On a lark, I asked ChatGPT to revise my May 5th piece, “The Ghosts of What Wasn’t” in the voice of Scott Galloway, of Prof G, Stern, and Pivot fame.
Here’s what the AI came up with:
The Ghosts of Missed Tech Utopias
When I usually riff on retro futures, it’s about how yesteryear’s sci-fi prefigured today’s headlines. This round, I’m flipping the script.
Being a futurist is a haunting gig—especially when tech fizzles. My buddy Gary Saul Morson dropped a concept in his ’96 banger, Narrative and Freedom, that nails it: “sideshadowing”. It’s about seeing the roads not taken, understanding that nothing is inevitable—there’s always another play.
Here’s the meat: A recent tear-jerker in The Economist spotlighted Cairo, Illinois, teetering on ghost town status. This was once a 15,000-strong community, now dwindled to 1,700. It’s the poster child for America’s fastest shrinking spot.
But here’s where my mind went: hyperloop.
Hyperloop? Elon Musk’s 2013 brainchild. Think: vacuum tubes and mag-lev rails slinging pods at 760 mph. No TSA, no waiting. In 2017, the buzz was you could zip from Portland to Seattle in less time than it takes to finish my espresso.
The dream? A game-changer. Picture me and La Profesora stuck in La Grande, Oregon, during a blizzard. With a hyperloop, you’d commute from La Grande to Portland—a tech hub—in a snap, transforming sleepy towns into thriving exurbs.
Yet here we are. Hyperloop’s stuck in development hell—Europe’s still poking at it—while I’m riding Teslas through Musk’s Vegas tunnels, feeling like a lab rat in a maze.
Cairo’s story in The Economist made me think. With a working hyperloop, Cairo wouldn’t be a footnote. It’d be a bustling hub, minutes from Memphis, St. Louis, Nashville…
Lockdown showed us we can operate remotely but also that, post-pandemic, we’re craving connection, hence the real estate squeeze in big cities.
Will I ever shake off what could’ve been with the hyperloop, erasing distance as a constraint? Doubt it.
Catch you next Sunday for more musings on the tech that almost was.
So how did ChatGPT do?
It’s not a bad parody of Galloway’s quippy style—and it’s 30% the length of mine, which is a bit of an ouch—but the AI version gets a bunch of things wrong. Portland, for example, is a great city, but it ain’t no tech hub. Calling a thoughtful book of literary criticism like Saul Morson’s Narrative and Freedom a “banger” is just weird. “Cairo’s story” makes it sound like the author of the Economist piece is named Cairo. Plus, the AI killed my joke about the Vegas tunnels! Finally, I wanted to convey just how transformative the hyperloop would have been by charting out the distances and times from Cairo to eight nearby cities, which the AI version cut entirely… making the tone glib but the substance less persuasive.
Oh, I should have mentioned this: it took ChatGPT less than a minute to create the Gallowized version: much less time than it took me to write the last couple of paragraphs.