The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’m usually an optimistic guy. A chucklehead, really, but I was born a white male in America, as lucky a combination in this cruel world as I can think of. You want to talk about the 1% of the world, I’m in the club. But lately I’ve been troubled, my optimism has begun to seep away and dark thoughts crowd my horizon. Maybe you know what I mean, just an inchoate Dread starting to cloud your days. Climate change, Gaza, Trump, Ukraine, Artificial Intelligence, Trump, pandemics … did I mention Trump?

The past few years, the past few decades, they’re the hottest on record. Storms are worse, hurricanes form faster, the Arctic icepack is melting, the Siberian tundra is pumping out methane stored for millions of years. Sea levels are rising, ocean temperatures are off the chart, the world is heating up, just like our politics. Meteorological immigrants will destabilize the countries they move to, borders will close, walls will be built, nationalism will make us all xenophobes and racists.

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars by sending transport spaceships each with one or two hundred pioneers. He plans to bio-engineer the next generations, humans more adaptable to life on another planet. With AI, who knows? The guy may actually pull it off. He says he wants to die on the Red Planet. I’m down with that, more room for me, more room for you. Just hope the Martians welcome immigrants.

I read today that the earth’s human population should peak at just under 11 billion of us in 50 years or so then start to decline. And that’s not counting all the Musk masses emigrating off planet. I’m not sure who does the calculations for half a century out but I won’t be here to fact check. 11 billion is a helluva lot of us, mostly crowded into coastal cities soon to be inundated by sea rise, high tides and storm surges. Kansas, get ready for urban refugees!

Today here it’s 85 degrees, the sun is warm, the mountains are hazy over a Puget Sound rippled by onshore winds, our garden is giving us dinner tonight, our insular little world seems like Paradise. What, me worry?

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.

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….

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.