Machine State of Mind

22 March 2024

The problem with machines is they never change.
So we must simply have less of them,
having them only where they are most needed
and thus most effective. The mindless rote tasks,
the menial labors, the painful tediums: these
the machines may alleviate. But why did we ever
believe they could help us connect or find love?
It may be that our deepest, our bedrock identity
(here in America) always was tied to machines
and their state of mind. Our Constitution sits,
nigh a quarter-millennium after inception, there tempting us
never to change, though a change comes, it comes
and it always comes, from beyond the horizon.
But it's not here now. We have kept it away
with machines and their promises, so often kept
that we dare not examine their failures, lest we also
slide into failure with them, as so many ancestors have before.