FIRST THINGS FIRST DEPT.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

At four o'clock on a recent Friday, Kevin McCullough found himself staring at a line of text on a poster in the Graham Avenue subway station, in Williamsburg.

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“Prompt: What comes first, the chicken or the egg?” The poster was an ad for the School of Visual Arts. Beneath the prompt was a crude painting—of a oval-shaped chick, or was it an egg with feet and a beak?—that seemed agnostic on the issue. McCullough shook his head. Something of a literalist, he had always disliked the question, believing it unworthy of endless debate. “The whole reason why a chicken exists is because of the evolution inside the egg,” he explained the other day.

McCullough is not a biologist. He works as an art handler. He often carries a Sharpie in his pocket, for labelling packages. That day, as the L train arrived, he uncapped his Sharpie and added a flourish to the poster, circling the words “the egg.” Then he stepped forward to board the train, feeling somewhat smug at having asserted a bit of clarity amid the existential dread of rush hour.

“Excuse me, sir!” Another would-be commuter flashed a badge in McCullough’s direction. Chicken police?