Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.

​Artificial intelligence.  Intelligence is a genetic gift.  “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” ... would you want to be smart only to have it taken away?  Will stem cell from research become real-life?  Is manipulation or experimentation ‘artificial’?
 
“Alexa, turn on the light” my husband raises his voice and a cylinder in the family room reacts.  It is dusk. She answers, “okay” and a floor lamp’s bulb responds.  I ask ‘her’ about the forecast, to set a timer as I prepare to make dinner; my mate wants the score of the football game currently being played in another state. 
 
Do I want to upgrade to the new blob that can make phone calls and have video chats?  I wonder about this.  I can do Skype on my computer, and Face Time on my tablet, and the digital phone has speed-dials.  Do I want the competing device that allows multiple speakers offering surround sound, yet has the same basic function as Alexa? 
 
I read “1984" with the same attitude as comics that had decoder rings, or a camera hidden in a tie tack.  There were no tie tacks then, only tie bars, and rings were just that, rings.  The idea that someone could watch whatever I was doing was absurd; I closed my bedroom door and the outside vanished.  MY things, my room, my privacy surrounded me.  I listened to the radio’s noise with programs I wanted; my parents and sisters could do the same in their private spaces.  Television altered that as we grouped around a tiny screen seeing only ‘test patterns’ for most of the time as programs were infrequent. 
 
Recording devices were fat reels with thin magnetic tape housed in a suitcase-like box.  It could  capture songs coming from the radio, the family singing or any one of us playing the piano, the audio of a special event as a wedding.  We controlled what it did.
 
We turned on a light, the oven, raised the furnace’s temperature, used a paper dictionary, put a 78 rpm on a spindle and had brief minutes of recorded music before having to turn the shellacked disk over to the other side, dial a telephone.  How much is a recipe’s measurements if cut in half?  Calculations were done with pencil and paper.
 
“Echo, play Frank Sinatra music”, the hockey-puck sized Echo lights up when my husband enters his office room.  Her circular colors indicates her obedience.  She doesn’t require food, or sleep, or positive-strokes to get through the day.  She doesn’t need a flu shot, or shingles vaccine, or to bathe.  She’s an object.  Or is she?  We have to be careful with our words else either of the devices will ‘hear’ and start.  I’ve started a sentence with ‘the economy’ and she turns on just hearing the ‘eco’.  And when my neighbor, Alex, calls, I hesitate to say the human’s name or AI lights up happily thinking ‘she’ has been invited to talk.  Is both our ‘cylinder’ and the ‘dot’ intelligent for real?
 
Are we being secretly recorded then the information stored on a ‘cloud’ like items from our computers?  Do you think “1984" has still avoided our own homes?  Are we safe to have heated discussions about news items, politics, religion, culture or is this seemingly-silent-until-we-activate-her blob really a listening device?  Just in case we really are not alone, when we are near one of our AI machines, and are having a debate or serious conversation, we whisper.
 

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.

            Torn down?  Really!  How could that be?  The entire undergraduate dorm area, for women only, called ‘south campus’, was new when I was seventeen. My plaid skirt and white buck shoes felt ‘adult’ with the sweater-set. A beanie cap denoted I was a freshman, and I loved wearing that as my Page Boy hair swished along my shoulders when I walked.  Curfews were actually comfortable, and a penalty was inflicted if trying to enter the dorm after 10:30 at night.  We 66 girls rotated ‘desk duty’ monitoring incoming guests, where each girl signed out to be and when she returned and signed in, lateness at curfew, sorting mail, and paging a resident via intercom when any phone calls came in on either the only campus phone (in the lounge) or the only pay phone for long distance.  There were no elevators and I lived, for four years, on the fourth floor!  It was mandatory we all had dinner together, and rotated waitress duty in the dorm’s dining room.  It was the Silent Generation.  Memories are unaware of time; ‘south campus’ was razed for new buildings. 
            After turning his high school tassel, my oldest signed up to live in the co-ed dorm Quad at The University of Pennsylvania  He wanted some noise and activity and spoke of that on the 400 mile trip from our house to Philadelphia where his pre-med studies began.  After he seemed as settled in as we could provide, I went to use the bathroom in the dorm before the trip back, and a young man was at the urinal. Embarrassed, I excused myself and asked, with eyes down, where the girls’ bathroom was; he said this is it.  Co-ed meant co-ed bathrooms as well, I found out.  My mind flashed to the innocence of a panty-raid where the boys could not even enter the dorm but stood beneath windows at ‘south campus’ area waiting for girls to toss a panty or so down to the ground below.  And panties were rather ugly, in those years, yet it was the ‘idea’ of such an event that seemed shocking-fun. 
            The following year, my daughter applied to live in a special dorm of only single rooms; she had to write an essay to be considered. Her acceptance to Penn was quicker than the anxious wait for Stouffer’s (dorm name) ‘yes’.  When we moved her in, I did not check out the bathroom;  I never did comment, to my older son, the preceding year about changes in social customs at his Quad vs my social situation entering a university.  New to a generation is ‘new’ and the enforced dress code of my college undergrad time no longer existed either.  Curfews were horse-and- buggy.
            How she managed to make salads for the dorm’s eating facility, be a receptionist at a close-by hotel, volunteer at the university hospital, and make only A’s amazed me.  Did she ever study on the grass with her blue eyes competing with the sky, and her slim frame pressed against a tree?  She didn’t say. She found a job at the Jersey Shore cutting fish for summer work, and was determined to not only be Summa Cum Laude but Phi Beta Kappa as well.  That happened.  
            “Mom.  Stouffer was torn down.  Was it an old building.  How could that be?” 
            As I’d once witnessed dominoes being toppled with a precision that took a gifted person to create and also understand whatever was needed to make each fall with grace and ease, I ‘saw’ buildings in my mind also dropping.  She didn’t think her dorm nor herself old enough to be in an aging category.  Me, neither, from my own experience.
            My younger son shorted the sibling legacy and chose a school within an hour and a half drive from home.  Having season football tickets, he’s noticed changes so there’s no shock that a tangible part of his college life vanished.
            The ties to graduate school aren’t as tight, perhaps because life takes on a specific goal rather than a transition period.
            I had no answers for my daughter’s bewilderment about time and place.  I am currently noticing how alumni magazines begin the ‘notes’ section with years far past my designated Class-Of number.  When will she become aware of this herself?