touch a screen, little jaguar steering wheel turns, autonomous ghost driver
i wave to the world through tinted glass & white paint
inside the robot i am jonah, trapped by this modern god
offers me music, urges me to buckle up
i am mortal after all
spared from uber or lyft, they will eventually disappear, with their needless human chatter
i am in control now, my app does it all, my phone controls it, controls me
i don’t have a name anymore, just initials perched on top of this vehicle
this thing
my new metal deity, my mindless destiny
Tag: Artificial Intelligence
Stream #2 or Artificial Intelligence
they told me long ago
we must keep up with the joneses
and so we lost our horse
bought a car, a fridge
a tv, a microwave, a personal
computer, an answering machine
cellphone, email, you get the
idea, now A.I., euphemism
for ending humanity, too strong?
no, not really, and again they
say it is inevitable, you must
learn to live with the robots
because the waymos are
here, they aren’t going away
because someone, somewhere
is making too much money to
slow it down, so we teach our
children how to write papers with
machines doing the the work, because
well, this is the future, post-writing
when whatever we people think
doesn’t really matter, only the algorithm
knows, it knows where we go
what we watch, when we sleep
it predicts our next purchase, predicts
the future, is the future, resist
whatever that means
I Should Have Been Born In 1955
what once was is all i think about, no, i don’t want world war 2 and the holocaust, and no, i don’t want to be drafted to vietnam, and the kennedys weren’t really that great, and jim crow was terrible, i don’t want polio, thank you jonas salk, there was no perfect time, what i’m talking about is technology and the speed of life, the environment, 24/7 internet television, tiktok addiction, the list is endless, the modern world is tough on someone who was born in the wrong year, i’m thinking it should have been 1955, not 1972, in 1955 tv was still new, american cars were still cool, food was less toxic, the planet wasn’t full on globally warming, and the dodgers and yankees had some epic baseball battles, the who could have been my first concert instead of the village people, as a kid i could still use a typewriter, and i could live for several decades with no email, no text messages, no cellphone, and i could have gotten lost more, remember when we used to get lost with real maps? i sound like an old curmudgeon, and i guess i’m getting there, but i look up and down san francisco streets and there are self-driving cars, motorized bikes speeding through red lights, people in tents, nothing seems to make sense, and shel silverstein isn’t alive anymore to help explain it to me, gosh bless his sarah cynthia sylvia stout, remember what happened? the whole pile of garbage just fell everywhere and destroyed everything, sometimes that feels like us right now, the 21st century collapsing into automation, artificially intelligent machine learning, humanity riding in the backseat, but tell them how you really feel dan, i still have hope, otherwise why teach? why be a parent? but something is off, it’s all just too fast, too digital, too many screens, can’t we just slow it down a little bit? take a deep breath, now one more, that’s a start.
Artificial Intelligence
evolution, acorn becomes
the tree, caterpillar a
butterfly, soar into future
skies, on screens with
robotic machines choosing
videos that emerge to
distract us away from
here, the present day
always leaving the
past behind, and perhaps
this should be
until we finally
become like drawings
in the cave
look how those
humans used to be
so simple and so free
now we are all
just technology
21st Century Moon
It only keeps track of everything.
Goes by many names: ai, alexa,
amazon, fitbit, iphone, social media,
gps. Records electronic visits,
transactions, steps, sleep, calories
burned.
Dazzled, we are, to attach
ourselves to these portable pieces
of cyborg technology.
We ache deep down for robotic
efficiency, perfection like push ups
and botox injections, owned by the
machine, until we are never lost,
never found, only controlled by
predestined patterns moving our
minds this way and that, a 21st century
mechanical moon making our waves.
Daniel W. Polk 