My Speech to the Class of 2026

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I was chosen to speak at your graduation because I am phenomenally successful, America’s favorite columnist, a best-selling author, winner of countless awards, in demand as a speaker, a frequent consultant to the Vatican, the Pentagon, the U.N., and CNN, and it’s all because I was not bright enough to go into a technological field — my math skill ended with the multiplication of fractions — so instead I majored in English and read Melville and Henry James and the Brontës, which prepared me for a career in baggage handling, but now A.I. has come along and changed everything to my advantage. A.I. is an ace with numbers and it is El Estúpido when it comes to language.

So A.I. is going to take brilliant people’s jobs first — the 4.0 straight-A honor students who got their doctorates in physics and economics and computer science are going to be out on their keesters, lining up at the soup kitchens, living at Dorothy Day, and those of us schooled in irony and humor, metaphor, hyperbole, are going to be in the money, driving Bentleys and Caddies, living in mansions behind iron gates, while the geniuses panhandle with outstretched Phi Beta Kappa caps to catch the small change of sympathetic strangers.

I’ve written a song about this, which is now busting the charts, a hymn to ignorance.

Imagine there’s no physics,
No mathematics too.
Imagine what you imagine
Is absolutely true.
Imagine we’re all successful
And we love this tune.
Hope someday you’ll join us
Living on the moon.

Imagine that Walt Whitman
And Henry D. Thoreau,
And darling Emily Dickinson
Are all you need to know,
And maybe some Franz Kafka
And also Sigmund Freud,
While all the science majors
Are going unemployed.

That song was not written by ChatGPT, which is incapable of understanding a language as rich and layered and tonal and intimate and exquisite as English. ChatGPT is a child in the Sistine Chapel, bewildered by majesty.

I see you listening intently to this balloon juice and why? Because it employs excellent English. You didn’t understand a fraction of your Microsoft Word instruction manual written by technowhizzes for other whizzes and now those whizzes are looking for work picking avocados and I am living with my gorgeous wife in our exclusive condo apartment in Manhattan where our meals are delivered to us by unemployed mathematicians on kick-scooters, wearing their old Harvard and Yale sweatshirts, their horn-rimmed glasses repaired with grip tape, as they hand us our delicious dinners and we tip them a couple bucks and send them on their way, poor things.

The elevator guy in our building has a Ph.D. from Columbia and wrote his thesis on A.I. and Large Language Models and now, three years later, his thesis is less relevant than the Dead Sea Scrolls and the poor noodge is wearing white gloves and being mannerly to us humanities majors.

Massive bunkers under Nebraska packed with gigantic gazillion-gigabyte self-reprogramming self-managing computers are running science and technology and the economy, the judicial system, and all of Academia, Congress, online influencers, people in big office suites on the 44th floor — they are purely ceremonial figures, holding pretend meetings, issuing proclamations that the Nebraska control centers laugh at and put into proclamation shredders.

Everything is run by A.I. except your church, baseball, and your humor columnist. In my church, anyway, we still recite the Nicene Creed and haven’t switched to anything nicer, and the Mets are still a losing ballclub even with one of the highest payrolls in the majors, and my readership is thirty-seven million and climbing and it includes Bonnie Raitt, Bernie Sanders, Marco Rubio, Taylor Swift, Novak Djokovic, and Dave Barry.

So where does this leave you young people gazing at me with upturned wistful faces? It means you’ve been royally cheated and you need to grab what you can ASAP. Your major asset is your parents, their home, their stocks and bonds, which they earned back before they screwed up the economy. You need to watch them carefully, taking notes on their ineptitude that you can use when filing for Power of Attorney and sending them to live in Memory Care while you make a good life with their stuff. It’s not theft, it’s foreclosure on your inheritance. They handed the country over to monstrous corporations; let them go to Shady Acres and you have a fabulous life. You’re beautiful. It’s been a pleasure.

© Garrison Keillor 06.01.26