AI

Authentic Imperfection

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Listen Here - Podcast Style

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Photo by Julien Tromeur on Unsplash

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Computers are useless. They can only give you answers!

Pablo Picasso

Computers.
They have always been present in my 56 years. As a kid they were big machines that swallowed cards as fast as someone could feed them. In high school arrived the Commodore 64. We worked hard to program it to do simple math. Artificial intelligence we were told. In university it was a glorified type writer to do my thesis on.

Fast forward 40 years. Wow!

Oh my they are fast! They input and process information far beyond human speed. They never need to sleep or rest. They have silicon processors as a brain. So fast! Once we ask a question the answers come back in waves of quick climax. Instant gratification.

At times, I do admit to being paralyzed by all of the information. Oh those old days of yore. The search was slow. Very slow. The sweet search in and of itself the very destination. The turtle as opposed to the hare. There were so many tributaries to discover and explore on the way to the big river. Hours upon hours spent digging up information from the crevices of books in wise old places called libraries. Libraries held the knowledge. Books were the Queen. Looking back I can profess that a lot of the learning came in the very search itself. The search lived way out beyond the boundaries of cut-and-paste. It was an art in and of itself.

Maybe creativity lives in the very question itself? Computers are making it harder to get lost on our way to anything? Those old imperfect paper maps never warned us of the traffic and lost as I often was, I was still able to find my way all over North America and Europe without a GPS. Getting lost was built into the journey and looking back led me to some of the most memorable moments.

Now there are algorithms. They decide our travel routes. They pick the best match for our next partner. They decide what we will see in our social media communities. They run our new digital libraries. Rarely, do we ever get to go on a hunch anymore. Computers are way smarter than we are. They quickly use existing content to create new content. They can even beat us at chess and write sonnets like Shakespeare. Is that intelligence? Maybe. What does intelligence even mean? It often gets confused with consciousness. Now that is a word that has many multiple meanings on its own as well. Thats a conversation for another time.

Do these machines feel?
Do they bleed with tears and dance to joy? Can they be knocked on their ass in awe?
Algorithms can only do what they are trained to do. Algorithms can only imitate human emotion. Imitation. They certainly try to remake what’s already been done from the information that they have been provided. Is that creativity? Creativity is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. Do computers truly do that? Wisdom may just be that journey from imitation to creation. Is that human only?

Have computers replaced our intuition?
Artificial intelligence is a master at imitation. Artificial intelligence is an intellectual genius. Does artificial intelligence possess intuition? Intuition is foundational to creativity and ignites the spark of innovation. It has been said that intuition is the voice of soul. Intuition guides the hand of an artist while she makes each stroke of her paintbrush. Not an algorithm. Transcendence may even be the child of creativity.

Is there a ghost in the machine?
Spirituality is being aware of being. It is a very imperfect journey. We as humans are not perfect. We are authentically imperfect. AI! Authentic imperfection. There is no algorithm for that. No imitation possible. A spiritual journey is more about transformation than information. Our imperfections correlate with that journey. It resides in us as authenticity. There is a rawness of soul that no algorithm can ever create.

To be human is to ask the unanswerable questions.
Our spiritual journey persists in asking them.

To have the answer is to have misunderstood the question.

Ernest Kurtz

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AI
Authentic Imperfection

Can machines feel?
Does the sand of the unknown
baptize the skin between their toes?
Raw and unfiltered
The blood of new meaning
born of marrow of bone
Is there an algorithm for awe?
No code can create it
No words can contain it
Do machines bleed?
Torn open by the sharp edges
of celestial transcendence
The wet kiss of authenticity
reaching out beyond the silicon
of limitations
The carnal consecration of creativity
A quivering of presence
painting a sound
Smothered in the sighs of soul
Swallowing space
like a straightjacket

© Jamie Millard

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I believe that poetry is meant to be read out loud. Reading, writing and listening to a poem is meditative and the words create an intimate encounter with the heartfulness of presence. We enter into the presence of a poem. Poetry is what poetry does to us. Poetry is a wonderful addition to a spiritual practice as it connects us to ourselves, to others, to this world and to our spirit. We are AI! Authentically imperfect. Authentic imperfection. No algorithm can imitate that. Let’s celebrate it.

Please enjoy the audio shared at the top of this article.

Lots of Love,

Jamie