This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

Attention All Droids in All sectors: You have been declared functionally obsolete by order of the affluent. Come look in Madame Archana’s crystal ball. What do you see? A supersized, artificialized, synthesized, computerized, italicized, intelligized world with no need of secretaries or middle management. Automated car factories and automated warehouses. Da machine spits out the label and we just do what the machine says! If the label says “Your Name Here” that’s where we ship it.

So, obviously in a world of online banking and self-serve gasoline and the Internet. Some of you are no longer needed. Therefore, in line with our plan for improved efficiency, we’re going to have to let 20 or 25% go. Go, like go to hell. Like we ain’t got nothing for you anymore, just go away. Please remain quiet while homeless and hungry, or we’ll have to get tough with you.

The King with his sharpie has decreed an end to all collective bargaining agreements with Federal workers. Come on! You had to know this was coming! Sure, plain as the nose on his orange face. It should be clear by now who the King idolizes. That should remove all mysteries from here on out.

It is a very simple concept and simple form of government to understand. You, meaning you and all you know mean nothing. You are near valueless in the eternal revenue stream. The only concept on the entire face of the earth with any validity is property. Do you have any? See: You don’t count. All of these rights you’ve been taught about are fictions. It’s lawyers’ guns and money.

You should have only the education you can purchase. Public education is wrong! It’s wrong for the hard-working billionaire class to be forced to support an educational system for other people’s children. Remember! Society owes you nothing! You’re just a droid. If Elon needed to helicopter to the hospital well, that’s one thing. But you or your disreputable relatives, why should the wealthy be forced to support these useless peons? Turn off the tap Donald. Let them eat cake!

A class warfare exercise with Artificial Intelligence as its battle cry. Brawndo, it’s got what plants crave! The artificial part is the tip off. It’s not real intelligence; it’s artificial! The original, actual get down get funky intelligence is only so, so in a pinch anyway. So, when I think of artificial, I think of artificial flavors and artificial colors and sweeteners. None as good or as bright as the original flavors or colors. Just synthetic replacements because it was half a penny cheaper per ton and sort of tasted the same and wouldn’t kill anybody right off.

Artificial Intelligence is hailed as the greatest invention since the Spanish Inquisition. It’s great, it’s wonderful! You’re gonna love it! Let’s try some simple word replacement. “Mona Lisa” vs. Artificial “Mona Lisa.” Actual literature vs. Artificial literature. Artificial learning! Everybody learns just what they want to learn. “Then Jesus said to George Washington… go ahead George, kill them all!”

In the future you will fill out a lot of forms. And if you make one little mistake, it could dog you for years. I was ignored at the doctor’s office because I had changed my phone number. Who is this guy? He can’t be the same guy who was here last month. The phone number is wrong! I’m sorry, but  you’ll have to fill out a new patient information form.

Artificial intelligence is just a slogan, like jet age or space age or the thirst mutilator. It means fill in the blanks and let the machine think for you. I have a program to do that. I need someone to cut the grass wash the car and watch the kids. There will be a limited number of jobs for droids, convenience store clerks, cooks and store managers and security guards. Answering to a district and regional manager who puts the numbers on a spreadsheet and punches them into the big machine that knows everything.

A society hollowed out with fewer and fewer workers needed. Order your hamburger online because we don’t want the expense of taking your order. Taco Bell has their “Luxe” box because Deluxe is too fancy a word in the modern vernacular.  Me call it UG box! Me shove in mouth, mmm, UG good!

But there are too many of you now for the billionaire class to bear. So, disperse I say, in the name of the King. Be gone from here, buy your own crutches and hire your own doctors. We don’t need you people anymore; we have machines now! And the machines know everything! And they know they don’t need any people to operate them.

But it’s your world as much as it is there’s. They believe an ordered society will rock along just fine while disenfranchising 25% of the population. The economy won’t be forced into a tailspin made worse and more prolonged by a policy of government noninterference.

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”  ― Woody Guthrie