The Stone, The Flight, The Hand

Once a tool can be made into a weapon,
that extends the field of battle
it is impossible to take the weapon
out of the tool, impossible to stop
those with mean minds using all that can
to press this meanness to their advantage.

Whether warfare or sex the effect is the same.

A.I. and drones have become the new way
to protect some air space and weaponize
other, less protected, air space through which
other countries throw stones/fire drones
that destroy buildings, industry and habitat
whilst hiding the AI hand that threw them.

The latest social AI problem is now centred
around 'nudifying' -taking normally clothed
and sociably asexual depictions of women
and children and rendering the images 
sexually distorted depictions of the person
who owns the face that gets used.

That the men (it is mostly men) who do this
are flouting old taboo by new means
shows how flimsy the prohibitions against
such images and technology were in the first place.

Like the new wars, the renewal of 'the war between the sexes'
where males defy responsibility via jargon for technology
and deceive themselves whilst making others feel slighted,
well, I always try to rely on older analogue understandings
of the stone, the flight, and the hand that started it.
 

 

When Humans Do Not Compute

Inattentiveness of each other's lives
was the main reason The Beatles broke up.
You can see it all in the mixed messages
between the humour and lack of eye contact
docuemted in the more conflicted rehearsals
in the film, 'Get Back', which replaced
the badly edited and far more barbed 'Let it Be'.

A decade and a half after The Beatles split,
'the German Beatles', Kraftwerk, faltered
in their creativity. Many outside the band
wondered why. The first member to leave,
who recently wrote his autobiography, knew.

They were not known for their banter
or making jokes in the studio,
but like their predecessors, all four
were known to work well together.

But as they invested more in computers
they invested less in each other.
Where the music was concerned,
what machines might be made to do
was more fascinating than what humans
had to say about each other. 

Now, doctors surgeries are high tech places,
where receptionists get glued to the screens
that the public know are there but can't see.
The receptionists are too busy to receive
patients who arrive for appointments.

That required human confirmation is gone.
When I go in nobody wants to know who I am,
or advise me of the right place to wait.
As a patient I am much nearer being a ghost
that the staff cannot care enough about,
even to exorcise, than anything more substantial.