John Mulaney's Tech Roast

Brutal honesty is brutally honest.

So if you hire a comedian to talk at your tech conference, you might get

“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future.”

“If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die, so many of you feel imminently replaceable.”

“Can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?”

On one hand, it’s an in-your-face existential crisis.

On the other, it’s a reminder that everything is just variables and status at its core.

I’m sure the laugh’s were uncomfortable, and I hope a few people walked out really considering their life’s work.

Because, in the immortal words of the Comedian character, Eddie Blake, in The Watchmen,

"Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian's is the only thing that makes sense."

Hardy har har har.

Do read, “Comedian John Mulaney roasts SF techies at Dreamforce” in the San Francisco Standard if you haven’t yet.