Is anything real anymore? I remember years ago when I first started to worry that, in my own lifetime, Artificial Intelligence (AI) would actually replace working writers. It seemed a fantastical dread at first, but then almost overnight it actually started happening. Today, newspapers are laying off reporters by the thousands, but retaining their staffs of AI coders … so we can all see where this is headed.
I always took consolation that surely there would remain the safe harbor of editing, because I saw no way that a computer could ever learn all the nuanced English idiom stored in a wise old copy editor’s noodle. Then came Grammarly, which is obviously just a crude beginning of the end for working editors. No matter that the products extruded by any such program may be less than perfectly eloquent; not too many readers will know the difference anyway. (Present company excepted, of course.)
I try to keep fears about technological encroachment suppressed, but they surfaced afresh several days ago when I asked a knowing friend for advice about getting past my writer’s block. Mind you, I was not asking just some nobody. She’s a tenure-track English professor at a flagship state research university, so I received it as quite a blow when she advised that I harness AI in writing this column! Skipping past the obvious ethical questions, I asked, “But what if it produces rubbish?” My professor friend replied that of course it will write rubbish, but still, with some fact-checking and clean-up, she said I could have myself a serviceable opinion column in a jiffy, and with very little labor. “It’s a great time-saving device,” she triumphantly summarized. Yes, I bet it is … and I assume she is encouraging her students to commit a similar fraud in their term papers.
Vulgarity and madness are now the coin of the realm in most directions we turn. AI is today moving on our factory jobs as well. Just tonight I read an article in the Asia Times stating that Samsung plans to build “all-AI, no-human chip factories.” In addition, AI is currently extending its tentacles into actual business and executive decision-making—even deciding for some periodicals what content they should print. (As far as I know, actual people are still making all of the decisions at PCA The Magazine.)
Trends certainly raise a practical question: Why pay humans to do anything at all when robots can theoretically run a whole enterprise for you? Warm-blooded people appear destined for mere spectator status in the robot wars. We’re headed toward an economy where the only remunerated jobs will consist of tweaking AI algorithms to maximize return to investors. Not, mind you, to improve the grammar output in editing programs; and not to improve product quality in widgets coming off an assembly line. Just to maximize profits, whatever that takes. And watch out, investors, if you think your comfortable roost is somehow necessary and exempt. AI is coming for you, too. The machines that you believe you own, they already have you in their sights … and you’re looking mighty tasty.
Yes, dear reader, this does relate to pipe smoking … for, in my pipes and tins of tobacco, I possess something that retains the same old-timey value as ever … and always will, I wager. Banks can fail and hard metals can crash. Computers can take our jobs. But when you get back to your cave, smarting from a day’s stinging defeats, pink slip stuffed into your shirt pocket, you will still find your evening pipe as much a refuge as ever it was. Nothing can affect that. A tin of gourmet Virginia pipe tobacco, vacuum-sealed for 20 years, is an investment utterly invulnerable to life’s rocky shoals. So is a rack of fine pipes.
I can state with medium confidence that the technology does not yet exist to electronically replicate the Nirvana attainable in a pipe smoker’s “zone.” (Most of you will know what I mean by “the zone,” but if not, see my column titled “Finding the Pipe Smoker’s ‘Zone’” in our November-December 2019 issue.) It is true, technological advances are outpacing our capacity to anticipate them. But as of today, as far as I know, we cannot simply click a link and imbibe any programmed smell or taste sensation. Even just a scratch-and-sniff level of stimulation is not yet deliverable to us via electronic conveyance.
Someday we might be able to place our palm print on a pallor screen, speak (or think) a command programmed to deliver some constellation of mental impressions, and be rewarded with fully realistic immersion in tastes both subtle and crude. But not today. As of now, if you wish to enter the pipe smoker’s distinctive world of pleasures, you still need an actual pipe and tobacco, and the know-how for getting out of them the primal secrets they hold.
At base, this is the enduring, peerless value that pipe merchants still offer their customers. If our buyers are not yet fully alive to this particular specialness their pastime affords, they are bound to come around eventually, as more and more of life’s other pleasures transmogrify into inferior facsimiles. I urge every tobacconist to impart an appreciation of what it is that pipe smoking still uniquely delivers. No doubt, you are trying.
I am at this moment smoking a 40-year-old VaPer in a trusty old Dunhill billiard, and I cannot imagine this experience ever being replicated by the sorcery of some code-writing whippersnapper. Even if nuclear war turns off the lights, this much will remain true: The pleasures of pipe smoking will endure in the darkness. For that, I am eternally grateful; and in that, I remain fairly confident. At least, pending new information.
– Image by Andrey/Adobe Stock. Story by William C. Nelson.
This story first appeared in PCA The Magazine, Volume 1, 2024. To receive a copy of this magazine you must be a current member of PCA. Join or renew today at premiumcigars.org/membership.