Commentary and Philosophy Poetry posted August 23, 2023 Chapters:  ...27 28 -29- 30 


Exceptional
This work has reached the exceptional level
The freedom in being out of tech

A chapter in the book Artificial Intelligence

Unplugged part I

by estory

Oh to unplug from the cellphones
And the laptop computers, the earbuds
And the bluetooth devices
And their endless connections
To portals and websites and zoom calls,
Chatrooms and twitter feeds,
News flashes, blogs, friend requests
From unknown facebook profiles.
 
Oh to leave behind the cellphone towers,
The vast interconnected web of the internet
And its tracking cookies,
The endless stream of data
And the endless text message alerts,
The pop up ads popping up on the facebook feeds.
 
Who can remember what it was like
To walk around outside in the sunshine,
In the fresh, vibrating air,
Listening to the gentle murmur of a waterfall,
The songs of bluebirds
And the dance of bees around the wildflowers,
Free and untethered to machines
And their artificial intelligence chatter?
 
I want to sit for a long time at the shore,
Out of sight of the surveillance drones,
Beyond the noise of the tires
On the information superhighway,
Carried away by the tides
And the seagulls on the wind,
Warmed by the sun
And not some incandescent light bulb.
 
I want to be far away from electricity
And its power cables, its gas powered power plants,
Its photovoltaic solar panels,
Its wind turbines
And its lithium batteries and transformers
Humming over the crickets
And the great horned owls.
 
I want to go beyond the washed out illumination
Of high voltage street lights
Blotting out the natural beauty of the stars,
Watching the slow, graceful drift of the moon
And the planets and their slow, graceful footwork
Tracing out the patterns of their mysterious ballet
Across the unpolluted emptiness of the sky.




The older I get and the more I watch technology take over the world, the more I am coming to the conclusion that just because these companies figure out a way to save themselves money and make money off of people, it's not necessarily a good for society. Pretty soon, if we let them take this to its logical conclusion, all we are going to interact with are machines. We weren't designed to interact with machines. Machines are lifeless, soulless creations and they are building a lifeless, soulless world around us. No wonder people are so lonely and unsatisfied today. The companies would have us believe that if you just get the new cellphone, the new app, the new internet service, your life will improve and you will live happily ever after. I think in reality they are just making the world more expensive and more complicated and more and more of an empty experience. We would be better off and with no pollution and any side effects from all this technology if we went back to the simpler times of the nineteenth century. Sure it was more work. That's another thing you were made for, and in working for the common good, you get satisfaction in life. Well that's my rant for the day, I guess, and in the end, I hope I get people thinking. estory
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