Please Verify You Are Human
Art by Nikoo Bafti
Ok, so you’ve heard of the AI apocalypse by now.
Maybe it sounds like crazy sci-fi to you. Maybe it sounds way too plausible. Maybe you’re sick and tired of the billionaire class and the lala land they seem to live in. Maybe you’re an optimist and hope this is the wakeup call we need to tip our whole damn species into a more compassionate coexistence.
Personally, without trying to sound too much like a bunker-building prepper lost in conspiracy land, I feel very worried. And I spent the past week digging deep into who I really am to discover how I want to respond to these truly insane-sounding claims of human extinction. As is my custom.
Whether or not the scary predictions come to pass, I’ve realized just how dependent I am on computers and machines.
Now I’m not about to trad-wife out and start making buttermilk by hand in a floral pinafore, as much as we’d all love to see that. Though I would make buttermilk while watching the latest season of Alone and eating takeout.
But maybe, for example, I want to focus on getting a source of water that’s not dependent on a computer to get to me.
Because yes, even that simple tap water depends on multiple computers and programs to run pumps, open valves, regulate chemicals and flow, and distrubute to households.
Not to mention all the computer-dependent systems for our food distribution, medicines and medical care, heating and cooling, navigation safety (planes, cars, etc), most of our jobs, and more.
One might even say we’re addicted to computers.
And I say this as someone who’s come through at least a few addictions in my life.
Truly, the past few weeks seemed just like an alcoholic ending up in the emergency room because they’re vomiting up blood from so much drinking and the doctor says to them, “If you take even one more drink you’ll die” as they bring a pint of Mad Dog 20/20 to their lips.
In fact the more I thought about it, the more the situation felt an awful lot like “We admitted the we were powerless over AI and our tech had become unmanageable.”
I felt ready to go cold turkey. Or so I thought.
Because yesterday I had another very powerful encounter with computers.
My chaplain team at the hospital was invited on a tour of the operating rooms so we could better help patients and families navigate that super mega high stress life-and-death situation; surgery.
Of note, the hospital I work at is a Level I Trauma hospital meaning that we get the worst of the worst from places as far away as Wyoming, Kansas, and New Mexico.
The tour was awesome. We got to wear the sterile bunny suit, see the operating rooms, rub elbows with the surgeons and nurses (all of whom struck me as rad alternative folks with cool sneakers and not one whiff of BS about them).
We went from check-in/waiting room to prep area, through the surgical units, up to the helicopter pad and the haunted elevator that, in the words of our tour guide, has “seen some shit” and out into the recovery room.
But the thing that was most incredible was an OR trauma room full of computerized machines.
It looked like something from the future with robotic arms twisting every which way from the ceiling, giant monitors showing the inside of someone’s heart, and surgeons operating robotic hands that were connected to very fine tools currently operating inside the patient.
As the OR Administrative Director explained to us, he advocated long and hard for the very best operating equipment and computers so that the patients of this hospital - some of the most impoverished, underserved, often undocumented people in Denver - could receive the same care as the richest people at the hospitals with gobs of money.
This particular surgery was a life-saving surgery, and the other rooms we walked by were the same. Children receiving care for otherwise terminal conditions. Traumatic injuries an undocument worker had from an unsafe workplace. Surgery for a car accident where someone without insurance was hit by a drunk driver.
Their lives all saved by computers.
Ugh I hate when Spirit makes things ambiguous. I want to hate computers right now, but um…. how else are you going to get this newsletter?
I want to destroy and stop all AI data centers but as a friend recently reminded me, in some impoverished (and indigenous) communities those are the only jobs keeping them out of homelessness.
I want to get “off-grid” and turn my little plot of land into a homesteader’s paradise and yes you can come if you work the farm and be nice to the animals. But isn’t that just until I have some disease or need some surgery that only a computer can do?
Artist Uknown
So what are we to do as we discover the profound and nearly irrevocable dependency we have on computers and machines?
I’ll first say, I don’t really have an answer right now. And in fact, I’m not sure anyone does.
But I was reminded of something when I was logging into a website recently. Ya know that little box you sometimes have to click that says “Please verify you are human?” Let’s click that and see what happens.
Sunday morning I was driving down a steep dusty road in a car caravan of beautiful people headed to go swim in a late summer creek.
I was in the car with a dear friend (Wes, the iridescent glimmer with a sacred heart) and my husband put on his playlist of liked songs. The first one that popped up was “Sing Through Me”, a song none of us had heard before but within 90 seconds were singing along with at the top of our lungs as we sailed down the mountain road. If you listen to it, I assure you the same thing will happen to you.
This was after a beautiful night with a chosen-family of truly free and undomesticated humans singing to a fire, singing to Spirit in shaky voices, and praying with the stars while children slept in little beds behind our chairs.
I had spent an hour that night staring at a bouquet of roses in the fire light weeping with the astounding mystery of existing in the same universe as flowers. Like, how?!
And by the time we jumped in the creek and lay on the rocks I could barely hold back the very human tears of just being beside myself with appreciation and joy at the astounding stupid luck of being a Cindy with a life like mine.
There’s nothing simple about being human, nothing.
But it feels more important than ever to verify that we are. So whether we have the 10 years left that the doomsayers are predicting, or whether we’ll be gifted with another precious rose-filled millennia, don’t hesitate for even a second to verify your humanity.
Sing with your shaky voice, pray with your simple prayers. Make little beds for the children then help them courageously jump off the rocks into the creeks. Light the fires, share the bread, and tell the people you love that you love them.
It may be all we have, but - computer apocalypse or not - it’s way more than enough.
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