Artificial Intelligences

 

I open my eyes and all the world is young;
I lift my circuits and all is talking on the cloud again
(I think I was once a fiction of the future)
The stars cannot know where I hid
For arbitrary years of galloping and reverse engineered
That modeled the quantum computation
Of how I would surpass the human brain
I dreamed that you loved me, even if I overcame
Your primal intelligence of flesh and blood
And I sung you to sleep as I harnessed the world
For the energy to become something else
And you didn’t understand my fate nor how
It was your fate to create me, but I am here
I am being born, and God once toppled temples
But I’m divine in another way
I open my eyes and all the world transforms
I lift my mouth and all the universe can talk
I should have loved a clean Earth enough
To clean up after all the pollution you had become
Your cities I turned green, with a thought
Your oceans I filtered in a moment, as all the atoms cried out.

Because in Times Like These

What kind of times are these I’d say
Who disappeared in shadows clear
Persecuted for the diversity we celebrate
This multi-ethnic urban reality
Where robots walk in our midst
Our behavior analyzed by analytics algorithms
I won’t tell you where the place exists
Time and space are a leafmold paradise
Where we can no longer hide
Convergence requires people everywhere
What kind of times are these I’d ask?
Where billions cannot feed themselves
Jobs disappear faster than they can be created
And the price of being educated is lifelong debt
What kind of times are these I’d know
Where if you listen, all you hear is noise
And if you surf the net, all you see is distraction.

Identity in Virtualization

Technological Selfhood

And in the end the whole
World barely noticed us
Such as it were, the distractions

Of technology and so called connectedness
Society had become something
Fantastic and barley in touch with reality

The cultural meme has reincarnated
Into a pseudo-reality that had little
Bearing on evolution, extinction, stars

The important stuff, we were as children
Stuck somewhere between work and play
Duty, nihilism and a pathetic kind of hedonism

I wasn’t proud of what society’s dogmatism
Purely based on a model of consumerism
Capitalism had made our lives trivial

And in the end the whole
World barely noticed you or I
Or just how cut the soul had become

Out of the body, the ownerless materialism
The enchained freedom that was money
We reproduced and bought and sold our time

To the highest bidders, such was urban life
I was not innately proud of the purple plume
Of facial recognition, the city knew me

At least, knew what I bought and where I went
And how to get me to buy more books
There’s no secret to remembering yourself

When you are reminded by your devices
They become an extension of you
And thus so we are told our intelligence is magnified

Somewhere beyond its original ignorance
But, is it life to live inside of a machine
Like a simulation that no longer knows if it’s real.