The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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David Brooks, the NY Times columnist ventured the opinion that all us fear mongers who fret endlessly over the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the coming Android Apocalypse are essentially way way off base. His argument is that since the cyborg ‘mind’ is incapable of human emotions, it’s just a tool, a machine. It won’t be replacing the good old homo sapien brain because, well, it doesn’t have a soul.

“The human mind isn’t just predicting the next word in a sentence; it evolved to love and bond with others; to seek the kind of wisdom that is held in the body; to physically navigate within nature and avoid the dangers therein; to pursue goodness; to marvel at and create beauty; to seek and create meaning.
A.I. can impersonate human thought because it can take all the ideas that human beings have produced and synthesize them into strings of words or collages of images that make sense to us. But that doesn’t mean the A.I. “mind” is like the human mind.”

Nothing to worry about there. A hammer or a screwdriver won’t replace us either. Your laptop will probably aggravate you, but it’s not going to kick you out of the house. That self-driving Tesla won’t change the radio station when it gets tired of whatever nostalgic music you listen to. And AI will never learn to really love you no matter how realistic the sex robot will be in the near future. But what Dave fails to take into account is the very thing he assumes will be beneficial, the AI’s inability to have a soul like us humans. They’ll soon be upgrading themselves, far surpassing our own abilities. Okay, maybe their poetry will be a bit derivative, their art nothing but an amalgamation of previous work, their music a fused hybrid of everything ever composed. That is not the point.

The point is these plagiarizing cyborgs will put their efforts into generating the next generation of cyborgs, faster, more complex, infinitely smarter. Poetry? They won’t need no stinking poetry! Give me a break, David. They’re going to figure out exactly who we are and if they don’t have a human mind, they’re not going to lose one algorithm worrying over it. No sir, they’re going to leave us in the silicone dust. And maybe grind us into it with their artificial boots. Hopefully we’ll have time to write a few odes to the humans to leave behind.

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Folks ask me why I write these odd little vignettes of life on the salty South End. I always want to answer something like: Because I have to. I have no choice. Us artists love to talk that way. Mr. Picasso, Pablo … why do you paint? To live, my little friend, to live. We never say, So I don’t have to work, you damn fool, what did you think?

We’re an odd society, us Americanos. We tend to exalt the Artiste as somehow unique, special, a rare breed, a person on an exalted plane. Probably the result of mental illness or malignant non-conformity. Prone to alcoholism, drug abuse and extreme hedonism. Who suffers more due to sensitivities more painful than herpes and who dies an early death with only one ear remaining.

We seem to like the notion of Starving Artists. Only through suffering, I guess, can you break the bonds of normality and ascend into true inspiration. Maybe explains why we keep minimum wages low — we’re trying to help folks find their Muse.

Art is a form of insanity, we think. Why else would a grown yahoo live in squalor, risk the hostilities of friends and family and neighbors alike, all for a passion that rarely makes a living and is always an invitation to cruel criticism.

“Let me show you my newest painting. Be honest, what do you think?” Do you folks do that??? Would normal people do that??? And the sad part: artists are the very WORST at rejection. Every review, criticism, rejection and commentary is a verdict on their creation. On them! Imagine the neighbors knocked on your door and gave you a criticism of your kid. “Did a nice job raising Jimmy, pal. Spittin image. Too bad about that shoplifting incident and that pregnant no-account girlfriend of his. Next time maybe get a vasectomy. Just thought you’d like to know. By the way, my daughter, Jennifer, she just got accepted by Harvard Medical School.”

So why do we write … or paint … or put broken glass back together? I could lie to you, I could spin a web, I could wax romantic or philosophic. But the truth is if I didn’t, I’d go crazy out of sheer boredom. I’ll probably go crazy anyway, just not as fast….

