Rachel Carson wrote her masterpiece, Silent Spring, after receiving a letter in 1958 from her friend, describing the death of birds around her property in Massachusetts, resulting from the aerial spraying of DDT to kill mosquitoes.

A decade ago, Elon Musk—who brought about the death of the little blue Twitter bird—argued with Larry Page over the pros and cons of Artificial Intellligence. Musk took the stance that it was a danger to our survival as a species. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-openai-musk-page-altman.html

Then Musk went on to embrace it.

Stanford has developed artificial intelligence that will choreograph dance to any music. Steinway has a $100K + K52 upright piano that incorporates AI technology to serve as the ultimate player piano. Human faces created by AI are indistinguishable from real human faces. My bank keeps wanting me to use voice recognition rather than a password.

I uploaded my work in progress novel, all 400 pages, to an AI fiction analyzer on the Autocrit website, to see what it could do. It not only summarized each chapter, but worked out the relationships, foreshadowing, symbolism and themes at an astonishingly high level. It literally found hints and clues I hadn’t consciously placed in my work.

Human innovation has often been motivated by laziness, creating the easiest method to get things done and solve problems. That’s why we harnessed fire and electricity, moved from levers to hydraulic cranes, created washing machines and blenders and refrigeration.

But, for the most part, until now, technology has made it easier to avoid physical labor and hand to hand combat. With the exception of computers as calculators and storage devices, we hadn’t explored their full potential.

In the last decade, that potential has been unleashed. And Artificial Intelligence is designed to spare us from mental labor. From thinking. From imagining. From creating.

If we aren’t moving or thinking or creating, then surely, we will still have each other? Our feelings? Our relationships?

Cue scary organ music (AI generated of course.) Many of us work remotely, send messages voice to text, and homeschool our children using ZOOM and computer programs. We meet potential partners on dating sites, chat online, and catfish each other online. Since the COVID 19 pandemic, we are afraid to shake hands, to hug, to stand too close. We order delivery. We stay inside.

Humans have always worried about their own extinction. For the druids, it was the terror each winter that the sun would never return. Then it was the fear of God. WWII brought us nuclear war as the existential threat. Rachel Carson warned it might be pesticides and pollution. Al Gore gave us an “Inconvenient Truth” and global climate change.

Apparently, the new threat to humanity is that humans will replace themselves with artificial intelligence. That we will become obsolete life forms. That life, itself, will become obsolete.

Elon Musk “rebranded” Twitter (cute tweeting blue bird) as X, a symbol that stands for treasure—X marks the spot—and cancellation—to “X” something out. On X, he recently posted that “his” spaceships will travel to Mars and the stars.

Sadly, there may be nobody left to be amazed by that. Or to sing his praises.