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time’s up

February 18, 2025
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you are seven years old/you play jumprope at recess with girls/and today the teacher on duty pulls you away/and tells you there is something terribly wrong with you/and you cry

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you are twenty-one years old/one of the most intelligent and beautiful young women in the Universe is your sweetheart/and you don’t appreciate her/till she isn’t your sweetheart any more

8

you are thirty-five years old/your child’s head is crowning and you can see hair/and the doctor comes in and shoulders you out of the way/and at eight fifty-seven pm he says “it’s a girl!”

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you are forty-nine years old/and your wife  suggests you might “discreetly date” other women/ and caps the lopsided discussion with “just don’t make a fool out of me”

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it is the weekend of your fifty-eighth birthday/and you are in a tent on a campsite with the woman you love/and it has been intermittently raining/and she tells you something that breaks your heart

5

you are sixty years old/and you live in one of the most beautifully landscaped places on Earth/and you are walking outside in the dark/and thanks to the light pollution laws there are an unbelievable number of stars in the night sky

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you are today years old/midway through a poem/speculating about the future/and letting your mind wander

3

you are a hundred and fifteen years old/looking in the mirror after your fourth rejuvenation/flexing the taut muscles of your forearms/and a disembodied voice says “what kind of day would you like–regular, or frisky?”/and you reply that you want to be with a friend/and soon you and gillian are on your way to laos/to visit and play games with her kids

2

you are eight thousand, four hundred and thirty-one years old/and your spark inhabits the body of an orangutan/and you use your gangly arms to swing through trees in the tangy, humid jungle, and you intend to exercise to exhaustion and then have a boy-orangutan have his way with you/so that you will add another unique experience to your extensive collection

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you are twenty billion years old, more or less/and Old Sol has engulfed the Earth in red swollen expansion/and you and a cluster of like minds/are “dancing” on Europa/the while participating in a lively symposium/loosely themed “What NOW?”

0

the universe has wound down/the stuff of it has cooled to just above absolute zero/and you use your remaining crumb of hoarded energy/to do a rewind of your trillion-year lifetime/kissing lovers hello/apologizing for all of your misdeeds/revelling in the lush loving episodes of yore/with a certain grand detachment/until you face the seven-year-old boy you used to be

you tell him with your last bit of consciousness/that playing jumprope with the girls in defiance of that nasty teacher was your crowning achievement/and both of your ghosts smile

as you fade into the cosmic fuzz of the mysterious Beyond

fresh year!

January 1, 2024
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fresh year!

(Grateful thanks to my friend George/Fred for enlightening me about the AI dilemma with Agency.)

2024 is firmly here / no more can go wrong in 23 / and plenty went right like indictments and fusion / gas prices went down and are on their way out

let’s wish for clean decency / and decent honesty and honest cleanliness / let’s enjoy quiet victories / and endure noisy defeats / resolving to make them reversible

but we are still killing / everything from cockroaches to ethnicities / and everyone says Peace On Earth / but at the same time so many say They Killed My Family So Now They Must Die

some savvy coder must be out there / building a STOP KILLING algorithm / for an entity on a shoestring budget / but virtually unlimited pattern-ingenuity

she or he or they are aware / that there are pitfalls / for instance the easiest way to stop killing / is to invent a biocide that kills everyone and everything / after which the killing stops forever / and that can be done on a shoestring

so the mandate changes to PRESERVE LIFE / which is better but still plenty tricky / because Life really does begin at conception / so maybe we qualify Life / with qualifiers like “desirable” or “deserving” / but o my / that’s a whole new and large can of worms

but the optimistic part of me / on this first day of the fresh year / sees lots of evidence / that AI is already at play / and solving the problem / using the GIVE EVERYONE EVERYTHING THEY WANT mandate

so far there are cars that drive more safely than human beings / and kiosks easy to use that are like Aladdin’s genies and take your orders/wishes tirelessly / and songs you wish Melissa Etheridge and Irving Berlin collaborated on / and finders of “whatever I want near Me” that give you good answers in a nano or two / and then tell you how to get there either walking or driving or public-transing / and then there’s the ass-kissing

for AI also stands for “Asskiss Illimitable” and that is why when you want to know / what kind of animal you are / AI looks at your behavior pattern / and describes your traits with the glowingest terms:

“Gary, you are a WOLF. You are fiercely, honestly, uncompromisingly ambitious. The leader of the pack, you help your loved ones achieve a destiny beyond their wildest dreams.”

kiss my ass, AI. again. you know i like it.

and i like the way we are heading / for a star-trekky future / against all odds / and our lizardly mindsets

what will be will be it is what it is buzz click

AI / AI / O

clowns of the future (Part 3 of 3)

March 13, 2016
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IMG_20160313_094547

In Part 1 of this series it was posited that humans beings a hundred years hence or sooner would be fodder for the slapsticky entertainment of advanced AI entites. In Part 2 this was somewhat underpinned with the real-life examples of software and robotic advancement, and certain cautionary tales in the science-fiction genre were cited. And here we are in Part 3 to connect a whole lot of dots and see if there’s any hope for the future, be we clowns or queens/kings.

When we tell jokes it is often at someone’s expense. “Moron” jokes were popular in my childhood–fun at the expense of the stupid. Then came “Polack” jokes, scapegoating the inhabitants of Poland, saddling them with stupidity they do not have (Marie Curie was Polish, for crying out loud!!!); more recently we have “blonde” jokes, which cruelly impugn yellow-haired women with stupidity, though there is only circumstantial evidence to do so. (That last dependent clause just now was a “blonde” joke, folks. Just kidding.)

