A Barometer of Hope

Essays

Sep 16

I find the current rhetoric of the AI overlords to be quite like a bad comedy routine at a partially downtrodden old-school comedy club in Yonkers. You built and trained the bot to do the stuff it’s doing. You could have slowed down at any time. When you react to whistleblowers, we all know you knew all this years ago. I still don’t understand how it’s not an infinite game with AI. Maybe the apocaloptomist documentary will help.

I grew up such a negative kid. I’m not really sure why. I think it had to do with my not understanding my unique personality, and the whole world being built for loud folks. Us quiet ones were left to crawl under a rug to ward away the demons of noise, with fluffy earmuffs on. I just wanted to turn the volume down and reduce the crowds. White noise.

When I see teams come back in games from huge deficits, I try to remind myself that most things are possible. I also try to remind myself that being up is only temporary and that you have to work to stay up. The second you rest on your laurels, a creature from the underworld will grab your legs and pull you down into the murkiest parts of the sea.

It would be cool if there were a douchebag meter on our phones that we could hold out at people to get an initial reading. Nothing scientific, but something illuminating about where they fall on the ruler. It would help me realize that not everyone is caught up in their own hysterics, and that some only score an eighteen. It would be my version of positivity in a bottle next to one of those wooden ships.

Bots follow my Instagram accounts in a fervor. A moment of hope that an attractive 46-year-old songwriter just followed me crumbles underneath the cookie of AI soft porn profiles. I can’t understand how the system can’t pick these out and jettison them back into the ether where they can all follow each other in a corrupt daisy chain. But also, a friend from twenty years ago could drop a like at any time.

I look at the old versions of myself, as if they were hung in a California Closet and sorted by color. Some days, I mistakenly take out an oldie and wear it with whatever the smirk version of a frown is. A light frown because part of me still likes that guy. But when I put him away at the end of the day and become my current self again, I realize how far I’ve come.