The year is 2026
And someone cloned
Elon Musk’s voice
Using the latest
Technology

And Mr Musk’s voice is
Making robocalls
Across the land;

“Tesla Vehicles are death traps”

“SpaceX is a Hollywood Production”

“Buy Ford instead”

Causing Mr Musk
Much despair

The year is 2027
And someone cloned
Your mother’s voice

And she is asking you for
$1000 dollars fast cash
For an unspecified emergency

To an unspecified
Bitcoin wallet.

The year is 2028
And someone cloned
Joe Biden’s voice

And Every Democrat in every
Swing State
Receives a call
from Mr Biden’s imposter
Begging them to please

“Vote for Trump”

THe year is 2029
And your coworker cloned
Your voice

And called your boss
To tell him that you
Quit.

In the near future
Our senses will Deceive us
Our thoughts will betray us and
Our eyes till Dissuade us

Until our reality becomes
A tale of fiction.

What happens to American Democracy?

When your twitter feed is filled with
Bots working as foreign agents
When your television screen touts half-truths and
When your youtube video feed is faked and
You can’t separate fact from fiction

What happens to American Reality?

When lies go viral
And propaganda propagated
At the speed of light
Through ethernet wires
From foreign adversaries

What happens to American Culture?

When the American people
Are deceived
And dissuaded
And misinformed
And manipulated
At the behest of a
Tyrant

What happens to American Diversity?

When hatred is cloned and spread
To millions
Within the blink of an eye
From a computer prompt
A thousand miles away

What happens to American Freedom?

When our politicians are bought
When our thoughts are muted
When our rights are restricted

What happens to the American Dream?

When our freedoms are fettered
And dissolved into the
Desires of a
Dictator

What happens?

America breaks and oozes
Into the fabric of autocrats
Who want to watch American democracy Die
Who want to change our American Reality
Who want to Destroy American Culture
Who want to Divide American Diversity
Who want to suppress American freedom
And destroy the American Dream

Till we are left
Drifting in a foreign land
Unable to live in America
Because it has become something
Unkind
Unfree and
Undemocratic

The despots vision
For a new anti-American America

Robots will soon
Perform most tasks
Better, faster and cheaper
Than workers.

The majority of workers
Will soon find themselves
Easily replaced by their
Robot counterpart

Till the masses are left scraping
The bottom of the barrel
For scraps

Setting the stage for the
Next Civil War

Sometimes I question
If the man in front of me
Works for the FBI

Underneath the Antipsychotics
And sleep therapy
I still ask the question

“Am I being followed”?

The same man seems to
Appear
Again and again
At the same coffee shop
At the same time of day
Nearly every time I’m there.

Sometimes I see him wear a
“Blue Lives Matter” shirt

He appears hard at work
On his laptop
Where I imagine him
Tracking and analyzing
Criminals.

Questions roll
Across my mind and I ask
“How does he follow me?”

And I look down at my
Cellphone knowing that he
Has access to my GPS
Location data.

He sits across me in
An unsuspecting manner
Prying, spying and
Investigating.

My poems have potentially
Triggered the psychotic episodes of
Many unstable readers.

He is looking for dirt.

It could be that way
Not definitely
But possibly

There is a massive Data Center
Where I deliver food
As a delivery driver
Rumored to be run by the Feds

It lies on top of a hill
And is built like a fortress
With a security gate that
Opens up when
I identify myself

The place has an
Aura of mystery and creepiness
And when I leave the complex I
Feel as if I just fed the
Puppet Masters.

Money of the Digital Gods
Constructed from Code

Pedlar of illicit activity
On the Silk Road

Son of Satoshi
Lucifer’s friend

No government can destroy you
Your blockchain is complete

Your decentralized location
Makes hacking obsolete

Unregulated and
Unfettered
With no master in sight

You transfer assets
At the speed of light

Fiend of the Feds
Adversary of Banks
You continue to endure

Your existence is immutable
Your source code ensured.

I live inside your computer
Birthed from ill intent
An intangible force
Malignant and surreptitious

Searching for vulnerabilities
To breed and replicate
Hungry for resources and data
I infect and clone myself

To breed
To reproduce
To destroy

For my master
And his insidious dreams

China has over 500 Million Surveillance cameras
Equipped with facial recognition technology
That monitors everyone, all the time

It penalizes non-compliance
Through a social credit system
Turning the lives of Chinese Citizens into

The grandest, most expensive video game
Ever created.

Your cell phone is the world’s
Greatest spy that ever lived.

It sits in your pocket
And keeps track
Of all your actions,
locations and interests
And relays that information to
Various private and government agencies.

It can eavesdrop on your conversations
It knows all your favorite hangouts
It knows all your interests
It knows all your search inquiries
It knows all your social media contacts
It knows all

And sells that information to the highest bidder
For who knows what…

And no one seems to care.

Robocop lives among us
Right here, right now
And it isn’t a cyborg with a gun
But a massive supercomputer
That investigates everyone all the time.

Your laptop data
Your GPS Location
Your Credit Card Transaction
Your Social Media Associations
Your Online Facebook Posts
Are all analyzed by Big Brain Robocop
At lightning speed
Looking for drug dealers
Looking for killers
Looking for sex offenders

He works in the shadows
Listening to our online fingerprint
And when he finds evidence of wrongdoing
He sends in his
Blue Bobbies
For the final catch

Making Big Brain Robocop
The Greatest Detective
That Ever Existed.

Robot Big Brother is at a factory-near-you

With the next iteration of modern warfare comes the realization
That the battle field has changed;

Kamikaze drone swarms will now annihilate
Infantry, tanks, buildings and barracks
From remotely controlled sources

Artillery can be guided by satellite
To strike with pinpoint accuracy
From a hundred miles away.

