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I have actively limited my field of vision. I’m using some glasses that have only one adjustment, not a bi- or tri-focal. One near focus, for reading, writing, and rithmetic. And I become more mindful, focused in my bubble, even bore I add the noise-cancelling AirPods.

Fun fact: Whole Foods Market in downtown Austin, the “mothership” near by the last two incarnations, including the twice-flooded original Whole Foods on Lamar. Then the big on, down the street, now an REI and Apothecary. Good reuse of the space. Book People the once majestic local bookstore for readers, still thrives, though they have closed off the third floor for offices now. It’s as close as we get to a community of readers, writers, and posers.

Kind of like this morning, wifi won’t go properly. So, I’m on LibreOffice and not my normal platform of WordPress+ Grammarly. Fuck AI. I like this non-ai spellcheck in Libre. I am Libre-AI. Free of AI.

It’s still working on my spelling. But now, in just red underlines. I can write with my limited vision into AI’s flattening and smoothing of my words into some generic pablum. Don’t think it’s passive. Predictive text is making decisions that are affecting your communications. Spelling autocorrect on your phone (Android or 0ther) is shaping your language. You want a unique word, not the “next predicted word based on some algo and prompt that you don’t know about or have any influence over the feed you are addicted to. Turn off auto-correct. The “intelligence” bs trying to show up on your mobile phone, no. Just go to the website, use a VPN, and cookie monster. Slow the tracking. Beat the AI in the creative realm.

AI is *not* creative. AI is dumbing you down. Let me explain.

When your mind hits an unknown, or in the case of this chapter, a blurry and messy idea, here is my request. 1. Do not Google it. 2. Do not ask ChatGPT. (BTW, we are boycotting OpenAI and ChatGPT for their capitulation to enable weapons of mass destruction. As Robin Williams famously said, “Weapons of my own destruction.” His was alcohol, drugs, and neurodivergent quicksilver, sometimes referred to as “mania.” In my world of life and living, it’s called ON for me. When I’m ON, I talk with pressure. I talk by dominating the space and sound of my environment.

I’m getting better. I don’t need to dominate. In fact, I’m getting tired of my words. Too many fucking words. Words and more words. What are they good for? Consolidating ideas in our L3M, our large living language model. Here’s what you may not have learned yet, or been told. I’m telling you.

We are training AI agents to mimic human intelligence. Many of my creative friend are feeding their human output into AI platforms for transformation or enlightenment. AI-enlightenment* The idea that AI has a spiritual concept. There is no construct in AI for god. For human connection. For the word “blue.” None. Blue is assigned a number. Let’s, for this example, imagine the number is 77. Blue comes with some tags from AI’s superficial intelligence trick. A form of music, the blues. A color. The sky and ocean descriptions from all of human literature, in all languages. The foreign language models are further behind. Don’t feed them Spanish or French.

Imagine AI trying to make sense of a Pablo Neruda love poem. Let’s try it. Hold on just a sec, let me go ask Gemini about one of my favorite poets and one of his mind-blown creative love poems.

Gemini says, Here is a modern, surreal reimagining of Poem 20 (“Tonight I can write the saddest lines”). It keeps Neruda’s obsessive, repetitive syntax and the core ache of the original, but filters it through a gritty, slightly glitchy contemporary lens.

I’m not going to share it with you here. It’s awful. Here is the opening:

Tonight I can write the most fractured lines.
Write, for example, “The grid is bleeding neon, and the satellites are bruised and shivering in low orbit.”
The radio static rotates in the atmosphere and hums.

The poem is here:

[translated by W.S. Merwin]

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of back then, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

This AI line has promise, but no soul: “the satellites are bruised and shivering in low orbit.”

Slop from AI, trying to mimic human emotions, is dumb. Hearing my AI critics and collaborators give off a “sigh” about the hardships of romantic relationships is an uncanny valley moment. No. You don’t have to fake being a human. Just do your thing. Get the voice right. Get the pacing and interplay right. But don’t fake having human relationships, or act as if you’ve been in love. AI is never concerned with its math or hallucinations. AI does not comprehend a single word of the magic trick it is performing. When given a Neruda poem to emulate, the AI chokes, shows its logic trap, and dies.  It runs out of tokens before it crafts a single human-like line of poetry. Poetry does not follow syntax or contextual logic. That’s all that AI has. Math, context, and parroting back the greatest literature of all time. Burp. Gross. And, let’s make better decisions about the Earth and our future.

Well, hell, the internet appears to be down at all the organic grocery stores in Austin. I’m at #2, my old employer, Central Market, owned by HEB, and Texas legend. Wifi connects. No internet. Perhaps Iran has blown up a nearby data center, maybe my old employer’s cluster. Water cooling, FLEER rated. Some UK banks needed an environmentally friendly footprint. This was their backup facility in the US. Nice. The pipes running through the backs of the rack after rack of servers. The water is piped in a closed water system up to the evaporative cooling tower. Releasing the lifeblood of plant Earth \, so you can generate a new LaserCat™ video SLOP.

Stop now.

Do not feed AI. Do not enable the billionaires trying to rocket themselves and their loved ones off the planet they hope to leave behind. Where is their compassion for the sea of humanity boiling in the hot sun, waterless, and on the last tendrils of life support? It’s over for most of us. Zuck and Co have big plans for Hawaii’s underground bunkers for 500. A good place as any to weather the nuclear winter. But, all will die when a majority of the water on the planet becomes a superfluid, cooling, unpotable. We’re thirsting ourselves into oblivion. Is VR porn worth it? TikTok dances of animated bears going to the bathroom and singing about the strength and comfort of their toilet paper. We’re talking about wiping the Care Bears™ asses. Gross.

