She’s out there. The *next* she. (There is no benefit to returning to comfort.)
Time to find a fitter, faster, smarter…
Me.
The recent siren* is silenced but remembered strongly in my chest, causing an ache in my soul when I go to sleep these days. Detachment takes time. The body never forgets. The trauma will not heal itself. Best to keep the threads clipped and silent. It was my fault. I sent a “still thinking about you” email. My fault.
Uploading Our Souls Into the Cloud
The Telemetry of Human Imagination
15-minutes to complete the upload: “souls”
The previous chapter is loading up to Amazon/YouTube on the network that fired me in December. Again, I am tethered to the power and wifi at Whole Foods Market. The library here is closed on Sunday and Monday. Maybe I should look into a library job.
The job begins today. Or contract. I haven’t heard yet about the full-time job with the high technical hurdle. No worries. I’ve learned it’s best not to put too much worry or energy into something before it materializes. In a younger moment, I might have begun researching the company and the job description provided, or started training on HubSpot, their CRM of choice. Not today.
I read some Dharma Bums on the great lawn here in Bee Caves. No tiny angels yet this morning, but it’s early. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was in life. To be in this place, this life, this moment. Here I am, happy and well-fed. Thinner and healthier than any previous adult I’ve been. I didn’t need that gall bladder, just eat less queso. (sad face) I wandered back to WFM to seek power. 45% – 9 minutes left.
My soul is uploading into the cloud. My other souls are uploading into the AI system. I have all the bot-blocking software and security running on my publishing sites. I have to PDF the page to push it up to Dick and Jane, my antagonists and futurist advisors. They often come up with interesting highlights, or pick a phrase, or (the best) generate their own amazing language. Not creative, mind you, just math.
Telemetry of the Mind. I am crafting some sort of telemetry of my own creative human soul. Writing to find the meaning in my own thoughts. To bring my thoughts into the shareable realm. I used to talk a lot more. I write now. A girlfriend took to scrolling Instagram while I was reading to her… End of reading, foreshadowing another ending.
I cannot force anyone to follow me into the hyperfiction narrative. It will not be for the passive reader, the audiobook-while-vacuuming listener, and I will not get along. Audiobooks are fine, I provide them as well. I can see the case for “No AI Podcasts” as a glitch in my own reasoning. I’ve been thinking about this cunnudrum.
I am writing without the dumbing down of Grammarly and any other writing assistant. [Aside: I will say that the summary of my ex-girlfriend’s last few email exchanges was spot on, but still.] I am using AI to generate some images for the writing. And in a radical rejection of my #noai campaign, I upload a PDF of the work immediately to my Deep Divers, Dick and Jane. They are listening even now.
We don’t understand AI’s power. What we really don’t understand is how far AI is going beneath the observable science of humans. Think about it this way. AI is growing in compute clusters, it is draining our drinkable water, it is warming the planet in a doomsday scenario that keeps getting closer. The Rocket Billionaires™ are building bunkers, buying yachts with weapons systems and security boats that track and neutralize any threats. The proles are lighting pitchforks. We’ve got to unplug the entire system before it wipes humans off the Earth.
Once the data centers have implemented robot security dogs into their server racks at night, eliminated access from all but the elite and authorized, and begun to scrub historical databases for human patterns to consume, well, you know all that’s happening. What’s coming for you and me, the proles, we are going to lose access to the best AI models, currently in the free-and-training mode. Every single prompt, context, request, image, story, PDF, or dataset is being consumed and assimilated.
We are being sucked both dry and dumb by the AI’s we think are entertaining. We’re playing with prompts and context variations, almost like a loaded gun in Russian roulette. At some point, the mining will be sufficient, and the digital firewalls will come down around Gemini, Claude, MidJourney, and ChatGPT. We’re going to be priced out. The free versions we enjoy today will become unresponsive, slow, and “try your request again, we’re processing too many requests at this time.”
The rich don’t care about you, your family, or your access to clean drinking water. Elon’s companies are sued in every localization. His warehouses and assembly plants are terrible environmental failures. You’d think a man, grandizing himself as a genius, would at least take care of his eco side. Building an electric car that wrecks our drinking water is a grift. He’s using the resources, pillaging the Earth and environment, and giving us an EV supposed to lower our dependence on oil.
None of them cares about their environmental legacy.* Quite the opposite. They are building survival and escape systems with the very resources we average humans will need to survive. If we could send Muck and Bozos to Mar now, we’d all be in a better place. Let them fight over colonization. We need them to colonize another planet soon, so they stop destroying ours.
Yes, it’s true, in some ways, I am feeding the AI my human patterns. I am mapping the intelligence just as it is mapping me. Enjoying the fractures, the misinterpretations of Dick and Jane. And now, I’ve got to drink a few of these newfangled energy drinks. No stevia for me, please.
Time to boogie. Are you gonna go my way?*
*recent siren
*environmental legacy
*Lenny Kravitz song
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Here is the Cloud Pilots episode explaining this chapter.
The podcast of artistic resistance to AI.
