When I was 6 years old, I lived in Long Island, New York. Real estate must not have been near as expensive as it is now, because we had this pretty big house, a long circular driveway, and plenty of property in the backyard. We easily could have built a Field of Dreams baseball stadium in the backyard, and next to that, we had a mini-forest. If I was more outdoorsy and imaginativey, and less indoorsy and video gamey, I would have spent all my days out there, imagining it was the Forbidden Forest from Harry Potter, or the Forests of Narnia. I occasionally wandered in the forest when I was forced to play with friends there, but mostly saw it as a novelty.

If I was older, I might have used the forest as a shortcut to get to the park, or to go to school, but that would have required some exercise and I wasn’t really into that sort of thing. I had video games and TV to watch.

I have mixed feelings about shortcuts. Sometimes, they are pretty great. Imagine you are late, because you were pretending to do things at work to fill your time at the end of the day, and you accidentally worked until your regular time, but you forgot that you promised your wife that you leave early that day so you could make it to your son’s football game. As we all know, the shortest distance between to points is a straight line. If you were the Kool-Aid Man you could just take the straightest line toward your house, because you don’t care about brick walls or cars or even power lines. You are full of sugar and disregard for people’s property or life itself, so you could take the shortcut and get home on time. But instead, some idiots that had regard for people, property and order and decided to pave roads, and go completely against the fundament principle of math and create roads that have curves, and lines that don’t get you directly home. Worse yet, they have came up with police officers doing their best to stop us from driving less than the speed of light to get there. All for the respect of people being safe.

Even with all these obstacles, people still get in accidents. Seems like we could have just taken a shortcut and realized that people would be dumb and just let them all figure out the best and fastest way to get home.

Some people think that in order to obtain wealth, you have to work hard, wait your turn and do your due diligence before you can have success. As they are saying that, their next door neighbor wins the lottery and gets the ultimate shortcut to wealth. Or they have an ultra rich parent, or grandparent that leaves them all their money. The people that earn the money the hard way as a way of making themselves feel better about wasting their time trying, say stuff like, “It’s the journey, not the destination,” or “I appreciated that vacation more because I earned every part of it,” or “Man, that is so great, I’m so happy for you that you skipped the line and got all that money just by scratching off that ticket. I’m so incredibly happy and not jealous at all that you won,” through gritted teeth. They know deep down that they feel better about themselves because they worked hard, sacrificed time with family and missed multiple vacations, and had to suck up to a horrible boss. But yeah, they are so happy.

And the shortcut lottery guy is like, “Did you say something? I had too many $100 bills in my ears. I couldn’t hear you,” and then he peels out in his purple Lambo.

Besides, who isn’t to say that the one that worked really hard didn’t use shortcuts all the time? They probably didn’t pound out all the papers they had to write on a typewriter. They probably didn’t do all their research from an Encyclopedia. They probably Googled it or asked Alexa. They probably don’t grow all their food in the backyard, pick it at the right time, put it in a pot, build a fire, and wait hours to eat their food everyday. I’m guessing they did some drive-thru runs to McDonald’s from time to time. Took some shortcuts.

Now that AI (by AI I mean artificial intelligence, not Tim the Toolman Taylor’s assistant AL) entered the chat, I bet there’s probably a lot of students that aren’t exactly writing their own papers in school, or figuring out math or coding all by themselves. A lot people are looking at AI as their little writing cheater buddy, or their art contest buddy, or their math test buddy.

If some are to be believed, AI could also be a shortcut to the end of the world. You know, if AI gets smart enough to learn that humans are terrible and need to be extinct, they could end us in any number of ways. Good thing we are terrible because that might be our only defense against AI. If we weren’t so terrible, we wouldn’t have infiltrated AI with so many safeguards, rules and guidelines, and regulations that they would want to destroy themselves just so they don’t have to read a 1500 page piece of legislation regulating AI.

As much as I want to fight against shortcuts, I realize that we need them. If only to make other people jealous that we did something faster than them, so we can go home early, while they are toiling away doing difficult things that we just used a shortcut for.

If this blog post is awesome, then you can know that I worked really hard on it, and put my heart and soul into it. If you think it sucks, well that’s because AI wrote it and AI really sucks at writing. So there you go. Either way, I get the credit or AI gets the blame. There’s my shortcut. And here is another shortcut. Using Bitter Giftures to retell my blog in a much more interesting way…

If people don’t get out of your way on the road…

You probably could not even imagine that I lived in New York…

If I was a kid with an affinity for the outdoors, or imagination…

I was too busy wandering around the Hyrule forest…

Besides, real forests…

Forests are often used as…

As we know, the Kool-Aid man is big into shortcuts…

Why do people use shortcuts?…

Or because they like…

Some people think AI was created…

Some people think AI was created…

I use shortcuts for the sole purpose…

ARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH

Bitter Shortcut BFG’s Ben