Every day, millions of people ask an AI system a question they don’t know the answer to, receive a fluent and confident response, and move on — having learned nothing except the most dangerous thing possible – the answer.

Patrick McGoohan explained and filmed this dangerous world in the 1967 episode of The Prisoner called The General.

In the episode, what McGoohan warns us against is the risk of answers – even correct ones – sans context. Ultimately for historians, lawyers, and programmers the context is the learning, the correct tokens: words, phrases, citations, syntactically valid code, the epistemic byproduct. If the byproduct becomes the measure of success, then the generated answers are stunningly vacuous, and we shall drown in the mere specious simulacrum of understanding.

As an elder millennial, I grew up in the ambient wash of 70s folk and singer-songwriter rock. Across the shag-carpeted living rooms of my childhood memory, I can see lightly sun-bleached album covers — Carole King’s Tapestry, James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, Jim Croce, Cat Stevens. My generation grew up downstream from people who knew how to craft a lyric and place a capo.

While I admire all that cohort, it was Harry Chapin who made the biggest impact on me. I rediscovered him late in high school courtesy of a creative writing class, but I was made a fan after a late-afternoon dash to Houston’s Galleria district. And his words have stuck with me for decades now. But the other night, while doing dishes, I was served up his “W.O.L.D.” and this time I heard something different. Tutored by life and the voice people use to lie to themselves, I heard a truly different song. And with that, I was in love with Harry’s (RIP) talent all over again.