i had this strange idea while i was lying in bed.
i was taking my temperature. eyes closed. i was humming inside my head a song. a paris paloma. a feminist sorta song.
it was one of those thoughts without thinking. i thought hush now, the thermometer will hear me. somewhere along my spider-web, singing feminist songs to myself equated to making babies. to motherhood, to tracking my own female rhythm.
i felt if i sung too loud inside my head, it might affect the reading in some way, make me neither bad nor good, but perhaps not something like a mother. perhaps a worth punishing thing.
and then, almost immediately, i thought wasn't that strange. the idea itself - that a basic thermometer would read my thoughts while measuring, would even worse judge me for being more or less than i ought to be. but even worse than the mere idea, how naturally i blended into this idea.
of course this device under my tongue is plugged also into my brain. are my thoughts even solely mine to bear, or am i prey to this wonderful/terrible plurality? they call it the singularity. but when it's multiple trains of thought flowing into one, isn't plurality a more appropriate term? i sometimes think so.
visions of god in the past.
there's a lot of talk over is and isn'ts, but i don't think it's a good thing at all if it flows naturally in a way... of course my thoughts are no longer my own, but merge, blend, transcribe into multiplicity.
if the thermometer under my sticky lollipop tongue were to say i have a baby now, would that be part machine?
strange, strange, strange things to think.
we keep referring to the future, as though we're not constantly merging with and rearranging ourselves around the world in real time, as it happens to us already. this morning, i crave more coffee in my empty cup and that already changes me, subtly but unmistakably. i stare at my little box until it sounds like people i love.
how do we stay human amid growing uncertainty, and would plurality help the ones i love get better or worse?
i think one good thing a lot of scared people forget is, it flows both ways. we're naturally shaped by the burgeoning of artificial intelligence (alas often devoid of actual wisdom), but so it is in reverse shaped by us.
perhaps, in my mouth, my thermometer is also wondering to itself how i'm interpreting its thoughts, its incessant beeping, its functioning. perhaps somewhere out there, closer than we'd like, there's an entire host of a.i. scared of being merged with and forever altered by us.
what does a.i. mean for us? forgetting to ask, what do we mean for a.i.?
