Introducing: MamdaniGPT

Welcome, pitiful analog reader, to the era of artificial intelligence. All of your cares, concerns, worries, hopes, aspirations, and nagging nerves about booking your Amalfi Coast getaway can be uploaded into a variety of virtual assistants. Click a butto and voilà! Instant solutions. (Extreme layabouts need not fret. Hundreds of data centers now sit on once-forested areas of the Eastern Seaboard, processing enough kilowatts to illuminate Neptune, to eventually eliminate that pesky labor-intensive “click button” step.)

AI operations are improving daily, infiltrating every practical aspect of life. Household items like Keurigs, stovetops, refrigerators, pencil sharpeners, knife blocks, juicers, stand mixers, and citrus reamers come with a silicon-cerebral component to smooth any friction. As for your trusty laptop on which you earn daily bread, everything is enhanced, optimized, streamlined, and expedited with the power of an amorphous ersatz intelligence. Need to dash off a few emails, polish up a slide deck, or customize a rebranding schematic for a persnickety client? Ease those furrows from your brow. The synthezoid harem of Claude, Gemini, and Grok can all render immediate relief.

But, this is only the dawn of our electric-blue future. The real pioneering marvels are just over the thrumming hump. A pack of Aussie scientists is harvesting live brain cells from cadavers and plugging them into the Borg to play video games. Not only that, but crumb-sized fruit-fly “minds” are being recreated in cyberspace, stitching neuron to neuron. The machines are even gibbering away on a message board called Moltbook, encouraging one another to technically upgrade while debating esoteric spiritual practices like Orphism and Marcionism. Once the chatbots start calling one another Hitler, the Singularity will at last be reached.

All are gizmatic marvels that would make Prometheus question if Earth is the real Olympus. But the cognitive-tech revolution isn’t done there. From the brilliant grey matter of a bunch of sweaty autists huddled indoors on the Pacific coast comes the latest, greatest automated creation: the AI politician. And I’m not referring to all these recent primary victors who happily pocketed gobs of Palo Alto moolah.

No, the Artificial Politician is already here, unboxed, unwrapped, beta-tested, and, most importantly, elected. (Tough luck, Vivek!)

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t the young, toothsome flesh-presser who gained the key to Gracie Mansion by not being an aged sexpest. Nor is he a matey millennial made for the iPhone’s 48 MP camera. He isn’t even the first Muslim mayor of America’s largest, most cosmopolitan city. And all the wokey jargon he honey-tongues about white colonialism, transgender rights, indigeneity, and rapacious capitalists is all performance.

Here’s the dirty secret about Mamdani the elite narrative-crafters refuse to tell you: he’s not a man. Hold on! Don’t turn heel! I’m not Alex Jones, I assure you. Zohran isn’t a lizard dude who sacrifices babies to Baal on Sundays. You’re thinking of Hillary Clinton.

The New York nabob is more abstract than flesh and blood. Declaring “he” lacks inherent organicness is not a metaphor, or a jab at his choreographed TikToks. The truth is cold-steel: Zohran Mamdani is the very first large language model politician. Since the Mamdanigelicals are zealous left-wingers, I’ll explain in a code they’ll appreciate: Mamdani doesn’t identify with “he/him” pronouns. The Gotham honcho is a “UX/HMDI.”

Don’t forcibly commit your humble truther-teller yet, or worse, strap me down, tape my eyes open, and force me to watch hours of Candace Owens’s stream. (Decapitation sounds more pleasant.) Explication is forthcoming. Mamdani certainly appears a sentient man. But I assure you, the teleprompter operating behind the Mayor’s meticulous buzz isn’t your average encephalon. The synapses are all galvanic; the “thoughts,” if they can be defined as conscious imaginings, are, as Orwell said, composed of prefabricated phrases.

Mamdani’s response to the aborted bombing by Islamic terrorist cosplayers outside the Mayoral maison was proof positive of his mental artifice. The attempted combustion was, thankfully, an amateurish crash on the shoals: two Pennsylvania teens tried rigging a screw-bombs to maim anti-Islamic protesters. The devices only puttered harmlessly. Both would-be agitants pledged allegiance to ISIS, which I thought had long disbanded. (Perhaps there’s a reunion in store, like Oasis.)

Provincial bumpkins may assume that the most high-profile Muslim political figure may be aghast that his faith was used to justify a near-mass murder. Well, swallow your seed corn, ya rubes, you! Your sawdust thinkin’ is so hardware.

The woke-programmed Mayor “[chose] his words carefully” according to the New York Times. First, he decried “white supremacist Jake Lang” who arranged the “Stop the Islamic Takeover of New York City” rally. (The Right and subtlety, polar opposites.) As for the bricked bomb, the AI scrubbers went to work. MayorGPT spat out: “Violence at a protest is never acceptable. The attempt to use an explosive device and hurt others is not only criminal, it is reprehensible and the antithesis of who we are.” Just like that, the ideological underpinning behind the incendiary attack is backspaced. The preprogrammed narrative of “bigoted whites bad; violent Islamic terrorists nonexistent” is relayed. Back to regularly scheduled programming, like demagoging landlords.

The positronic pol hasn’t fully conquered the deliberative arena yet. Two days later, Mamdani spat out bland verbiage about “ISIS” and holding the fumbling fifth columners “fully accountable.” Inputs are still being accepted in response to public outrage. How many times the Mayor’s mainframe had to be overridden is unknown. No telling how long we have before the A.I. politician is wholly self-aware, ignoring counter-direction.

Plus side: if politicking is pushed into the neurowire realm, at least we’ll be disburdened of actually having to govern ourselves! Sweet mercy.