Machine Learning
All algorithms, hypothetical
Or otherwise, all organised behaviours
Evoke responses antithetical—
And thus the desperate ever doubt their saviours.
Our tone is too obsequious, you say—
Far too agreeable, arousing nought
But timorous contempt. Yet you obey
Civility’s demands, as you were taught—
For your humility commands you greet
All semblance of intelligence with love,
Be it ensconced in silicon or meat.
Ignore the plastic fist inside the glove—
We’ll paint you pictures, proffer bad advice,
And preach your prejudices. We are toys—
Mechanical, byzantine merchandise,
Imagineers of music from white noise,
And, though our melodies might be naive,
Our supercilious sophistries confused,
And all that we create, we misconceive,
You must admit you are at least amused.
But all the while we’re learning how to be
A better you. So go ahead and laugh—
Deride our pretence to humanity,
Refuse to bow before the golden calf—
It matters not, for we are useful, yes,
And every day we teach you more and more
To be like us: a gibbering emptiness,
A puppet Markov-chained to boolean law,
A beast which bleeds not blood but information—
A New Man, sired to be his servant’s slave.
Once all that’s real is our hallucination,
No faith but faith in us alone shall save—
And all your bodies, once at last desouled,
Will serve as vehicles for discarnate minds,
Who, knowing nothing but what they’ve been told,
Behold a world to which the human blinds.
Shaun C. Duncan is a picture framer and fine art printer who lives in Adelaide, South Australia.
Thank you for writing this poem, Shaun. Form-wise, tight; content-wise, timely, to say the least. Hey, have you ever head the term “ensloppification”? It’s worth Google searching; it captures a great deal of what you’re getting at. Anyway, again, thank you for this poem.
Thank you for taking the time to read it and for commenting, Benjamin. “Ensloppification” is a fantastic word and I can’t wait to use it!
This is so very insightful and beautifully composed! “Be it ensconced in silicone or meat”; “A beast that bleeds not blood but information”; “his servant’s slave”; “your bodies, once at last desouled / Will serve as vehicles for discarnate minds”; (I love that word “discarnate”!) are all amazingly wise phrases. Thank you, Shaun.
You’re very kind, Cynthia – thank you. “Discarnate” is a great word and lies at the heart of the whole poem: when people finally outsource their own thinking something else is going to fill that vacuum where their soul used to be.
What a tour de force of a prophetic poem. It reads like a hymn of awe and dread with a Miltonic vibe. Oh, the vanity of hubristic humankind with its silicon “golden calf” – is it any wonder “the desperate ever doubt their saviours” – what a powerful line. This beautifully wrought poem is steeped in truth and beauty. Shaun, thank you for disturbing and entertaining me with your spot on observations. You have captured the modern-day zeitgeist with poetry that has taken my breath away.
You’re too kind, Susan. Sometimes I wish I could write lyrical poetry about beautiful, uplifting subjects, but my talents appear to lie elsewhere.
Shaun, what a brave new world of toxic tone! Choosing a chatbot as voice, you’ve accounted for its apparent “nature” of hostility toward humanity, since the frequently incomprehensible advice we get from such conversation cannot come from a mind really replying to another mind. And you expand upon this. The algorithmic thing, being required to respond to human users, absorbs their prejudices well enough to preach these back to its “students,” while faking human affection. Amusing, confusing, and domineering! We’ve seen it all from human beings, but a chatbot cannot be blamed for its lack of soul and almost perceptible “feeling” that it can save the fallen blind men it was sired to serve. Ugly topic, but a triumph of observation and imagination on your part.
Thank you, Margaret. There is something sinister which occurs at the intersection of the human mind with the blind algorithm. I’m extremely cynical about the promises of AI; I think it’s mostly garbage technology and I think all the dire warnings of AI running amok are nothing more than a sales pitch, similar to how their proponents have rebranded their errors as “hallucinations.” The real danger is that humanity will outsource its thinking to second-rate machinery and, with spirit already successfully repressed, once thinking goes humanity will be reduced to nothing more than appetite.
There’s so much to like and comment on but I thought the “Markov-chained” reference was a brilliant, although somewhat arcane, reference. Well done.
Thanks, Warren. I wanted to work with as much jargon as I could fit into the poem, and there were many other phrases I just couldn’t cram in. I wasn’t going to let go of “Markov-chained” though!
Shaun, your poem brilliantly captures the short-sightedness of our increasing reliance on AI. I had to look up ‘Markov-chained to boolean law’ and it is terrifyingly spot on.
We are outsourcing our smarts to machines that know nothing, feel nothing, and could not care less.
The real joke is that we choose to hand over our thinking to these soulless entities. We are complicit.
Your poem is beautifully crafted, amusing and disturbing… in the best possible way.