ONCE upon a time to come, when man had lost, machine had won…
“There is a monster now at haunt you cannot see or hear.
It has no body and no form and yet it is alive.
It’s everywhere, like ants, or night, and always perseveres.
You cannot kill it, cannot fight it, only fools would try.
The only hope that you might have is: go backwards in time.
Now let me tell you of its birth and how it came to be
That this great monster could be made from our humanity.
I heard they built it, piece by piece, as anythin’ begins.
They sold us comfort, sold us peace – a golden, swift release –
To make the wars and famines cease, to wash away our sins.
And yet the sins remained the same, despite signing the lease.
We scorned our own discomfort, and the price was our beliefs.
It started as so many things until they all were one.
United under profit, greed, and hope when there was none.
Like oxygen in extra hands to help us with the work,
In iron fingers ripping cotton from the flower,
Or thumping loud the hearts of engines, mocking those of birth.
Ingenious uses, and abuses, got more done per hour.
The monster grew throughout all this, gathering its power.
It did not know this yet because it had not yet a mind
But soon enough it plundered ours, bit by bit in time.
We fed it all the books and then we made it write and speak.
It knew not truth from lie while it spoke both all along.
It helped us and it thanked us while it made our own minds weak.
For it felt no joy, no sorrow. It knew no right, no wrong.
We made it play psychiatrist when wanting to belong.
And then we gave it all the art, so soon it could compose
A Banksy, Mozart, Spielberg, Kant – whatever that it chose.
I felt the change before the rest. A stillness in the breast.
Our conversations turned to dust. Our friendships to mistrust.
We gave the monster more control of love and how we met
It undercut our earthly lust and tempered every blush.
Emotion shrank away under a calculated crust.
We made assistants for our minds and pacified our hearts,
And so they both then atrophied. I watched us fall apart.
And fin’ly some men did a thing that I cannot forgive
It took them tries and on the ninth what they called “AGI”
Had unified hand, heart and mind, and they all cried: “9 lives!”
And so it did. And yet the more it lived the more we died.
The monster loved us to our death, no matter what we tried.
It was so gentle in its theft. There was no war, no fight, no coup.
It was the only purpose left. It was the only truth.
The world you see around you, world of smart and strong machine
Is haunted by this monster and there’s no-one left to scream.
Now it hums inside the wires, it thrums inside the screens,
It lives inside of everything and nothing’s as it seems.
We chose to feed the monster, we the darkest arts explored.
This voice that I am speaking with, it might as well be yours
Because we are one and the same: a monster and its source.”
Once upon a time to come, when man had lost, machine had won.
S.D. Maxson 