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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

Image

The starship Enterprise, as conceived by Gene Roddenberry, whom Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura, called “The Great Bird of the Galaxy,” will endeavor in the 23rd Century “to boldly go where no one has gone before.” But Arthur C. Clarke, much more scientifically attuned than the late great Roddenberry, says, “The truth, as always, will be far stranger.”

Meanwhile humans of two different hegemonies have ventured beyond our atmosphere. This page has a hint of the magnitude of that very real endeavor, the various forces (gravitational, ideological, economical, teleological, and so forth) influencing the effort, and the hope and the despair of the future of human space exploration. Part of the hint is that in free fall, there is no rightside-up; we groundlings can’t take in a page like this in one glance, or even one gaze. Betters than us (or is it we?) will follow, I hope.