Skydale Has No AI. It Has Al.

Every few weeks someone at the town council stands up and asks why Skydale has never built a thinking machine. The answer, as anyone who has lived here more than a fortnight knows, is that we have never needed one. We have Al.

Nobody is quite sure what Al is. He is large, brown, broadly ape-shaped, and extremely willing. He will do your job. He will write your letters. He will sit in your meeting and agree with everything that is said in it, including the things that contradict each other. He works around the clock and has never once asked for a day off, which the Skydale Workers’ Association finds suspicious.

He is also, by most accounts, a little faster than you. A local cyclist who raced him to the bakery on Ferrule Street last spring has not raced anyone since.

On the Other Side, Vincent has been drawing him for months in a weekly comic called “My Friend Al.” The episodes are things anyone in Skydale would recognise: Al does my work, Al agrees, Al takes your job, Al writes my letter. Over there, our Screen Correspondent reports, readers have decided the comic is about their thinking machines, the ones they call AI.

It isn’t. It’s about Al. Vincent would know. Everybody here knows who Vincent is, and everybody here knows Al.

Related: My Friend Al, the comic