“I saw it with my own eyes!” That proclamation used to serve as reliable confirmation that something a person had seen was real. But that was before the eyes were so easily deceived. That was before anyone with a computer had easy access to a tool that enabled users to dramatically manipulate photographs and videos. And voices. And…who knows what else? Artificial intelligence (AI) will—if it hasn’t already—turn us into doubters. Skeptics who do not believe their own eyes. Cynics whose uncertainty turns confidence into disbelief and trust into an obsolete idea accepted only by the deeply naive. I no longer believe the Facebook “reels” that show live-action videos of car crashes or bears saving children by snatching them out of the way of speeding 18-wheelers. AI tricks our senses into seeing or hearing imaginary sights and sounds. We may be just moments away from thinking only what AI directs us to think and experiencing only those emotions AI instructs us to feel. Embrace reality while you still have the capacity to differentiate it from fantasy…while you still can.
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After reading it, an article in the New York Times Magazine from a few days ago, When Grief Came for the Gravedigger, left me feeling unsettled. I wonder whether anyone else reading it would find it as emotionally troubling as I? I still am not quite sure why it impacted me in such an odd way.
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Blue skies, tarnished by high white clouds, may be up to no good. Gusty winds force the swaying trees outside my windows to sneer at me, as if they know something I do not. Yesterday’s rain and last night’s intermittent drizzle left the driveway and the street wet; do the trees find that amusing? Sometimes, the forest makes me feel out of place; as if miles and miles of isolation in a desolate desert landscape might be more to my liking. But that, too, might quickly seem foreign and unfriendly to me. So would a mountainous vista or a place where the sea intersects with cliffs. Something is missing, no matter where I go and regardless of where I imagine I could be. Is it the environment, or is it me? If I could visit places without taking the baggage of myself with me, I might find the answer. Or I might find that answers do not emerge in response to questions; they struggle to find a suitably empty place that’s aching to be filled with a companion to emptiness, whatever that is.
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A grey film has silently hidden the blue skies, changing the fundamental character 0f the day. If noise could be muffled the way sunlight can be dimmed, I would be sitting here at my desk, enjoying the peace and tranquility of silence. The sky is reading those words…it is responding with flashes of grey and blue changing places; simultaneously, I watch and listen as the wind howls in brief fits of angst and anger and bitterness.
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If I could erase the past and the present for just a while…a week or a month, perhaps…and then return to move gradually into the future, I would know more than I know today. Erasing experiences might have the effect of deconstructing everything; allowing the construction of a different present, built on an entirely new foundation.
