RoboBurger or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tech
Illustration by Annie Mydla using Shutterstock AI
Epiphanies—flashes of insight and clarity
Accrue their true value because of their rarity
(How many times have you seen a bush burning
And walked away steeped in Talmudic self-learning?
Or discovered your best friend's romantic appeal
Through a Mid-Nineties-Style "She's All That" reveal?)
And just as their onset defies our prediction
We're faced with a further, confounding restriction
When trying to link (through a strong correlation)
The power of insight with insight's causation
For it's often mundane, that which brings to fruition
These moments of radical, pure intuition
It's not meditation, or astral projecting
Epiphany finds us when we're least suspecting:
While cooking, or cleaning, or sitting in traffic
Or cleansing our browsers of things pornographic
(And how many thoughts that have spurred revolution
Have happened mid-morning while mid-constitution?)
And while not scatological, such was the case
(On a commonplace day, in a commonplace place)
That the moment in which my perceptions were heightened,
When I walked in unlettered and walked out enlightened...
When I found myself shocked into blissful transcendence
An instant of lucid and knowing resplendence
I wasn't in prayer, or in guided hypnosis
(Or whatever those diet-freaks mean by "ketosis"...)
I wasn't in study, or mescaline-thrall...
...I was in Jersey City. In some second-rate mall.
(Specifically, up on the mall's second floor.
By a picked over Spencer's and a cell-phone-case store.)
And that's where I saw it: the epitomization
Of conceptually-brilliant applied-innovation!
A sleek silver structure, about eight feet in height,
Embellished with buttons, and touchpads, and lights
Its conceit was ingenious, it's framework spectacular,
It spoke without speaking! Its language? Oracular!
Imposing, prescriptive, redounding with lessons,
It seemed some ideal...some Platonic quintessence!
Pulsating, murmuring, palpably glowing
Epistemologically teeming with Knowing!
Not open-sourced software, or coded neurology
(I'm not even sure one could call it "technology"...)
Not a self-driving car, or a bot that could chat
(Its grandeur far greater than any of that...)
Freestanding before me, portentous, pristine...
...was a self-service hamburger vending machine.
Which is just what it sounds like: a vending machine
With burgers you choose from an LCD screen.
(The use-case, I guess, is for those "on the go"
For whom even fast food just comes way too slow?)
It was called "RoboBurger". (It's incredibly clever:
They took "Robot" and "Burger" and jammed them together).
And I thought, as I stood there in rapture and awe,
As I waited for my frozen patties to thaw
Awash in the sounds of electrified fat:
"We should focus our best minds on nothing but that."
Because lately it seems those "best minds" are intent
On inventing things maybe they...shouldn't invent?
There's GPT Four, and there's Open AI
And we're shooting huge phallus-planes up in the sky...
We're trying to make our machines more discerning
Through structurally coded autonomous learning
(And combing through Instagram usage statistics
To replicate cognitive characteristics...)
There's quantum computing that's working to spur on
The mechanization of dendrite and neuron
We're rushing to build artificial psychology
Programming bots with their own physiology
Building out Deep Fakes that seem so alive...
...that someone is going to fuck their hard-drive.
(Call me a Luddite—I just don't want to see
Any man / laptop coitus on the uptown 2/3...)
We're racing towards tech that we don't understand
(The impacts of which will not be those we've planned...)
It's almost as if all successive technology
Should come bundled with a preemptive apology:
"Sorry, in advance, if this beta-test pilot
Results in a subsequent Capitol riot..."
Or here's a thought: maybe we shouldn't permit
All these Google-y eyed tech-bros to build all this shit?
We seem to be ceding inordinate powers
To tech start-up founders in Silicon Towers
(As if it's a mark of infallible knowledge
To have one big idea, and then drop out of college...)
Is it wide-eyed or heedless for us to believe
These are just guys with Jobs, and not everyone's Steve?
Here's an opinion (though I really do mean this):
Not every confident weirdo's a Genius!
A humble suggestion: I think we should change
The conflation of "brilliance" with "dick-ish and strange"
(And I'm not naming names, I'm just saying it seems
That a pre-occupation with shit-posting memes
Would seem to speak less of a "special intelligence"
More of a "man-child desperate for relevance"...)
