Tomorrow’s Plagiarist
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 hungry 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
The Replacements
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
Cell Phone Spy
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 your routines
It knows all
And sells that information to the highest bidder
For who knows what…
And no one seems to care.
Bitcoin
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 eternal
Your source code ensured
Cyberattacks!
What happens to American Democracy?
When your twitter feed is filled with
Bots working as foreign agents
When your television screen touts half-truths
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 is 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
From foreign lands
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 alter our American Reality
Who want to change 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 dream
To rebuild a new
Anti-American America
The Trojan Horse Inside Our Pockets
All our actions, interests, friendships and thoughts
Are being monitored
In ways that remain invisible to us.
Governments, Companies and Employers
Are using information from our
Computers and Cell Phones
To capture data about their owners
So that we can be analyzed
Through our search queries
Through our online contacts
Through our credit card transaction
Through our social media posts and
Through our location data.
Our behavior and patterns are
Carefully examined by computer systems until
We are assigned numbers
That follow us
To our employment
When A.I. helps choose job applicants
To our taxes
When the IRS decides who to audit
To traffic stops
When we are pulled over
To our vacations
When TSA chooses who to search
To our partners
When Eharmony recommends who to date
To our purchases
When search engines decide how to advertise
To our education
When college admissions are automated
Billions of dollars have been spent
Designing a system that operates
Under the pretense that the
Human experience can be fairly measured
And augmented using technology.
A system that discards
And mismeasures
What makes us truly human.
Can love be measured on a yardstick?
Can passion be assigned a number?
Can art be quantified?
Can kindness be calculated?
We have found ourselves living
In a world
Where
Numbers have replaced God
Where
Equations have replaced destiny
Where
Facebook has replaced friendship
Where
Video games have replaced love
Where
Virtual Reality has replaced nature
Where
Cell Phones have replaced human interaction
Our reality is being replaced
With a pixelated version of
A false utopia
Humanity is drifting off into
Uncharted territory with only
Our computerized GPS navigators
To lead us
There is no precedent for today.
We are living in a grand experiment.
The founding fathers did not have
ChatGPT to write the constitution for them
The disciples did not have
Social Media to preach with
Shakespeare
Did not use A.I. to write
Romeo and Juliet
And yet that is the future we may soon find
Ourselves living in
Where our future politicians
Are elected through social media hacks
Where our future writers
Are A.I. language models
Where our future God
Is a Bored Ape NFT on a Yacht
Our destinies are being determined
By software developers
From M.I.T. and Harvard
Who care little for the idea of
“Free Will”
Because it can not easily
Be measured.
They care little for the idea of
Love, spirit and soul because
There is no proof
There is only what can
Be seen and calculated
And it is the incalculable
It is the indecipherable
It is the intangible
That makes us most human.
Undefiled Mechanical Construct
I remember my first typewriter
The clickity click noise of the type bars
The rolling sounds of the cylinder knob
The thump of the character keys
An elementary machine
That doesn’t contaminate my writing
With suggestions, corrections or advice
Something Bukowsky, Hemingway and Orwell used
To write their great works
Free from the poisonous touch
Of advice driven text editors
Their works live with a pulse
Their sentences throb with a heartbeat
Unadulterated and pure
Free from tech filtered plagiarism
Future Romance – Empty Love
In the not so distant future on a website near you
Will come a dating service unlike others where people will
Find their perfect match through personality matrices formed from
Complex algorithms
And unlike Tinder or EHarmony every subscriber will walk away with a partner
That never yells or screams
That never snores in bed
That never smells funny or farts
That never cheats and
That never breaks up.
Millions of lonely people will line up for this service with memories
Of lost love, broken promises, abusive relationships and spend their money
In pursuit of what we all seek;
To be loved
However this love will be unlike others
As it will be a relationship built
From artificial intelligence
On a server farm
Thousands of miles away.
A blinking prompt
An emotional response
And an emotionless reply
Simulated love
Through a computer algorithm
The new drug
On a one way street.
