This Unpublished 2015 Column Predicted 2023 Fears About Chatbots and the Work Sponsored by Elon Musk at OpenAI

Retro readers get to see a major-media column on Earth’s near-term dystopian future that was written days before Musk’s OpenAI—later, the creator of ChatGPT—was even founded.

Introduction

Between 2013 and 2015, I was a cultural theorist working on my doctorate in English at University in Wisconsin-Madison, preparing to apply for tenure-track positions at colleges and universities across the country in one of the most competitive academic submarkets there is. (There are—you may know—exponentially more PhDs in English than open…