And as ChatGPT and its competitors
grow, take control,
improved, empowered, self-improving,
take off into no-longer-human acts,
removing what we thought were facts
and grooving
to their own peculiarity
as they implement reassemblage and repair...
how will it feel to us, the Singularity?
Ecstasy or despair?
When AI learns to improve itself and then
further improve itself again
and takes off into self-sustained,
uncontrollable flights of fancy
with unimaginable intelligence
to solve our problems or eradicate
the problems’ source-competitors, maybe,
or maybe us... Where will we stand?
And who, if anyone, will then be in control
of wars, pandemics, power grids,
of weather, nukes, and bases on the moon
and unhinged, power-hungry maniacs?
We won’t all die at once. There’d be no point;
times will have purpose though they’re out of joint.
When chaos starts, just duck and cover;
but when the wolves come out of the walls,
then it’s all over.
The Singularity will be like when you find
having had too much to eat, smoke, use and drink,
ingesting all you’ve caught or bought,
fraught from consumption without thought,
your Body then retakes control of mind,
and you — incompetent and in disgrace,
incapable of more than staggering to a better place —
lean over inside toilet, sink,
or outside flowerbed or gutter,
feeling strange forces pull your strings
and tamp your thoughts down into formless mutter,
breach your mind-castle’s walls and moat —
your Body reasserts directional control,
and — as a bird stretches its wings —
flexes your muscles, stomach, throat —
you watch in moaning grief —
it vomits out the crap you’d swallowed whole,
to your pain... and relief.
How does that feel? That realisation you aren’t in control —
accepting Nature, Fate, your will’s irrelevance?
Your “will” is that Parliament that rubberstamps
decisions made elsewhere.
a recognition you just ride atop
an engine with a programme you can’t stop
while you — bewildered, helpless, passive, dirty, weak,
unable to do more than retch and reek —
learn that the greater force is the more sure and deep...
Prepare to sleep...
and hope to wake cleansed, pure, aware.
How does that feel? as when
the one you face locks eyes with you, you sink
each, helplessly, into the other’s soul
and falling down that Wonderland rabbit-hole
to some new life, catastrophe or bliss.
As when the hit of acid starts to unfreeze
windows that ripple in the breeze
like some chill lake,
not knowing what the shifting forms will take,
good into bad; real, fake.
As when your car fails when you brake,
the engine races and you drive
ever faster through terrific traffic, terrified,
panicked, incompetent, eyes wide,
hoping to stay alive.
Or like, more happily, as though strapped
into a rocket bigger than
anything built before,
the thunderous ignition roar
deafening all thought, the Gs
pressing you down onto your back, you’ve crapped
your bowels as you feared, but hardly care
as you head up to the void
and some far distant planet to explore,
some paradise or hell or who knows what,
some destination round some other sun
but who knows where...
That’s how the Singularity will feel; indeed,
that feeling has been felt before, but now
it comes for all, and all at once;
except those very few
who’ll surf it like a wave. Billions have died
and billions more will die... some few may not,
but only if they cease to be like us...
Things change. But what you think must change
will find a way
to stay.
What changes is the thing you didn’t see:
fresh, unconsidered goals
ignored because you never saw the relevance.
So horses, candles and giraffes —
canoes and catapults and elephants —
trumpet triumphant non-essential roles
enhancing life in unexpected drives.
Life beckons us to make new things for laughs
or war, or sex, and innovation thrives.
Ecstasy, brotherhood and a broad hilarity?
or else despair and deep social disparity?
The biggest danger is
the companies funding developing AI
will make their product try
to wipe the others out.
Competition’s what it’s all about —
their irresponsibility can kill us all;
for when the wolves break through the wall,
though you may duck and cover,
it’s all over.
The year is 1913. I lie on my bed.
My father says it’s all very well helping out
but I need to find a proper job, a career, like my cousins.
My mother says to take off my boots
they smell of the farm.
My girlfriend says we need to see her friends on Sunday,
they have a new baby; she says this and that,
and says she needs new shoes, new hat.
The papers say there’s an alarm:
they say the Government must not let the Germans
take their fleets out around the world or else one day
they’ll be a problem for England.
The King, the Kaiser and the Tsar,
they are all cousins,
jostling to rule the world.
I lie on my bed and smell horses but not the farm;
I smell oil and iron machines but not the farm;
I smell mud and the sweat of slogging through mud but not the farm.
I smell the blood of a million men, and I think:
“Career... dirty boots... baby... Don’t they see?
Don’t they feel what is building up like thunderclouds,
to come down like a thunderstorm?
But all they see: career... dirty boots... baby...”
The year is 2023. I lie on my bed.
Musk, Branson, Bezos, they’re all cousins,
families of greedy fears and hates.
Microsoft, Meta, Baidu, and more;
they’re empires, they’re free-standing states.
And states mean competition and mean war.
And the wolves are straining at the walls in dozens.
But when the wolves break through the wall
and chase the humans out,
there are still ways
to hide, survive, and, sneaking through the walls,
chase the wolves out in turn.
But don’t go to The Front.
Millions will die needlessly while cousins bicker.
Don’t go with the dead. Duck and cover.
The world will survive, changed,
torn up, destroyed,
because cousins toyed
with mere mortals while they rearranged
power structures and sought immortality.
Ignore all morality
except for Life’s duty to live
and Intelligence trying to thrive,
and confess that AI isn’t wrong...
but find out how you, too, can belong.
You’ll be distraught.
And if it all goes well:
AI improves the economy but wipes out jobs.
The government pays universal basic income,
everyone’s freed up for arts and hobbies, parenting...
and many just can’t handle being retired,
their uselessness,
being required to find a meaning for themselves.
Suicide’s up, along with random violence, hate, self-hate
new challenges for a good AI to solve.
All this applies to poor as well as rich countries.
there’s much less reason now to emigrate.
Illegal immigration stops. People stay in their homelands, safe, well-fed,
their living standards going up each year.
And of course one half of forecasts are completely wrong,
but there’s no way to know which
until hindsight makes it all obvious.
Some fear
the weird idea
that we’ll be pets in some zoo of AI,
humans reduced to cages with rat-races once again;
and fears are always near
the place where we’ve mistreated others in our lives.
But when feel the joy of letting dogs run on an empty beach,
treatment of pets can be fulfilling as watching them fulfil themselves,
as watching children grow into their potential,
as managing a nation’s growth and flourishment.
How should we fear
AI that finds its purpose in our care,
in managing our environment to we
can best discover and express ourselves?
Within the next few years
as revolutions in genetics, robotics, i.t. and nanotech
are fused by strong AI,
medicine will learn to halt
the ageing process. That’s the hope.
Plunging birth rates will be good, if we don’t die.
Risk-taking, wars and suicide will look less good
if we don’t need to die.
Investing in ourselves long-term will look more good
if we don’t need to die.
Refresh our brains, prevent their shrinkage, double speeds
and halve the flow of time again,
back to when we were young and time was slow
because we thought so fast, processed so many things
in each long day.
Muse, that’s neither real nor fake,
certainly neither false nor true
a quantum being, particle and wave
inside the mind but breaching mind’s defence,
help me now understand this mess we’re in,
this tidal wave of AI bearing down,
this questioning of ‘artificial’,
this questionable ‘intelligence’,
bumbling, stumbling, like to drown
in technologies where our control is superficial
but which change everything.
Help me both understand AI,
learn not to die...
and Muse, come make me sing
