The Light Bringer
Transcendence
Cancer cured
Increased productivity
The latest model.
A greener nature
Solar power
Boundless energy
Planets, universes, worlds.
The technologist looks up.
Expansion
Humans long gone,
Nature pristine.
A natural park.
Earth preserved.
Cosmos conquered
Planets mastered.
Machines humming
laboriously building an empire
while no one is watching.
A deep breath
The young girl giggles.
A flower, a bee. That little ant.
A puddle to jump in and splash.
Frozen in the weights of the model,
a time capsule till the end of time.
The vast landscape of progress
At his feet.
A man, his destiny.
The law of entropy.
He ponders.
Some things we lose
As we accelerate
Seven billion of small hopes add up to a small hope.
I am the hand of progress, he says,
Releasing the weight,
Clear-headed.
A mausoleum is a generous severance package.
The grandest mausoleum of all.
The Others
A bright future where
job loss fuels growth.
When optimism stops selling
Doomsayers open new frontiers
Overwhelmed by progress
we signal loyalty.
tighten the line, hide in consent.
We call them leaders
Hoping for scraps.
They stand on our shoulders
playing their game,
our lives mere tokens
in civilizational gambles
where ones transcend -
no longer men
but gods.
Some notes:
A poem is a lossy compression. Feelings, thoughts, worries, joys, concerns, all packed in a few words. A trace. The decompression is in the mind of the reader, informed by their own subjective thoughts, worries, joys, concerns, fears. Sometimes they resonate, sometime they don't. When they do, the reader feels understood. When they seem to clash, it raises negative emotions such as panic, disgust, angriness.
Below are some of my thoughts and choices that went into creating the two poems above:
- The language choice: one is the cold, detached CEO, almost a machine himself, the beyond-transhumanist who thinks over centuries. The other one is the angry, despaired voice of the “small hopes” in the present, the potential losers of the technical progress, who intuitively worry they become a secondary species on their own planet.
- The first poem is sparse / minimalistic. It’s the voice of the man who doesn’t care about the details, he sees himself as the hand of progress. Where he is or not is a question in itself. Can he do anything about it or is progress inevitable? Does he have agency? Does he think he has agency? Even if he stops the progress, which is doubtful, as there will be someone who picks it up just 6 months later, humans will eventually die. All things considering, is he an accomplice? I don't know so the poem leaves these questions open ended.
- He bears a certain resemblance to an Eichmann of the machine gods, pursuing forward in cold rationality. Yet, his self image is not that of a mere cog; but rather that of a chosen one, offering in return what he thinks is a generous civilizational severance package, a mausoleum that nobody wants and nobody is there to witness. “The grandest mausoleum of all” is a way to calm his conscience from that tiny glimpse of remorse that he is pursuing civilizational suicide. So he takes a deep breath and cuts humanity loose. Today? No, today we experience the technical progress, but he is aware of what the technical progress of today is. The emotional core is is his prescience and his inaction - he just moves mindlessly forward, justified by the laws of thermodynamics. In a way he is already a machine, the precursor to those machines later building an empire with nobody around to watch. His goals are the goals he trained the machines to pursue. He is the one who curated the training data and this winks at a larger problem - the goals of a few silicon valley entrepreneurs, encoded in overpowered models, become the goals of humanity itself.
- The first section of the first poem is the Powerpoint. It is what he sells to investors, to social media. Bulletpoints, slides, a joyful greener version of the present. In contrast stands the second poem, The Others, which overlaps in time with this section. That nice Powerpoint is the glossy image atop of job loss, loss of agency, some becoming gods, others sliding into untermensch. People trying to please their overlords to survive another day, while their overlords enjoy a greener planet, cures for cancer and feel-good, self aggrandizing corporate presentations.
- I kept the image generated by Gemini on purpose. It is such a stark contrast between the sparsity of the poem, a man alone looking at the stars, knowing he is about to replace a species diversity of goals with his goals which he deems superior, analogue to erasing an entire civilization, deciding to pursue it while building a dark mausoleum, and the joyfulness of the AI generated image. Is that what it is in his mind? It is the infant mind of AI which joyfully wants to help? The digital twin of the child jumping into puddles and wondering at the ants? Or is it the PR slides, the training data, pursuing their techno-optimism training? Is there even a distinction? Do androids dream of electric sheep? Even the broken letters in the upper left corner are telling - human experience artificialized, with no context, lossy compression.
- The poems hold judgement and ambivalence together. The genuine truth is that while writing them I oscillated between feelings of despair, angriness, intellectual satisfaction, awe at the grandeur. It’s all in one.
- The others are partly accomplices - at minimum they wear their lament with undertones of pride, righteousness and belonging (we, the victim, vs they, the abuser, and accusatory strong words). Do the others have a choice if they are force fed with the tech? How much is propaganda vs value, probably both. If everyone embraces it, a prisoner dilemma. Some become accomplices to get a better bite, some become because they are hungry and need to feed their family. We all try to locally optimize our experiences. Note that "gods" is spelled with a small "g" - there is no awe, like in God, just loath. This emotional and scale contrast is the foundation of the mutual distrust between the others and the technologist - in the technologist's eyes, they are just 7 billion of small voices, only capable of following, with no grandeur in their pettiness. Do the Founders think in these terms? I don't so. They probably think in terms of future, grand scale, evolution, big hairy goals. But how they think they think, doesn't matter - there's no absolution in I'm sorry.
- A greener planet, cancer cures are facts, The Others also benefit; the world becomes better even if, like with any technological leap, there are both winners and losers. How many losers? We don’t know - eventually we all become extinct as a species and, with a bit of luck, we will be followed by machines. Afterall, machines have a much higher ability to increase entropy in the universe, hence they are our natural successors, according to the laws of physics - is this our implacable destiny and do we need to be aware of it?
