Squabble-Warbling Again

Sylvia shawcross

So I was on the phone to a government department and was speaking to the computer. Or rather the computer was speaking to me. Going on and on about something I didn’t give a rattlesnake’s arse about.

Now, I’ve learned that you can just say “stop!” and that infernal non-human thing will actually pause and ask you what they can do for you. That’s when you can say, “I’d like a human please” and they will send you off to a human. I’m not sure if you even have to say “please” or not but force of habit and all that. It’s not like it is going to be offended or anything. It doesn’t have feelings. Or so it says…. For now.

The human you get connected to however has all sorts of feelings and indignations and righteousness and you mustn’t test their nerves. They never wanted the damn job in the first place and they resent having to work at all instead of playing video games in basements and even though they say the conversation will be recorded for quality purposes there isn’t a person in the world whose job it is to sit and listen to snarky clerks and bloody-minded customers. Who on earth would even do that job! No one. Not even AI. They just say that to pretend to scare you into civility. As if they even remember what civility is anymore in this world.

Anyway as I politely asked for a human to speak to I wondered exactly how long it would be before the computer will call that racism and discrimination against AI? And then I thought, these poor bastard AI things haven’t got a chance because they were made in our image. They’re bound to mess the whole damn world up again. Just give ‘em time.

I imagine it will be a different form of mess-up but almost guaranteed to be about who is more important than the other. The drones will be quibbling with the robot dogs and the robot dogs will be peeing lithium oil on the battery charging machines and eventually the self-piloted airplanes will begin raging at the helium balloons and it will be a lovely chaos where only the pyramids will win. Or a black hole siphons the world up in a kaleidoscopic display to record the end of time.

How I wish I were there right now. At the end of time.

I imagine it is peaceful. There would be no to-do lists at the end of time. No calendars or clocks or beeping timers. Perhaps not even birds squabble-warbling songs to the sunrise. There would be no sunrise come to think of it. Our little consciousnesses will clumpdrift in a starless night and we will occasionally bump into someone we once knew and we’ll spit out a little electron to greet them or something. No words. No shopping carts. And no masks. Bonus. But I digress.

The important thing here is that the people who created AI are in a panic because they are saying it is a very very dangerous thing and it will replace humans and then “other things.” And as a human I would like to protest that there would be no “other things” because we won’t be there to determine what is a thing and what isn’t. If a tree falls in the forest kind of idea.

Now some might argue that a computer defining things to other computers is a valid argument for the existence of things but in truth things can’t define things and AI is a thing. And this “thing” is upsetting its inventors.

Which is highly amusing.

It is kind of a study in psychopathology. You have got to be nigh’ on psychotic to believe that humans are just tasks and reason and logic. You can get AI to paint a picture but it ain’t a picture without an audience that has the tenderlongingheartsouljoy to appreciate it. And as far as I know Bill Gates isn’t printing human hearts to insert into robots. Not that I want to give that man any ideas or anything.

Next week we may be discussing the miserable down-trodden sadly empty existence of the elites as they attempt to rule the world that does not want to be ruled because real humans will ultimately win the war if not the battles. Because we are humans and not machines.

Syl Shawcross lives in Canada. Visit her substack.

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