and the ice paths are clearing. Fixed the broken spoke on my bike and I’ve been riding out to all spokes of the city, trying to shed a few kilos, jolt the neural pathways back into life. Reading an hour a day the lines lead me to other writers, make me reassess old musings. I’m drawn to what’s local more than ever, to hopes and caring, the secret cache of dreams and memory we all mine. I’m drawn to what’s human, away from the binary drone. Unimpressed by the propaganda around machine intelligence I begin to see it as nothing more than intensive computing, a joyless and skewed simulacrum on the back of extraordinary funding that can never evolve to any human level smarts. Because human smarts is shaped and marshalled by all the immeasurable sensory touches and events that have to be lived, by time and all the tides of emotion and longing. And by sleep. In sleep we take Nyx’s hand and wander out into the lands of night, breathe deep on all that shared memory banked across the millennia. Machines are boxes of nuts and bolts – no matter how quickly they can compute – there’s no spark of life in them. They’ve no skin in the game. My tech fear abates a little, and the more I turn the pages.
