LOIS GREENE STONE - ARTIFICIAL YET INTELLIGENT

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 YET INTELLIGENT
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​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.