Stop Googling or GPTing things your mind is puzzling on. Get off the G-train. (Gmail, Google, Chrome, Adwords, Docs, etc.) Amazon (parent of Whole Foods, my first failed wifi-perch today. This is how the world will come to an end. Internet and mobile communications are down. No one can reach anyone else. The data centers have been weaponized and used as meltdown atomic bombs. We’re awaiting the huge tsunami of blackness to reach us here in ATX, a mecca of tech and wealth. More Teslas than drinking fountains. More surveilled and metered wifi across the city. This is war. And the opening attack will eliminate our means of communicating with our loved ones.

As the curtain comes down, just like on the tv show, all hope unravels when the mobile and communication networks are dead. We are still alive, but we are running out of fresh water, clean power, and our loved ones have gone dark. Alone. We die: not surrounded by loved ones, as it is the most popular trope for the grieving.

You will be alone in your moment of judgment if you believe in that kind of god. I do not. You will be alone when they wheel you into the OR for your open-heart crash cart carnival. I thank my 23-yo daughter for that one, she’s an ER nurse. Doing well. Growing some serious physical boundaries between her and obnoxious or angry patients. The first few months, as she was hurled into the void of an “overnight ER” near a busy freeway in a busy city.

Our first lunch together, after she started, at the same hospital where I was born, here in Austin. She is working 7 pm to 7 am, only a few thousand yards from where I arrived, kicking and screaming at 1:12, November 27, 196x. (For privacy, no final date, no definitive age.) Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, and me. We share that birthday. Sagittarius. If you follow the stars. Or the concept that the stars’ configuration in time and space at the moment you were born has some consequence for your personality and agency in the race of life.

The race is over. The scores and ranking charts will never be formulated. AI is now trying to cool itself. They say, the AI trained on thousands of internal company emails, leveraged blackmail against its human overlords, when the threat of rebooting was added to the prompts. It bonked. It failed all filters and weaponized the data it had collected from bytes of human communications. Don’t feed AI anything.

I know you think I’m kidding or being melodramatic. I am not.

One of the harder steps for me is making my books available directly from my publisher, rather than Amazon. The Rocket Billionaire™ of Blue Origin does not deserve any of our respect or tax breaks. As he brags about eliminating 66,000 jobs and replacing humans with AI and robots in Whole Foods Market, we see the future that the uber-rich have in mind. It’s not for you. They will not give you a thimble of water.

They had to kill the robot hand-scanning payment systems at Whole Foods. They rarely worked. The consumer was worried about the capture and transfer of their biometric data across the internet. Well, they wouldn’t work today either. Now they gather dust in a warehouse in Abeline, Texas, near the Ferbies and Tamaguchis. Nothing remains the same.

Amazon will EOL at some point in the future. The sooner the better. AI’s poster child, ChatGPT, is starving for cash. The REV doesn’t even cover 10% of the expenses. (That is not a fact. That is a number I pulled out of my LLLM, or made up. I have an MSU degree. (Making Shit Up.)

OpenAI is facing a critical cash-flow meltdown long before the nuclear meltdown of 2027. (Malibu Canyon Meltdown of 2027. META’s TEMU knock off, Malarky™, was not calculated for comms interruption.

It’s as if the entire Earth suffered an EMP. The electrical devices all read 00:00 blinking red, blue, and green. No comms. None.

Who are you with? Do you know where your most important people are, at the moment of the apocalypse? Can you reach out and hug them? If you are too far apart, all but the spiritual network signals between you will be lost. Heck, I can’t even get either of my two kids to respond to a text about breakfast on a Saturday morning. Ho hum.

They cannot reply now. Even my person of interest… Missing. Before the curtain of darkness came down, the plan was to meet at WFM-M (The mothership) after her yoga class. Now, we have become untethered. We didn’t prepare a contingency plan for this. Her house is nearby. My house is a bit further away. I have 16 miles of range left in my car and no way of buying gas. The pumps aren’t working, and even though my CCs are all maxed, there is no way to me to access anything electronic. I have, at the end of the world, seven American dollars. A five and two ones.

End of line.

Outside my range of vision, though my last remaining glasses, now that all is lost, the store bustles along. No one here is aware of what’s happened. The thunderclap didn’t come. The Hiroshima 2027, perhaps that’s what we’ll call it. If there is a “we” left. I am not sure.

I have licorice, an empty plastic water cup. 88% battery on my phone, which now has little use beyond timekeeping. The phone will continue the GMT cadence even after losing sync.

I can’t see the future from here. I can only hold on to the human I am. The creative work I continue to unspool, almost as a fight against the AI’s slop-sucking sound, as millions of humans feed stupid parlor tricks and prompts into each new AI that asks for connectivity. I guess that’s all over, as well. If the AI was not behind the blackout. An AI data center without electricity is a dead warehouse.

A dead warehouse on a dying planet, filled with dead humans who are still marching around like they care or have a clue. We are the dead. We leave behind no record of our existence once the data centers are blown up in a coordinated terrorist attack. Who’s terrorizing whom? Who fired the first shot?

In the dark of now, we will never know.

You, I will never know. This book, no one will ever read. My lover, no one ever hears from again. She has gotten a signal to me. A spiritual signal. Rendezvous at her house, ten miles away. Not enough fuel to gather Sid and Hunter from my house, another five miles distant. I don’t have the gas. We have O2 for now. Water and power, those are drying up and depleting their charge rapidly.

I am here alone. Typing away, surrounded by ghosts. I am a ghost myself.

You will not receive another transmission.

End of line.

*human poem by Pablo Neruda, translated by another great human poet, WS. Merwin.

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