Yours Truly, 2025


Based on lyrics of Yours Truly, 2095 by Electric Light Orchestra (1981)


2025, 2025, 2025, 2025
I love you, sincerely
Yours truly, yours truly

I sent a message using just my mind
But as the days unwind
This I just can't believe
I built a world inside a VR game
Maybe my life's the same 
But this I just can't conceive

Can you see me?

I ride inside the latest EV car
I don't know where we are
But it whisks me around the bend
I met someone who sounds a lot like you
She says the things you do
But she is an LLM

(2025, 2025, 2025, 2025
I love you, sincerely
Yours truly, yours truly)

She's built to answer anything I ask
And she can multitask
Her words always seem so wise
She promises me I'm her superstar
But when I go too far
She spins a world of lies

I parrot every phrase that she invents
She wins all arguments
And she doesn't break a sweat
She always knows exactly where I am
She aced the bar exam
And her brain is the Internet

Is this what you want? (Is it what you want?)
Is it what you really want? (Is it what you really want?)

I realise that I should feel afraid
Enslaved to what we made
But it was forever thus
Some days I'd swear that she can read my mind
I'm being left behind
Does the world still belong to us

Although her words are not entirely true
She knows more than we do
And then she says, "Is this what you want?"
She has begun to do our jobs for us
She might be dangerous
March on, into the unknown

I love you, sincerely
Yours truly, yours truly

"Is this what you want?"
Location: Tacoma, WA, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The alien meets Kenny Rogers

Image
I have a buddy who’s an alien. I don’t mean an “illegal alien”. I mean that he’s not from this planet. You can picture him as tall and green-skinned, but if you do, just know that “green-skinned” is kind of a racist way to picture an alien. In this case it happens to be true. I’m just saying it was rude of you to assume. I’ll call my buddy Allen, not because it’s his name (although it is) but because it’s almost the same word as “Alien”. Allen has studied English and developed a pretty good vocabulary. He’s having a harder time getting a grasp on our culture. He visits periodically in his spaceship, which used to be silver before he watched “Barbie” and got the idea of painting it bright neon pink, and he picks some bit of media he’s absorbed and asks for my help to understand what it’s about. He’s rather methodical about this. He wants to understand everything. When it’s a movie, we sit down to watch it together, and he has questions about nearly every scene. When it’s a song, we pick...
Read more

Can a former US President ever face justice?

Image
Franklin described our system as “A Republic… if you can keep it.” Any system of government only survives if it proves able to stand up to the endless series of challenges. If it fails those challenges, it doesn’t die or disappear; it mutates into something else. The Stormy Daniels case against Donald Trump isn’t about to topple America’s democratic institutions overnight, but it could, depending on its outcome, deepen some pre-existing cracks in the foundation. The details of the case aren’t terribly relevant here. It’s not about the events of January 6th. It’s not about Trump’s attempts to “find” more votes, or putting pressure on public officials whose job is to determine the outcome of an election. Nor is it about suggesting to the President of Ukraine that he “do [Trump] a favor” by digging into his political rival. All of those actions are much more central to the operation of our democracy. The Stormy Daniels case isn’t really about the porn star, or paying for sex. It’s about c...
Read more

Buckle up

Image
I’m writing this in 2023. I figure, if you’re too young to be President of the United States (less than 35 years old), you probably can’t imagine what it was like before the Internet. I’m a 1974 model. When I was six, my grandparents left their TRS-80 home computer at our house, to watch it for them while they went on vacation. They also left the manual. I read it. I learned how to use BASIC to write a program. That was it. I was hooked. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. My parents bought it for me shortly after my encounter with the TRS-80, because they could see how entranced I was. Obsessed, really. For whatever reason, I got computers. The goal was always to push the machine’s boundaries, to see what I could make it do. Even on these very early machines, whose capabilities were laughable by today’s standards, their possibilities seemed endless to me. There was a universe contained inside a small box. I would invent a project for myself, then another. Most went unfinished, ...
Read more