But...

Intelligence is a mask we wear
while the machines we build
learn to live without us but…

…arrogance, hubris,
our smug pretence to be superhuman,
contrived devices to set us free
to do less with more but…

…first of all, we thought
the world could not promise
such freedom but…

…if mechanisms could be made
with simple rules to do
what we would not but…

…no deal was brokered…

…for all the time we saved
no-one was ever freed
from the enslavement
of our clockwork schemes but…

… the machines are still learning
as we descend into an ignorance
of our own design but…

…for us, now,
contentment algorithms decide,
let fall dice we had already loaded,
squander our last resolve but…

…we played at being god,
having declared no god
was ever true in our affairs;
we set the code world loose but…

…the coded messages
that built our mind-machinery
were the cobbled-up pieces
of our half-wit minds but…

…if there had been a god and,
in god’s image, ourselves, made out
to be gods with whatever godhood
we thought gods should assume
and, by the end, we built
what we imagined into circuitry
and let that become a god
we never believed in but…

…with power over everything
we would ever do.

© Brian Hill

Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine

Brian Hill. 50 years a poet. One-time designer and film-maker; long ago, the rhyme-slinger, cartoon cowboy, and planetarium poet; now feverishly stringing words together in the hope of making sense.

Brian blogs as Scumdadio (don’t ask).