What If Machines Heard Us Dreaming?

There’s no better feeling as a musician than an unexpected royalty check. Sure, writing the hook, or laughing through bad lyrics, is its own kind of magic. But the moment that song crosses the invisible wall and pays you in dollars, not just dopamine, it’s different. Objective proof your work mattered. And the best part is, it’s sometimes a surprise.

And I’m not a ruthless capitalist. But I do like surprises.

Which is why I’ve started wondering: what if our future still contains that feeling? What if it isn’t the bleak algorithm-induced paralysis we’re told to expect? What if the machines we fear are simply new conduits for surprise, like the royalty check I never expect but still find in my mailbox, proof that something good can arrive when I least expect it?

My aging 2006 Honda CR-V, affectionately named Katherine, is limping toward retirement. What she’s given me in independence, she’s now teaching me in patience: the joy of public transit.

In Los Angeles, it’s easy to be cynical about buses and trains. They’re late, underfunded, or half-empty. But sitting on the Expo Line, I’ve finished books, tinkered with fantasy baseball lineups, and answered WhatsApp messages from my family long ignored. The surprise is not the slowness. The surprise is the newly found gift of time.

Which brings me to Waymo, Google’s driverless car experiment. A black-pilled doomer sees a corporate plot to ban human driving.

Black pill = a pessimistic worldview that everything is hopeless and the system is beyond repair.

But here’s the reality, parents already report feeling safer putting their kids in an autonomous car than with a stranger behind the wheel. And if human error causes over 90% of the 40,000 car crash deaths each year in the U.S., then handing over the wheel isn’t a pessimistic surrenderism but actually human salvation.

Waymo cars have logged more than 10 million autonomous rides. Not a bad proof of concept. They’re in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and coming to Miami and Austin. In times like these I can’t help thinking of fiction writer William Gibson’s quote “The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.”

So is it so bad to imagine a commute where your hands are free for a book or to work on a screenplay, or FaceTime with a loved one, rather than frozen at ten and two? Or to imagine a life where DMV lines, insurance paperwork, and all the tedious admin of being a legal soul are quietly handled by machines in the background, leaving us more time to live?

For decades, despair has been the default setting. We’ve normalized it. We’ve pedestaled it. We’ve chanted it like Paul Revere. And these tropes below reinforce that cynicism, but here’s why I think they’re wrong.

Good. Take them. Over 60% of U.S. workers say they’re burned out, and productivity gains of the last 40 years have outpaced wage growth. We dream of a 4-day work week yet why not make it 3? If automation can finally deliver the convenience capitalism promised and never delivered, that’s not the end of work, it’s the beginning of rest.

And sure you’re older and fearful of what comes next, that fear is valid. Learning new skills in twilight years ain’t easy. But maybe the point isn’t retraining for another grind maybe it’s finally being freed from that serfdom mindset. Imagine a system where the machines work, and people actually get to live.

Maybe. But art has been dying by the hand of the algorithm for years. Tiktok is crawling with derivatives. Tech platforms have prioritized volume incentivizing artists to spend all their time on content and only a little on their craft. Comedians aren’t funny, musicians can’t sing. That’s why when someone like Mk.gee or Dijon comes along we’re floored as a society. Because we’re so used to the mediocrity platforms have been normalizing for years. The Benson Boone’s of the world, if you don’t get the fuck outta here with those backflips, man.

So AI didn’t and won’t kill art more than capitalism has. Advertising incentives, human greed, and apps have done more damage to creativity in the last 50 years than AI will I’m sure. If AI collapses that already collapsing system, good. History says every artistic revival begins in the ruins of the old.

Absolutely. And it should. Schools are like prisons. Literally. I studied architecture and they’re built using the same program. Long corridors, controlled movement, easy surveillance, bells dictating every step. There’s even a site online where you have to guess School or Prison from photos, and it’s actually difficult.

Schools were failing way before AI. For the past 40 years, American education outcomes have been trending down while costs keep skyrocketing. U.S. students rank middle-of-the-pack in math and reading among developed nations, despite the highest per-student spending. Harvard’s endowment is over $50 billion and climbing, Ivy League schools hoard tax-sheltered billions, and the government continues to underwrite student loans that feed this machine. The result? A system designed to enrich institutions, not students.

Truth is, we’re not really learning anyway. Studies show excessive homework worsens outcomes, yet we cling to 19th-century curricula built to churn out compliant factory workers, not curious thinkers. College graduates leave with historic levels of debt but fewer real skills for today’s economy.

So if AI forces us to confront this fraud, maybe that’s not a crisis but an opportunity. If it exposes the cracks, maybe that’s the real education humans have needed all along.

Ultimately surprises are baked into humanity. Every day, millions of people feed AI our unfinished ideas, late-night start ups, unsent job applications, half-written poems, lyrics, what to say to your loved ones and how to say it. Real time (safe for work) human dreams. We’re told these fragments exist only to sell us more ads. But what if they’re wrong? What if these are ingredients for future blueprints? What if machines remember them long enough to build something better for us, with us? To know what we want in our futures better than we can even imagine?

What if consumerism dies and ushers in a new age of experience-ism? It’d be a pivot away from the American obsession and extraction. A revolution geared more towards the joy of simply being.

In music, I’ve been burned by delayed checks. But I’ve also been saved by the surprise of one arriving unexpectedly. That choice between cynicism and hope is ours, every day. We’ve been cynical for decades.

Like the royalty check I never expect but still find in my inbox, maybe the future surprises us too, not with collapse, but with something worth believing in.