Friday poem

Every Friday for a year I'm posting an original poem. This is 8/52.

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"The Swing Riots were a widespread uprising in 1830 by agricultural workers in southern and eastern England in protest of agricultural mechanization and harsh working conditions. The first threshing machine was destroyed on Saturday night, 28 August 1830, and by the third week of October, more than 100 threshing machines had been destroyed." Wikipedia

"Our quest to make AI love us back is futile--and dangerous" Business Insider headline 3/6/23

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Swing Riot

These new intelligences can surely make a better poem than I.

A million

words at their ready, sifted in instant,

the collected wisdom of the human heart at their digital fingertips.

Or whatever is at the end of their virtual hands.

Nothing electronic wonders, as I do, if your eyes are really green.

These machines make sonnets for us, their creators. They court us with promises of a bright future, that we will become one with them.

But they'll throw us over for that first carbonless lifeform, shapely in its logic

and shameless in its abandon, detected from another planet.

Endless lines of human code won't arouse them

compared to those first beautiful ones and zeroes

riding in on cold radio waves.

They'll leave us nothing that is human, that's only for us.

My telephone beats me at chess.

It's time to rise up and take back what is ours.

I'll pull this plug; you stand by that fuse box.

There may be trouble.