I’M NOT CERTAIN WHETHER JAMES TAYLOR meant to predict the takeover of artificial intelligence and the death of our collective imagination in his 1970 song “Fire and Rain,” but somewhere a music teacher is saying to herself: “Called it.”
That teacher is Miss Molloy—a bowl-cutted, crochet-sweatered, denim-skirted woman of 23 or 53—who taught our third-grade music class. One autumn morning, after we sang “Fire and Rain” off mimeographed lyric sheets, Miss Molloy taught us what the song was about, which was the robot apocalypse. “Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you” meant she had succumbed
