Title: Harping over Spiritual Robots

By GREENVANHOLZER

Last potato moon harvest, I conjured up the term “Spiritual Robots” while searching artwork on the computer. While sixteen Google images appeared -twelve were of people attending artifi-cial intelligence symposiums. The first thing that stood out in the pictures was that most of the participants were taking it sitting down.
Robots are increasingly becoming humanlike as people get rigid. Seems cute in an Oz’s Tin man way, but the twain shall meet someday –perhaps sooner than you imagine.
Actually, we’re already overlapping; No eye contact sealed in on “freeways”. Can’t get a person on the phone for venting com-plaints? That’s an old problem. Now it’s depersonalized elec-tronic-chatter between cubed drones in the same room. -way off the earth, rocking in windowless buildings.
Calculating kids seldom step out of cybercaves; for fear that, a yellowcake flake of acid snow, from the falling skies will rust their tongues. When they do, they plug in as Pod people, to feed off music of irregular beats with strangers on subways –rather than having actual conversations.
These days just about every body part is replaceable. Even the Vice President has artificial heart valves. Machines could be used to help us make wise decisions, but many of us let them decide. Swirling slots in Vegas, hypnotize many that would be better off watching whirling dervishes. With new money rushing through their veins, gas station lottery winners declare, “I always knew I was going to hit the number!” While millions with similar wishes become numb zombies as their fortunes spiral downward.
Nevertheless, sophisticated machines guide us everywhere – buzzing through water, snow and air. The list of things they can’t do ever shrinks. Artificial systems help doctors diagnose medical concerns. You can play twenty questions over the Internet in intel-ligence experiments. Systems learn from us in vast ways as we feed them more information.
Robots powered by speech recognition software, recognize when humans are happy or sad and eerily “pretend to care”, with corresponding facial expressions, helping even people labeled autistic become comfortable. Robots can assess hostage situations and disarm bombs while delivering a pizza. However, at what point will the gollem spirits began running a new lottery of whom gets to live or die?

“Google News” claims that their information results are “com-piled solely by computer algorithms”. Then who designed those algorithms? Have they been in existence since time immemorial? And do they fine-tune themselves? At night does a robot mouse dust and vacuum the nano-nuts and bolts of the Googleplex termi-nals into absolute purity? I’m having a nightmare that it’s termi-nally daytime for robots. Perhaps if I breathe deep with my own lungs and count five, my psychotic reaction will taper off.
Doctors in our Country have systematically institutionalized thousands of patients into mental hospitals than overmedicated them into robotic states for stinking profit. More wars and jails are planned, but with less real rehabilitation opportunities –creating millions of outcasts. These dispossessed could become essential slave labor backup forces in the event the next lines of senseless Iron-man fighters develop glitches. Increased frivolous laws with stricter enforcement and draconian sentences successfully lobbied for, translate into job security for the machine-like penal systems.
Instead of locking prisoners away into subhuman states at record levels, ideal communities could preemptively strike at root causes of “waywardness” by caring more about schools. Funds not invested in prisons could better broaden “homeland security” by being spent on systems already proven to help student achieve-ment.
And shouldn’t we use caution while screening our children over normal difficulties faced growing out of the age of innocence -before medicating them into something they are not? Who screens the screeners? Vacuous steel-hearted leaders fiddling with low approval ratings? Perhaps a savant metallically inoculated into mathematical beauty could lend the social engineers some thoughts on what’s worth tracking.
A lot of the things that we now take for granted would not exist at all, had past Einstein’s and Edison’s been “fixed” at their first sign of boredom in the classroom. Healthy daydreamers of today like Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who also developed the heart-stent keeping VP Cheney alive need not be labeled ADHD and force-fed questionable pills, when they’ve tapped into better life-beats.

Though I stick in this morass of the alienation behind mecha-nization’s takeover of society, I would like to thank Googles ro-bots for helping me pull out this article. I have heard they have a cousin that likes beer! He is probably the most humanlike robot yet. One who really seeks to understand mankind. Next time he flies in for the Wagon Days non-motorized parade, I would like to repay him with some special input. Over ales poured out in inex-act measurements, we’ll watch some sports together. There I will explain why his kind will have the most difficulty replacing our athletes and artists. Then my smart-pill friends will insist that we ape-Evolvers teach our Trans-human palsey-walsey to sing with us in perfect harmony. Yes, someday we’ll make beautiful music together.
In this way, the robot will quickly delve into the deepest di-mensions of the soul. Because you see the way things have been heading -with my fancy free speech, we’ll be singing the most heart-touching songs chorded together on a chain gang.
Great and Powerful Feds will lift the curtain, allowing this mechanism into designated wilderness areas. There he’ll joyfully hold a bucket for me to mop machine-erred-plutonium-waste off previously pristine primitive area foliage. While metalbreath and me are reprogrammed, I promise we won’t give any lip, if our captor can find him self, human enough to conjure up some Potato hooch nightcaps -to cool our tops while cloistered in a Modern Minidoka “Manage-mental” camp.