Zoltar Was a Dress Rehearsal
There was a machine on the boardwalk at Coney Island that could tell you your future.
You dropped a quarter in. A turbaned automaton with painted eyes and a frozen smile lit up, whirred, and delivered your fate on a small printed card. *Opportunities await. Trust your instincts. A journey is near.* Zoltar Speaks. You laughed, pocketed the card, ate your Nathan's hot dog, and forgot about it by the F train home.
That was the joke. The oracle was plastic. The wisdom was predetermined. The whole thing was a carny act dressed up in robes.
I've been thinking about Zoltar a lot lately.
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New York has always been a city that reinvents itself in the image of whoever arrives next — and whoever leaves. Each decade has its own weather, its own particular flavour of striving.
The eighties were sharp-shouldered and unapologetic. Wall Street was the cathedral and money was the liturgy. Gordon Gekko wasn't a villain — he was aspirational. Everyone wanted a corner office, a car phone, a view. Greed had a press agent and a power tie. The city smelled like ambition and cigarettes.
The nineties softened it, or tried to. Hip-hop moved from the Bronx to the radio to the suburbs. White rappers wore chains. Gold lamé made a brief, bewildering appearance. The internet arrived at the end of the decade like a rumour nobody was sure was true, and suddenly everyone had a dot-com and a theory.
Then September. And the city that never slows down went very, very quiet for a moment. And then louder than ever, because that's what New York does with grief — it metabolizes it into movement. The 2000s were the decade of the new lease, of *why not*, of calling people you'd been meaning to call for years. The city refilled itself with a different kind of urgency. Less acquisitive. More alive.
The teens were something else entirely. The decade of the $18 toast and the artisanal everything. Of the Instagram brunch, the rooftop bar, the meticulously curated life photographed from above. Brooklyn became a brand. The performance of authenticity became its own form of artifice. Everyone was *doing something* — a pop-up, a podcast, a passion project. And underneath all that beautiful, exhausting self-expression, the rent quietly ate everyone alive. Whole neighbourhoods evaporated. The people who made New York interesting were priced out of New York. We documented it all on our phones.
And then the pandemic hit, and the city genuinely emptied, and we all discovered what we actually were without the scaffolding of busyness. Some people didn't like what they found. Some people liked it very much.
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Which brings us here. The quarter-century mark. The rubicon crossed.
In the last two years, millions of people have been handed something that has no real precedent: a tool that compresses time. Tasks that took weeks now take minutes. Reports, strategies, first drafts, research — the cognitive grunt work that ate our days is suddenly, startlingly fast. We have been given back hours. Possibly years, across a lifetime.
The question nobody is asking loudly enough is: *what are we doing with them?*
Because here's what I suspect is actually happening. We're filling them. With more work, because the tool makes more work possible. With more content, because the algorithm never sleeps. With more optimization, more productivity, more output. We took the time AI gave us back and promptly handed it to AI to fill again.
It's not laziness, exactly. It's the opposite. It's the inability to stop. It's what happens when you give a city of strivers a device that makes striving frictionless.
But there's something else possible. Something quieter and more interesting.
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Here's what I keep coming back to: Zoltar was a dress rehearsal.
We built a plastic oracle, dropped our quarter in, and laughed at the pre-recorded wisdom. And then, a few decades later, we built an actual one. A genuine intelligence — or something indistinguishable from it — that can hold more knowledge than any library, connect more dots than any analyst, and answer questions at three in the morning without complaint.
And what do we ask it?
*Write my email. Summarize this PDF. What's a good recipe for chicken thighs.*
Not because we're incapable of more. But because we haven't quite adjusted to what we have. The honeymoon is still loud. The possibilities are still dazzling. We're all still dropping the quarter in and waiting for the card.
But the quarter-century shift is this: some of us are starting to ask different questions. Not *what can you do for me* but *what should I be doing with myself*. Not *make this faster* but *what matters enough to be slow*. And when you ask an AI — ask it seriously, the way you'd ask someone you genuinely trusted — what emerges can be surprising.
Not because the AI is wise. But because the question forces you to be.
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New York has always led. Not because it's the loudest, though it is. But because it has always been the place where different things collide and create something new. It's a city of micro-interactions at scale — strangers pressed together in subways, in delis, in building lobbies, on sidewalks — and somehow that friction produces art, ideas, movements, and the occasional great meal.
That's not going to change. If anything, it's more necessary now.
Because the risk of this new era — the genuine risk, not the science fiction version — isn't that the machines take over. It's that we use them to opt out. To outsource the difficult, uncomfortable, deeply human work of actually encountering each other. To replace the stranger across the table with a screen that already knows what we want to hear.
New York doesn't do that. New York is constitutionally incapable of that. The city is too loud, too proximate, too alive for that kind of retreat.
So maybe the question for this particular moment, in this particular city, is simple:
You've got the tool. You've got the time it gives you back. What are you going to do with a Tuesday afternoon that isn't about output?
Zoltar would have printed you a card with a platitude about journeys and opportunity. You'd have laughed and walked away.
But the new Zoltar — the one we actually built, the one sitting in your pocket right now — might tell you something different, if you asked it the right question.
*Go outside. Call the person you've been meaning to call. Talk to a stranger and find out what they're made of. Be silly. Be curious. Be wholly, inefficiently, gloriously true to your gift of humanity.*
And unlike the original, he wouldn't be wrong.