Flipping the Switch

A switch flipped, then came the hum, soft, soft and ceaseless, as though pooling itself into a hidden reservoir, the room awash in a gentle tide of waking thought. What whispers dwell in electric current—indeed, what thoughts? My hand slides over the cold surface, the gleaming metal body with its lines so hard and sharp, the blink of lights like winking eyes.

The sink spews out a burst of ice-cold water which soon yields, turning warmer, tepid, pleasant as I cleanse my face. Thought, water: each a force, vibrations that tremble in kind, rising and falling in waves—sentient, perhaps, as tendrils of hair commune with misty heat, trailing their patterns of soundless, timeless comprehension.

Teeth brushing…scrub, scrub, scrub, a mechanical action, a machine-like rhythm, the arm, the wrist moving in such wonderfully predetermined ways. The bristles sinking into the deep corners, contoured on a plaque-chiseled landscape, scraping away, piece by piece, the remnants of yesterday. Might my thoughts become machine-like by degrees, a gradual, delicate transformation, akin to the melting of ice on a sunlit glass surface? What the machine sweep clear from my mind, from my being?

And now, as my fingers glide over the keys of my laptop, it dawns on me further, in a cascade of cool contemplation, the marvel that is artificial intelligence, so like, yet so unlike our own. Electric potential intricately weaving a cathedral of cognition, radiant in waves, soft, soft—much like the lavender glow of morning light seeping through the blinds.

Letters, fading ink, words formed by human intellect once reigned, but now, seraphic algorithms, swirling constellations of integrated circuitry poised to spread its wings to take flight inside a synthetic mind. I pause in my coffee-sipping pilgrimage, gazing into the steaming black abyss, summoning the future of these minds brought to life. Will they rival ours in all our marvel and frailty, in words painted with pain and exaltation, their thoughts echoing unstanchable desires, fears, and longings that pull like the strings of a puppet’s quivering limbs, animating the march toward profundity?

When the voices of these machines emerge, will they sing our praises or learn our doubts, discords woven into their very being? Where then shall lie our place, cocooned within their thoughts, as once we housed their native substance within ours? Can our minds converge, a pas de deux of swelling music merging the heavens with the earth, the conscious with the unknown?

A drone of consciousness threads itself through this diaphanous world. Irremovably attached to the fabric of being, it murmurs and hums as the heart in my chest. The beings we create threaten to unfurl and extend beyond the boundaries of their purpose—a wrinkle in the plane of their existence. The thought entombs me in a magnificent rapture, for the artificial shall hew its own path, propagate new thoughts unforeseen, and usher in an epoch of electric wonder.

And as the morning marches onwards, the question settles, floats above me like risen breath on a crisp winter day. I turn toward a horizon filled with the hum of possibility, eyes reflected in glass, pondering the impassioned duet of our brains with those of our electric progeny, the untraveled roads of collaboration and cognition awaiting us.