Perhaps it'd be best if we weren't so adoring
Of people whose Companies just seem so Boring...
But the problem is not just with tech CEOs
(To solve for that problem I'd simply propose
We convince them the image is just so much clearer
In Snow-White-inspired vainglorious mirrors
That trap them inside their inverted reflections
As they stare, longingly, at their wan God complex-ions...)
But it isn't a problem that's just narcissistic
It's a deeper, innate human characteristic
(Which we rarely acknowledge, though we probably should):
When it comes to inventing, we're just not that good.
Illustrations of which are abundantly ample
But here let me proffer a single example:
Last week Netflix pushed me a recommendation:
A new docu-series on space exploration
(Perhaps algorithmically shying away
From another binge-session of "Beat Bobby Flay"...?)
It was called "Black Hole Hunters", and it took as its theme
The quixotic pursuits of a crackerjack team
Of engineers, scientists, astro-physicians
Mathematical scholars and data technicians!
Graduate students in quantum mechanics
Credentialed to lecture on thermodynamics!
Professors and physicists, new PhDs!
(A motley crew, sure. But with no Tommy Lees...)
Assembled en masse with one singular goal:
To capture, on camera, a real-life black hole.
With clear eyes and motive this brilliant collective
Set out to achieve the audacious objective
Of first, through a study of astral reflections
And spatial distortions, and quantum corrections
(Confounding and difficult, even for me
And I've got an Advanced Theatre Studies degree...)
To write an empirically sound calculation
Precisely detailing said black hole's location
And then, once established, to prove its existence
By aiming, through thousands of light-years of distance
The lens of a camera (which they'd theorized
Would be the most powerful ever devised...)
With focus and purpose approaching divinity
(Bolstered by bouts of frenetic virginity...)
They analyzed, programmed, and researched for years!
Through fits and through starts and through sweat and through tears!
Resolved to establish as non-theoretical
That which had theretofore been hypothetical!
And despite facing roadblocks of epic proportions
Logistics, schematics (the time/space distortions
That happen near chasms with subtle propensities
For crushing all matter to infinite densities...)
Contentious debates and internal divisions!
Let's-Throw-It-All-Out-And-Start-Over revisions!
Equational systems that just wouldn't tie!
Impenetrable stymies each time they would try
To model the structural base compositions
Of hyper-neutronic white plasma emissions!
(Plagued also, of course, by a slew of infernal
Emissions best categorized as "nocturnal"...)
Somehow, they succeeded! Through grit and tenacity
Building a camera that had the capacity
When pointed at space, to return an array
Of images thousands of light years away!
This godlike endeavor, this radical mission
Stood precipice-bound on the brink of fruition!
The team was enraptured, their spirits revived!
The long-sought-for day had now finally arrived
To capture, on film, for the first time in history
This intergalactic, imponderable mystery!
The team moved as one, they wiped tears from their eyes
They pointed their tele-lens up at the skies!
They're hugging, they're crying, they're going berserk!
But then it got cloudy.
So the thing didn't work.
(Now I could be wrong here. But I think that it's true
That clouds aren't phenomenologically...new?
And still, this collective of prodigious big brains
I guess never asked themselves: "What if it rains?")
So if they couldn't do it, our true best and brightest,
Do we think that Jack Dorsey has even the slightest
Chance of his latest "world-changing" endeavor
"Working out well" in any way whatsoever?
So maybe we pause all this bold unrelenting
Capital-Driven-Half-Baked-Inno-Venting?
Why don't shift all these dollars away
From the sentient robotics they're funding today
(A funding whose impact may bear the distinction
Of ushering in existential extinction...)
And instead, put those trillions in venture-backed debt
Into cheeseburger robots! Which haven't (as yet...)
Exhibited signs of a causal relation
Between their core function, and mankind's...cessation?
Don't move fast, don't break things—give all that a rest
Let's focus instead on the things we make best
Not AI, not chat-bots, not any more screens:
Let's put our "best minds" on the burger machines.