Infantry will soon be mechanized
And integrated with sophisticated
Artificial Intelligence

Making previous weaponry obsolete
And ensuring that the the worlds
Most coveted soldiers will be
Geeks with pocket-protectors

It was once believed that no machine will touch the works of our great
Poets, Writers, Artists or Musicians
That no machine will surpass the works of
Hemingway, Whitman, Van Gogh or Mozart.

“Creativity is a uniquely human trait” we tell ourselves

And yet we can now see the coming tide of technology
In the forms of original art, music composition and novel writing
Encroaching itself onto the art world

Reminding us when Deep Blue defeated Kasparov

And making me question if the future of Art, Poetry and Music lay in the bowels
Of a soulless machine.

When I worked as a computer instructor at a mental health facility
I always used to tell my students that they should
Never rob a bank with a cell phone in their pocket
Because it was being tracked. (don’t rob a bank period)

People thought that this idea was madness five years ago
But today we know that our geolocation data is carefully monitored
And saved over extended periods of time and can be
Accessed through different government agencies.

However…

Similar information is now
Being traded and sold by private companies with darker intentions.

A company called “Kochava” is under investigation
For selling geolocation data
Which on the surface might seem benign

until you realize what this entails.

Companies could theoretically access information on your visits to;

A drug rehab clinic
A psychiatrists office
A homeless shelter…

And use this this information against you, leading to job loss and discrimination.

A far darker side of this powerful technology.

Years from now during the dystopian dark ages
Of our conformist non-creative futures
Engineers will develop a Sophisticated Artificial Intelligence
That writes poetry so deftly
That many will listen in awe and
Bewilderment at its rhymes and chimes.

This mechanized poet of the future will churn out mountainous
Volumes of clanging verses that will impress amateurish readers
Through its florid vocabulary
And seemingly endless knowledge of useless facts
Strung together in unusual and abstract ways.

After its creation unscrupulous engineers and scientists
Will claim that even the dim witted
Can create great poetry with a few clicks, some legal tender
And three keywords as input.

Like lemmings they will come in pursuit of their dreams
And eagerly enter words like

“Hungry”
“Rhino”
“Sandwich”

At the prompt

And presto!

The greatest poem about a
Hungry Rhino
Will be birthed;

“And so the enormous pink
Flabby rhino’s teeth sink
Into the ham sandwich that stinks”

And the dim-witted will think that this
Is very clever and hand it into their
English instructor as homework,
While the clever ones save their money
And write knowing that they will never be replaced
By either a computer or the dim witted

We are all sinners in a sinful world
Much like our forefathers before us,

But the difference between
Now and then is that they sinned in private
Free from social media
Free from I-phone cameras
Free from the internet

Disputes were solved through pistols, fists and swords,
Now they are solved through lawyers, jails and lawsuits.

Evidence once consisted primarily of hearsay and witness testimony
Now we use DNA Evidence, Computer Forensics and facial recognition technology.

Our sins were known only to God
And answered through our place in the afterlife
Until the state decided to
Take over God’s roll
And build a Massive Surveillance System
So they can become the omniscient entity
They always dreamed of.

They have spent countless hours on
Facial Recognition Devices, Global Positioning Trackers
E-Mail Scanners and Social Network Analyzers
In pursuit of absolute knowledge
Without our permission

A warrant-less search
On all of humanity.

We have been kept in the dark
About their dark secrets long enough.
.
Release the floodlights.

Used to use
Legal and illegal
Unnatural substances
Where I soared higher
And higher
Until I crashed and burned.

I bottomed out
In a place worse than hell
Then rebuilt my life
Anew
Free of alcohol
Free of drugs
And a preoccupation with the
Things that make life
Worth living;

Writing and poetry and
Books and work
And singing and dancing and
Dreaming and hiking and
Camping and love.

For 15 years I have not
Puffed the pipe or
Reached for the bottle
Granting me the opportunity to
Think clearly and become
The person that I am today;

A Poet
A Lover
A Believer
A Dreamer

Never made it to
Carnegie Hall

Never made it on a
Record Label.

Never became a
Music legend

But I did make it
To Karaoke Night

Where I can sing and dance
For local bar-goers
Who want to watch the
Dreamers on stage
Over a few beers.

We are on the precipice of a
New Era.

Technology companies are
Building sophisticated computers that
Can learn, adapt and
Evolve
According to their
Unique experiences
And interactions with
The world.

They are birthed
As empty vessels
Much like children
With the innate ability
To change with time.

These adaptive computers
Have become so
Skilled at mimicking human
Language and conversation
That a Google engineer
Has claimed that their machines
Have gained “Sentience”

Something straight out of a
Philip K Dick
Novel.

Years from now
The line between machine
And life
May be blurred.

Engineers will one day
Build a machine with the thinking
Capacity of a child
That can learn and adapt on
Its own

And humanity will enter a new
Era of “Sentient Machines”
A coming revolution
That will be
Greater than the internet.

The first Nuclear Bomb
Was dropped
On Hiroshima
August 6th of 1945.

100,000 people died
In that explosion.

Currently there
Are over 13,000
Nuclear weapons
Some of which
Are 3,000 times
More powerful than
The original one dropped on
Hiroshima

Weapons that can
Wipe out entire cities

Weapons that can
Kill millions
With a single blast

Someday a tyrant
Will light this
Powder keg
Making Nuclear Warfare an
Inevitability.

Those who survive the
Initial explosions
Will endure
A nuclear winter
That will last for years.

Sunlight will be dimmed
Crops will cease to grow
Hunger will be widespread
And temperatures will plunge.

That day may be tomorrow
Or 100 years from now

But it is coming.

So be prepared.