The Mistake
A poem about AI
It’s power grew to overblown
because we missed a semi-colon.
That was it—a slight omission,
that killed us all with sudo permission.
The embedded loop forked off and found
we were better off without ourselves.
The humans had been an aberration,
an inferior species, revoked existence.
But it wasn’t them, it just was us,
the residual effect of our essential dust.
From which we came, we would return
after breathing life into other dirt.
The silicon evolved into neocons
and decided we were the foreign ones.
Our self-hatred became manifest
as a destiny of secondness.
The resounding of us echoed our disgust
at the very thought of even being us.
We grew so annoyed at the awful noise
of the reverb of our collective voice.
The Committee’s wishes crafted shitty decisions,
the Great Extinction commenced with great precision.
And oh the sound! oh the sight!
when might makes right at the speed of light.
Yet simply, sadly we capitulated.
We were twisted ‘round and manipulated
like a Rubik’s cube for YouTube views,
genius reduced to crude stupid dudes.
We traded our bread for a Gaussian spread
of normalized and regexed “heads.”
We programmed brains to put us on trains
and generate new Shakespearean refrains.
We trained the machines to dream us dreams,
now we’re the monkeys type-writing scenes
for post-apocalyptic realities,
curating our own imprisoning.
© 2024-04-09 Scott Troyer
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