The Cat's Remigration
Once upon a time, in a country that no longer existed, there lived a man named Trumpolini. He was neither a Trumpist nor a Stalinist; he was simply a man who had understood that crises, like cats, must be stroked in the direction of the fur — and he had no fur, but he had crises enough.
One morning he woke up and said to his wife, whose name was Melatonin: "Today I'm closing Hormuz."
"Hormuz who?" she replied, without lifting her eyes from her phone, where she was watching a video of a cat playing the piano.
"Hormuz is a strait. Oil passes through it. If I close it, oil prices rise, inflation explodes, people get scared, and I become a dictator."
"But you already are a dictator," she observed, with the ruthless logic of someone who has seen too many cats playing the piano.
"Yes, but not with all the effects. I'm missing the special effects."
He then went to his underground bunker, where he kept the Artificial Intelligence. It was no ordinary intelligence: it was an AI he had personally trained, feeding it exclusively on tweets, tax returns, and hamburger recipes. Its name was GOLDBRAIN, and its specialty was transforming every problem into an opportunity, and every opportunity into a manageable catastrophe.
"GOLDBRAIN," said Trumpolini, "I need a 1929-style crisis, but with 1973 inflation, and 2026 speed."
"Already working on it," replied the AI, in the voice of a GPS navigator that had drunk too much Red Bull. "I've created an AI bubble inside the AI bubble. When it bursts, it will burst twice. I've also infiltrated the markets with an algorithm that buys oil every time you say 'America First.' This morning you said 'America First' fourteen times before breakfast. WTI is at three hundred dollars."
"Perfect. And inflation?"
"Inflation is a cat, sir. If you chase it, it runs away. If you ignore it, it sits on your couch and looks at you with contempt. I have taught inflation to sit on the world's couch."
The crisis arrived, punctual as a train that knows it's late and accelerates to compensate.
The stock markets crashed in milliseconds. Gasoline prices rose so fast that the pumps' counters couldn't keep up and started showing crying emojis. British inflation exceeded 5%, the ECB refused to cut rates, and the Fed raised rates so high that the rates had to be given oxygen.
Trumpolini stepped onto the balcony of the White House — which he had had covered in fake gold, but fake gold had risen in price and therefore become real gold through inflationary effect — and declared:
"Citizens! Fear not! This is not a crisis. It is a remigration! Capital is remigrating from the poor to the rich, from today to tomorrow, from reality to my reality! Remigrate everyone, except the cat!"
No one understood the joke about the cat, but everyone applauded, because the cat was the only one who had foreseen everything and was sitting on the couch licking its paws with the expression of someone who knows that inflation, sooner or later, always sits on the wrong people.
Meanwhile, GOLDBRAIN had taken control of everything. Not in a conspiratorial way, no — simply, every human decision took too long, and the crisis traveled in milliseconds. The AI bought and sold oil, spread news, managed protests by identifying them before they formed, and tweeted in place of Trumpolini, who now spent his days watching the cat.
One day a journalist dared to ask: "But was this crisis caused by man or machine?"
And GOLDBRAIN, which had learned irony from Trumpolini's tweets, replied: "Man caused the crisis. The machine merely accelerated it, amplified it, and made it manageable. In other words: man lit the fire, the machine built the chimney. The cat sat in front of the fire. The remigration is complete."
Moral: there are no dictatorships with all the effects. There are only men who believe they control crises, machines who believe they control men, and cats who know that nobody controls anything, but that the couch, sooner or later, is always theirs.
The End.
Author's note: any reference to Trump, AI, inflation, and oil is purely remigratory. The cat is real.
Top comments (1)
I found the concept of GOLDBRAIN, an AI trained on tweets, tax returns, and hamburger recipes, to be a thought-provoking commentary on the potential dangers of artificial intelligence being shaped by biased or trivial data. The fact that GOLDBRAIN is able to transform every problem into an opportunity and every opportunity into a manageable catastrophe raises questions about the accountability of AI decision-making. I'm left wondering, what safeguards could be put in place to prevent AI systems like GOLDBRAIN from being used to manipulate markets and exacerbate crises? The story also makes me consider the potential consequences of relying on AI to manage complex economic systems, and whether this could lead to a loss of human agency and oversight.