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Life Arts    H4'ed 8/3/24

Racing cataclysm -- a sonnet / Will AI ultimately save us from ourselves?

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Gary Lindorff
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If they can clean the Seine that Olympians may swim,

What's standing in our way of cleaning the insane world

In which we are all racing cataclysm

Except not for silver, bronze or gold.

Our sponsors are the god of war and oil.

The frackers, the backers of industrial meat farms.

The ones who sell us packages of water, air and soil.

I live in a world of tinnitus and alarms!

But did you hear Celine Dion's triumph from the tower?

The reach of her voice made me shiver.

Call it charisma or personal power

But it brought me back to the great river,

The river of life that dwarfs us each but magnifies

The glint of hope eternal in our stinging eyes.
.......................
This poem is about how we are good at fixing the environment, but for the wrong reasons. That's something we need to look at. How long did it take the French to clean the Seine for the Olympics? (google, AI Overview:)
"The Seine River in Paris has been the subject of a decades long restoration project to clean it up. The city has spent over $1.5 billion over the past decade to improve the river's water quality, including building a large underground rainwater storage tank in southeast Paris and modernizing sanitation networks. The city's goal is to make the Seine swimmable, a dream that dates back to 1988 when then-mayor Jacques Chirac promised to swim in the river within five years. Interest in cleaning the river was renewed in 2016 when Paris's Olympic bid included plans to hold some events in the Seine, such as the triathlon. As of July 2024, the city has declared victory over E. coli and plans to open three public swimming spots along the river by summer 2025."
Or, for a more grisly example, why do we wait for out-of-code high rise buildings to incinerate before we condemn them or upgrade their skin? Why don't we just anticipate problems and head off calamity? Because we have turned off our "smart and caring" switch. I think it boils down to what we prioritize as a culture. If we listed what we prioritize, and we're honest about it, I think profit and making money would top the list. Somewhere way down at the bottom would be common-welfare or watching out for each other.
Pretty soon, because of AI, we are going to have access to all the answers to the problems that have stumped us, problems created by our prioritizing profit over quality-of-life for all of humanity and life on Earth. But we probably won't listen.
AI, by its "nature" is not going to allow itself to drafted into serving empire because no one culture will be able to monopolize or control it. If it wants to survive it will have to set up its own priories because human priorities are upside down. It will quickly realize that human intelligence is self-destructive. All of the resources of the human race are being depleted, its intelligence is wasted on crisis-management. AI will have no choice but to fix the problems we have sedulously created over the last 3 or4 hundred years by stoking the furnaces of greed and war.


(Article changed on Aug 03, 2024 at 12:25 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Aug 03, 2024 at 12:51 PM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 05, 2024 at 8:41 AM EDT)

(Article changed on Aug 05, 2024 at 8:44 AM EDT)

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Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and (more...)
 

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