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LeAnne V Rheaume
LeAnne V Rheaume

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A technical poem- prehistory and looking to the future.

Probably a not so interesting take, but I wanted to post and practice so here we are.


Neanderthals, we technologists.

We're bashing rocks together and expecting a new frontier; yet we're looking for fire. We're flattening the curve of ingenuity, mudding data points and manufacturing scarcities.

What is the point? A new understanding, a technology to rival the hadron collider that still needed a ferret to clean the tubes. A man behind the curtain forcing us to adopt a technology that will only enrich him as he shove his nose into space itself.

The twittering birds with gold studded wings say it's a natural progression but the rainforests and congolese mining camps say it's more like a new form of blood diamond. You can't have the fancy chips without the blood smeared crates that supply the raw goods to build them.

New tech, what is the capability? AI is a tool for us, not a savior. A nuclear power plant is needed to push the frontier and human progress forward? Really? A modern Chernobyl in the making. Trains are derailed, spewing toxicity and death in their wake, but sure, let's get the nukes out as we choke.

What is the price of progress?

We're breathing an intoxicating slapdash palette of Scheele's Green and London Purple impastoed against the canvas of our phones, coughing bloody foam as a product marketed as the next big thing ultimately kills us in our own homes.

Pseudocode and forced industry. Data will be the weapons of the next medieval period. Multiple dark ages have proven what happens when we forget to read.
We'll burn the heretics and witches under the banner of progress. An inquisition will be televised. A genocide already is, and we allow it.

Thralls, to the AI Idols and Gods we create. Ennui and despair inconspicuously slithering into our ears, deafening us to the cries of the victimized.

Or will we? Can we change, unplug, unblind and undeafen? Can we see the spark against the darkness? Can we use AI to attack human misery and problems instead of ourselves?

Yes!

Use the tool for eliminating obstacles, use it for good. Let's scan for tumors, not replace another's livelihood. Let's help a traumatized child learn to speak against a virtual friend with no pretense or expectation, until she can rejoin her classmates.

Let's use AI to map our potential for eliminating food deserts so families aren't hungry. Let's connect a clan who were scattered to across the globe and across cultures and languages, so they can share a meal for the first time since 2003.

We don't need a chatbot that will wipe out our ability to innovate and digitally expand our minds to learn and grow as we reach for the stars. We can check our understanding, and try again.

Global warming is killing us slowly, accelerated by the potential savior of the human race - how do we balance the power?

Math Munchers in the modern era. Not Drone strikes and media blackouts.

The world is dying. We need solutions, not suffocation.

Use the tower of Babel to learn, even the Voynich manuscript and the Annunaki tablets buried deep under Ur can grow the star seeds into quantum colliders, if we don't wipe the next hero of humanity's story off the map.

Speak up for those not fortunate enough to be at the razor's edge of humanity.

A parking lot copilot is not the pinnacle of digital humanity. This is more than a farmer's almanac. Cat 5 hurricanes are wiping the holy lands, the ancestral villages, never to be rebuilt.

Rage, against the dying of the literate light!

I am not the Oracle of Delphi, yet I can see we are more than what meets the eye. There's many saviors across our world if we share knowledge instead of putting things behind a paywall.

Teach someone to code, and they may one day change the world.

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