Larry Kilham Blog |
These poems bring us hope during troubled times through our connection with nature. Chapters include poems on dreams, understanding ourselves, nature, robots and us, and living in the time of covid. There is also a special chapter of legends told by poetic verse.
"Dreams" is the opening poem: From your pillow through your window you travel to your land of dreams. Its special places only you know - their vistas bathed in sunny gleams. Flowers carpet the valley, birds chirp from the trees. From them you absorb energy while you float in the breeze. Now put structure in your vision to give your life new meaning, and you can do with what you’re given with a joyous and prideful feeling. (c) 2021 Larry Kilham See the robots on yonder hill –
they’re not dining on chlorophyll. Their panels soak up the sun so from batteries they can run. They await our all-seeing guidance to apply their focused intelligence. Then the robots harvest the crop picking and packaging until they drop. Some say the robots will rebel and conspire to attack us with computer-driven ire but I think they will await our orders as their leaders, mechanics, and coders. (c) 2020 Larry Kilham There's been a lot of talk about human missions to Mars. I have a different perspective as you can see below. THE ROBOT AND THE UNICORN
The robot wandered our desert preparing for the exploration of Mars. The creatures chirped and yowled “Who is snooping in this paradise of ours?” They agreed that wily coyote should talk to this blinky thing. He asked, “Are you smoking peyote or are you under alien programming?” The chastened robot turned to go when a galloping creature with a spiral horn pulled up in a cloud of dust and proclaimed, “Yes, I am a unicorn!” The unicorn said to the robot, “Believe in me and I’ll believe in you.” The robot blinked and clinked and replied, “Fine, let me tell you what is new.” “I’ll search for ways to live on the barren plains of Mars and someday I will travel to the planets of the neighboring stars.” The unicorn spoke confidentially, “Everyone loves me so we should travel together, wouldn’t you agree?” “What will you do?” the robot asked. “We must stay alive. With no food on board, how will you survive?” The unicorn smiled and said, “I do PR, my man! I can report from the boring mission stories of mystery and charm. From you the logician and me the magician.” “We unicorns absorb energy from the sun or from whatever star is near like you do from your solar panels so come on, let’s get in gear.” Now outer space is a lonely place and a stranger sight you might never see - the robot and the unicorn exploring a dead Martian sea. They set up their antenna and broadcast to Mother Earth: “Your lights are glowing in deep dark space. The source of all hope and progress is Earth and the human race.” © 2019 Larry Kilham I saw a robot in the garden today.
It asked me to come and play. But I thought that was a ruse because its battery needed juice. So I asked, Do the birds need feed or is there anything else they need? And it replied, No, just bring the charger so I can stay here longer. And I asked, What about the plants and flowers? and it replied, I’ve been weeding those for many hours. I pressed on, What about the beans and tomatoes corn, squash, and potatoes? Then the robot made bold to say, Come to the garden and bring a sack and I’ll show you how to harvest the veggies and bring them back! (c) Larry Kilham 2019 Honeybees, which are of the greatest commercial interest, pollinate about a third of what we eat, including fruits, nuts and vegetables. Thirty-one percent of US bee colonies were lost in the winter of 2013 alone. Then, as the future of the honeybees seems dire indeed, the cavalry of the robots rushes to the rescue of the flowering plants and trees. Although they are not yet deployed into the waiting blossoms, they already have a name: robobees. The current leader in robobees technology is a team at Harvard University. In May 2013, their School of Engineering and Applied Sciences announced that an experimental prototype of the robobee made its first controlled flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it powered upward, hovered on its delicate flapping wings, and flew away. Writing in the Scientific American, the team leaders said, “In 2009 the three of us began to seriously consider what it would take to create a robotic bee colony. We wondered if mechanical bees could replicate not just an individual’s behavior but the unique behavior that emerges out of interactions among thousands of bees. We have now created the first RoboBees—flying bee-size robots—and are working on methods to make thousands of them cooperate like a real hive.” A major engineering breakthrough was finding a way to power the high speed flapping of the 3 cm wings. The solution was piezoelectric effect actuators. Electric fields applied to tiny ceramic strips cause them to flap the bee’s wings at 120 times per second. Read more at the Winter of the Genomes website. It can be ordered on Amazon. Let us dispel the startling statements and popular movie themes telling us that artificial intelligence will greatly exceed human intelligence in just a few decades. There have been startling statements and popular movies telling us that artificial intelligence will greatly exceed human intelligence in just a few decades. There may be little doubt that this will be the case for applications mostly requiring massive and repetitive computing, but is not so certain for projects requiring significant imagination and creativity. In any case, it is highly unlikely that androids will be running around conquering the world.
AI Computers can access very large databases. They can be used in detailed multidimensional design. They can manage vast projects. There is talk of computer-like nanorobots that can circulate around in your body. There are even computer programs to invent new devices. However, as far as I am aware, no computer independently came up with the general theory of relativity. Timothy Lee summarized the AI and robots limitations nicely in his story in Vox. See the the story here. I write about this in detail in my new book,Winter of the Genomes available at Amazon. The problem is not the threat of AI, despite the stellar thinkers who have said so. The problem is we the people who are increasingly leaving our thinking to our social media groups and the Internet. AI will not consciously take over. People will give in. See Winter of the Genomes. Suppose you lived a distant time from now, and you overheard the following exchange between a woman and a robot:
She: “I am the smartest. I went to the university. I am connected. I am the key to success around here.” Robot: “Yes, but you and your kind need to eat and drink, to consume things like clothes, and to occupy large air conditioned spaces. You are too demanding and too expensive to continue living here.” It will be a long time before robots will be able to make a value judgment like this, but this comparison is increasingly going to happen. Robots do not feel better if something or someone is doing their work for them. They just exist for the moment with no memory of the past or vision of the future. Since robots work much more cheaply and efficiently than humans, we will hardly resist assigning them to more and more of our daily tasks from vacuuming the floors to walking the dog. The whole thing crystallized in my mind when I was in a remote village in Myanmar, or Burma, of all places. Through an interpreter, I asked a schoolteacher what she thought of robots (I never miss an opportunity to do book research!). She said, according to my notes, “The machines will take over a few things, then more things, until all you have to do is watch television. After many years, people will lose arms and legs for lack of use. You will turn into potatoes.” That’s the wisdom of a simple, village woman. It’s worth thinking about. From the new book just published, Winter of the Genomes. Could robots be the fourth great socioeconomic revolution in modern American Life? First, automobiles replaced horses, enabling suburbia. Then along came television which brought the world into our living room. What sneaked up later was television's child, the video camera, which became the all-seeing eye, following us everywhere. Then there were smartphones which serve as our portal to the Web and to our friends.
If we combine the mechanical genius of the automobile with the sentience of television and the connectedness provided by the smartphone, we find ourselves among the robots. They can be alive enough so we can love them, and they can revolutionize our economy. Like cars, television and smartphones, mass adoption of robots will depend on mass production to reduce their cost, and people-oriented packaging so that they can be be as attractive and simple to operate as smartphones. See more in my new book, Winter of the Genomes which can be purchased at Amazon. |