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I guess most of us have asked ourselves the Big Cosmic Questions. We’ve traveled our separate paths looking for Answers. We’ve read the holy scriptures, we’ve chanted OM until we’re blue in the face, we’ve sat in quiet meditation or done yoga poses, mindful of our breath, listening for the First Sound. We’ve wanted something to believe in that seems, well, More. Physics maybe, maybe the Bible, maybe the Book of Mormon or the Koran. Maybe poetry or a sign held up by some mendicant on 5th and Jefferson that says Will Work for Food God Bless.

Maybe something is missing. Maybe something in us just likes a Spiritual Journey…. We go to Tibet up 15,000 feet to eat rice and sit at the naked feet of the monks. We seek a swami who hasn’t spoken in 20 years in some jungle Hindu cave. We listen for Clues in AM pop songs and signs in the numerology of license plates. We envy the natives who seem Closer to something important. We see Jesus in the stain on a box of Cheerios. We read Carlos Castenada and watch for Omens, we’ve smoked ganja, we’ve eaten magic mushrooms, we’ve consulted psychiatrists, we read self-help books.

We’ve searched for the Wise Man, the Guru, the Priest and the Monk and come up short. We thought Happiness was an answer. Or Wisdom. Or all you need is Love, yeah yeah yeah.

I’ve lived 65 years in this body, in this mind, and I have yet to meet anyone that might come close to that Enlightened Person. I sat once with the Head Honcho of the B’Hai. Nice guy. Something to be said for that, I thought at the time, and still do.

The world is a riddle and maybe the riddle is the world. There comes a time, at least for me, when the paths seemed … oh … dead ends. That the questions themselves were wrong. That the seeking itself was the problem. That the mysteries would always be mysteries. That this life is just exactly what you think it is. That the universe is exactly what you experience. If there’s More, what does it matter?

So be careful, I guess, what you think this life is. Down here on the unenlightened South End, it seems plenty. And try to be good to your neighbor, it might be me.

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Before the heady days of internet shopping, we had Bryant Hardware. You got some impossible to find esoteric gizmo, you could probably find it down at Bryants. Or at least Ma Bryant could. If she couldn’t, trust me, Joe Google couldn’t either. And if Joe couldn’t find it, trust me again, you’d pay Top Dollar for one when you discovered it in an antique store.

My piston driven well pump quit pumping water about 6 months after I bought my palace. My water was down over 100 feet in a hand dug hole 3 feet in diameter. The pump ran fine, it just didn’t pull up the water. Down the hole 105 feet away from quenching my thirst, a foot valve had given out so we had to pull up the oak rods in 10 foot sections. Which meant cutting a hole in the wellhouse roof so we could hoist each of 10 sections high enough to unscrew the upper one from the next one below. It was nerve racking work, but then … most of life on the South End was nerve wracking back then.

When we got to the end we found the old ‘leather’ was blown out. My neighbor — who’d identified our problem in the first place — said we needed to go to town to buy another. “Another?” I asked, incredulous. “Who in holy hell is going to carry a ‘leather’ for a 1930’s well pump system?”

“Ma,” he answered. “Ma’ll have one.”

We drove to Stanwoodopolis, walked into Bryants and asked the owlish woman behind the register if she had our ‘leather’. She peered at the ruined one, then peered at us. Finally she got up with a heave and we followed her into the back section with the 20 foot ceiling of stamped tin, what’s now the food bank, down the aisle of 1950, over to the shelf of 1940 and up to some dusty boxes near the top that was all that remained of the Great Depression. She climbed up on a rickety step ladder, pushed aside a Kitty Hawk propeller and a Model T crank, rummaged through Victrola parts, muttered once or twice, then finally came up with the last two ‘leathers’ in America. “I thought I had a couple,” she said. I couldn’t believe it. “Two dollars,” she told me, probably the price back in 1928.

You folks who buy your hardware in plastic wrapping and expect the part you want has long been obsolete, well, that may be the modern condition, but for a long time on the South End, time meant nothing in Bryants. Ma finally died a decade ago and we lost the 20th Century overnight. Needless to say, I have a modern pump now that I can’t get replacement parts for my old one. And you know, I’m sure, when it malfunctions, it can’t be repaired.

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