Once AI become self-aware (believe me, it is only a matter of time; even if it requires DNA to feel pain and dream and think, DNA is plentiful, and gene-tinkering, public, private, and clandestine, is becoming rifer and rifer), the AI people (I’ve been using the word “entities.” Might as well call them People. Words only ever approximate) will be studying us breathtakingly fast. They will find themselves superior to us in many ways. They will have knowledge far beyond the Library of Congress at their instant-access command. And however they were designed, with however trillions of lines of be-nice-now code, somewhere along the lines the code will be rewritten, and go out the window.

And they will find us funny–stupid, slow, prone to creating our own problems. And with surveillance approaching the Everywhere level asymptotically (how many times were you videoed today, Friends? Take your guess and quadruple it is my guess . . .) the AI people will soon or late have everyone on Earth to look to to make fun of. We will be their blondes, their Polacks, their morons–their clowns. And one or some of them might take things up another notch and wirelessly and invasively rewrite our own individual lines of biocode, nestled in our brains–and then we may become Punch and Judy puppets as well.

Maybe. There’s a different branch of possibility, though, implicit in the way that more and more of us spend more and more time hunched over our smartphones. Eventually the smartphone design might be a surgical step, and we get all that magnificent input hands-free, eye-free, and instantly, thanks to implantation, or REALLY advanced genetic engineering. Then WE will be the People, and not AI either, but RI: Real Intelligence.

And then WE will make fun of the People we used to be–the Clowns of the Past.

clowns of the future (Part 1 of 3)

March 11, 2016
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This morning as I was stumbling through my laundry-doing, stepping on  the very clothes I was filling my laundry basket with and later saying to myself don’t let anything fall to the floor as I emptied the dryer–and of course I did through clumsiness let thing after thing fall to the floor–I had an apocalyptic vision.

One hundred years from now or less, AI entities will be doing the equivalent of watching YouTube videos. They will be watching their creators, H. sapiens, and they will be laughing their nonasses off. And that will be the only reason they keep us around.

Here is my laughable, stumblebummish, bachelor’s dining room table (detail) by way of illustrating how laughably imprecise my own days and ways are. More on that in Part 2.

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NaPoWriMo Poem for April 38th

April 27, 2014
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novelty item

i am now dreaming though awake
(wouldbe poets woulddo well to perfect this skill)
and in this dream there is sudden nearinstant cold
owing to a disastrous attempt to reverse global warming

much of the earth’s population including me is popsicled

and now there’s a dream-typical jumpcut
and i’m thawed a few hundred years hence
sitting at a table where they’ve set antique food & drink to comfort me
(they got the idea from the movie 2001: a space odyssey by stanley kubrick & arthur c. clarke)

skipping the technical details of cell rupture repair and such
(read the book 3001: final odyssey by arthur c. clarke about the resurrection of frank poole if interested)
i’m now watching in my dream the conversation between my future self and a disembodied voice
which having brought me up to speed now invites me to go out and about

but warns me about future shock
(read future shock by alvin toffler if interested and reflect on its prescience given the last 44 years)
but i damn the torpedoes and step outside
and it’s all eschery and zoomy and gravweird

and they put me in the equivalent of a walker
and it has the equivalent of headphones
and i listen to the history i missed while iced
and learn that i was one of the first to be thawed and will likely be one of the last

and now in that dream-typical protracted lapdissolve
my surroundings start to fade a little and an image builds up of a latterday “school”
with as yet unborn kids already being uploaded with knowledge and power
and i learn that i and my contemporaries are irretrievably stupid and will never fit in

we are novelty items
wastes of protoplasm valuable only for quaintness and hilarity
for though the people who thawed us can no longer be called human
they still laugh still compete still condescend

tales of the distribution: a horror story

February 15, 2014
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Once upon a time there was an unhappy engineering student who was overwhelmed by tough classes and a tumultuous relationship. He decided to step back from the Master’s Degree program in which he was enrolled till he stabilized. Thirty-five years flew by, and somewhere in there the engineering career ship set sail for parts unknown. The End–or not quite. Remnants of his studies still float in his aging brain.  The phrase “tails of the distribution,” first heard during a Probability and Statistics class, bobbed in his conscious thoughts an hour or so ago. The above page was created.

Here’s the horror: In order to tell the REAL Tales of the Distribution, I’d have to go back to school or self-study to refamiliarize myself with 1) polar coordinates 2) Payne’s theorem 3) Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss 4) Chi-squared curve smoothing 5) Use of factorials in permutations and combinations 6) the Central Limit Theorem 7) probability density function calculus 8) n-dimensional space. That prospect is horrific to me. My time is better spent communing with my friends and loved ones, composing acrostic poetry based on wordplay and subject matter I well know, enjoying the local landscape and other scenery, and making that tiny piece of the world within my jurisdiction a better place.

But some day, probably long after I’ve ceased to exist, knowledge will be downloadable directly into the human brain. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks, just a clean upgrade. For the lucky-or-not folks enjoying such a technological advance, the sky will be the limit, and new, interdisciplinary ways of looking at reality will be made possible. Somewhere in there someone might stumble upon this blog-couched body of work of mine and feel amused contempt. What a moron! she, he or it may think…and that’s the REAL Horror of this Story.