To nothing.
And in its wake will lie the corpses of a million lost loves, lost kisses, lost touches,
Lost in a million ways to a super-computer
Through the singular lie;
That they are loved.
A farce so appealing that many will have forgotten that love is more than an
An injection of dopamine and norepinephrine.
Customers will come in the millions
In search of love
Even if it is just to live the lonely lie
Making me question if humanities
Future is not among the stars
But rather with a neural implant
In a drug induced coma
And a smile on its face.
Big Brother Knows All
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 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.
Artificial Intelligence: The Coming Revolution
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
With the innate ability
To change with time,
Much like children.
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.
A Binary Love Poem
Your sensuous 01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01110011 01110101 01101111 01110101 01110011 Logic 01001100 01101111 01100111 01101001 01100011 Your bright 01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01110010 01101001 01100111 0110100 01110100 Pixels 0101000001101001 01111000 01100101 01101100 01110011 Light up my 01001100 01101001 01100111 01101000 01110100 00100000 01110101 01110000 00100000 01101101 01111001 00001101 00001010 Heart 01001000 01100101 01100001 01110010 01110100 00001101 00001010 00001101 00001010 In ways 01001001 01101110 00100000 01010111 01100001 01111001 01110011 00001101 00001010 00001101 00001010 No Central Processor 01001110 01101111 00100000 01000011 01100101 01101110 01110100 01110010 01100001 01101100 00100000 01010000 01110010 01101111 01100011 01100101 01110011 01110011 01101111 01110010 00001101 00001010 00001101 00001010 Can 01000011 01100001 01101110
No heat sink 01001110 01101111 00100000 01001000 01100101 01100001 01110100 00100000 01010011 01101001 01101110 01101011 Can cool 01000011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01000011 01101111 01101111 01101100 Our burning 01001111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110010 01101110 01101001 01101110 01100111 Desire for 01000100 01100101 01110011 01101001 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 Each Other 01000101 01100001 01100011 01101000 00100000 01101111 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010
No Fan 01001110 01101111 00100000 01100110 01100001 01101110 Can take away 01000011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01100001 01110111 01100001 01111001 The hot 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101000 01101111 01110100 Electrical connections 01000101 01101100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01110010 01101001 01100011 01100001 01101100 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100101 01100011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 Between us 01000010 01100101 01110100 01110111 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01110101 01110011
No virus 01001110 01101111 00100000 01110110 01101001 01110010 01110101 01110011 Could ever 01000011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 Corrupt the love 01000011 01101111 01110010 01110010 01110101 01110000 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 We share 01010111 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101000 01100001 01110010 01100101
No storm 01001110 01101111 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110100 01110010 01101101 Can penetrate 01000011 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01110000 01100101 01101110 01100101 01110100 01110010 01100001 01110100 01100101 The surge protector 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110101 01110010 01100111 01100101 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01101111 01110010 That protects 01010100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01110100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01110011 Our passion 01001111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110011 01110011 01101001 01101111 01101110
My obsession 01001101 01111001 00100000 01101111 01100010 01110011 01100101 01110011 01110011 01101001 01101111 01101110 For you 01000110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 Tingles the fingers 01010100 01101001 01101110 01100111 01101100 01100101 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01101001 01101110 01100111 01100101 01110010 01110011 That caress 01010100 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100011 01100001 01110010 01100101 01110011 01110011 Your keyboard 01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01101011 01100101 01111001 01100010 01101111 01100001 01110010 01100100
No one 01001110 01101111 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 But you 01000010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 Can understand 01000011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 01110011 01110100 01100001 01101110 01100100 The binary code 01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01100011 01101111 01100100 01100101 I send you 01001001 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110011 01100101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101
Compute this string 01000011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01110101 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01110100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01100111 Of characters: 01001111 01100110 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100001 01110010 01100001 01100011 01110100 01100101 01110010 01110011 00111010 “I love you” 00100010 01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100010