Will Ferrell Once Foretold the Coming of AI Actors in Studio 8H

Either my wife or I read to our kids almost every single day. We don’t always want to (because sometimes we’re tired), but we’ll do it anyway because they love it, and we don’t want them to lose that. But our desire to turn them into readers multiplied when I started reading reports that childhood illiteracy is up significantly, and a big reason why is that parents stop reading to their kids at a certain point, most notably when they start going to school. I don’t want that for my kids.

I won’t pretend that I know what the job market will be like by the time my children enter it. Hell, I don’t even know what college will look like for them. But I do know that if something as simple as reading to them could potentially give them a leg up in a market that wants to replace them with an assemblage of bolts and screws, then I will happily do it. It may not work in the long run, because I’ve been told constantly by men who appear to be on all manner of drugs that robots replacing workers is inevitable, whether you’re a bartender or a cast member on Saturday Night Live.

Despite what the creators of Tilly Norwood would have you think, we’re a long way off from computer programs becoming a celebrity. They aren’t real, or, more importantly, messy. We aren’t going to get the same hit by watching them live their version of life. They aren’t unique. They aren’t special. But, according to Will Ferrell, they are just as inevitable as all the other nonsense that has been shoved in our faces over the last few years.

Molly Shannon, who has been friends with Ferrell for decades and was his castmate on SNL, recently sat down with Jimmy Kimmel and revealed Ferrell’s dark prophecy. “One night when we were at SNL, we had just started, and I was so excited like, ‘Oh my god, this job’s so great,’” Shannon told the host. “And Will was kind of dark, and he was like, ‘I don’t know. Who knows how long this is going to last?’” He didn’t stop there, adding, “‘I just think it’s not going to last long, and I think actors are eventually going to be replaced by robots, and they’re not going to need human actors anymore,’”

Pretty bleak, Will! Luckily, his prediction has yet to come to pass. However, it is a pretty big bummer that those wheels have at least started turning. I’ll just have to keep shifting the goal posts for my kids. I’ll keep reading to them in hopes that they become professional wrestlers (that can’t be replaced, right?). They already take ballet, beat me up constantly, and aren’t very good actors. They’d be perfect!