Tag Archives: future

Sonnet: “When the A.I. Hit”

Leave a reply

When the AI hit, Diamandis, Thiel,
Branson, Page, Brin, some Russians and Chinese
became the gods of Earth, of skies and seas,
by grappling it to themselves with hoops of steel;
appeared as giants, credit cards, or scotch
to screw with mortals, rape them just for play;
fought, and destroyed the Earth, blasted away…
taking along, as fleas on arms, legs, crotch,
musician, writer, politician, whore,
derelict, linguist, murderer, the insane…
some samples of the human heart and brain
as being interesting distractions for
the gaps of interstellar time and space.
Aspire to fleadom, folks, or leave no trace.

This sonnet was originally published in Snakeskin a couple of years ago. Like the previous sonnet I put up here, it reflects my concerns about the near future. The list of people who might take advantage of the possibilities offered by the ongoing revolutions in genetics, robotics, A.I. and Nanotechnology should today include Elon Musk–but the candidates for practical godhood change every few years.

And what the vast majority of left-behind humans can do about it is anyone’s guess.

Sonnet: “When the A.I. Starts Analyzing Us”

Leave a reply

artificial-intelligence

In the dire months before the comet hits
or other unavoidable known doom occurs,
all social structure fails, all vision blurs,
that world–in book or film–goes on the fritz.
The reader or the viewer merely sits;
asked of his own mortality, demurs–
“My death’s not imminent.” The crowd concurs:
others’ll die first; we won’t lose our wits.

Our AI, tasked with knowing human minds,
reads, views, reviews disasters huge, small, odd,
absorbs how humans pray in grief and tears,
the Bible, Shakespeare, the Quran, and finds
our gods by crowdsourcing our hopes and fears…
works out just what to do… becomes our God.

This sonnet was originally published in Snakeskin. The near future obsesses me–I don’t see homo sapiens continuing for another 100 years as the lords of this planet. But what will supplant us appears unknowable. I’ll stick around as long as I can to watch…

Sonnet: “We’ve Reached Earth’s Edge”

2 Replies

The Earth’s explored, and flat. And I know this
despite Earth’s shadow in lunar eclipse,
and how horizons hide the hulls of ships.
We’ve reached Earth’s edge, stare into the abyss
with Branson, Musk, NASA and the Chinese,
toppling into blackness, falling prey
with Kurzweil, CRISPR, Google, Bostrom, de Grey,
businesslike scientists battling disease,
entrepreneurs with dark unearthly schemes:
the outer darkness space’s endlessness,
the inner darkness immortality.
Pushing and leaning into stellar space,
the event horizon of our thoughts and dreams,
the black hole of our post-humanity.

Published in the Formal & Rhyming Poetry section of this month’s Better Than Starbucks, the “Earth’s edge” idea is just another way of trying to express my ongoing fascination with the end of humanity-as-we-know-it, and the beginning of something that we can’t even visualize yet, let alone make confident predictions about. Close to the idea of the “posthuman god” at the bottom of the Wikipedia page.

Technically, this is a poorly-structured sonnet (ABBA CDDC EFG FEG), with a really weak rhyme of endlessness / space. Sorry about that. But I hope you can enjoy it for the ideas, anyway!