Speculative Poetry

I think we can all imagine two very different futures for humanity, in regard to technology. The study of algorithms and advertising can lead us to some dark places, but technology has the ability to solve a lot of our problems as well.

Below is a visual representation of the two poems I wrote. One contemplating a negative future “Invasive Technology” and the other contemplating a positive future “Innovative Technology” both reference some technologies we use today and are written ABBA style with 7 syllables per line.

I hope you enjoy this visual/written representation.

3 Thoughts.

  1. Hi Emma!

    I loved the contrast. Invasive vs Innovative. I think in a way, this contrast can apply to existing technology such as the Internet. Lots of information, but also lots of misinformation.

    Responsible development is so necessary in order to move forward in a way that’s innovative.

    This might sound pretty funny, but one thing that I am personally concerned about is the development of AI technology. For example, there’s recently been news about GPT-3, a general purpose text generation AI, which can write any texts (including codes) as long as it’s given a prompt. It’s trained on 175billion parameters; it’s predictive ability is INSANE! I do worry that, one day, autonomous AI will government the way we interact, learn, and live. Imagine AI that curates and filters all the content we see. Imagine AI coding and creating and imprisoning humans to “protect” this world. The realities in Terminator and the Matrix, etc., might not be too far-fetched!

    Chris Lam

  2. Hi Emma,
    I really enjoyed your representation of your speculative narratives, what I especially liked was the poetic format you decided to use to represent the two contrasting ideas.

    Your choice of words and images really show the differences and the links between technology and humanity. What I especially like about your Invasive poem is the words you use and how disconnected it seems until the image is created of the glistening products door to door. This disconnect also shows how the invasion of technology has removed humanity from the world. Your innovative technology feels more connected and closely linked to humanity and how we use it to stay connected and use it to chat across geographic spheres.

    I really think your work for this task stands out as it tells the story short and sweet and extremely effectively and I saw many others created audio, long written stories or videos to bring across their message but your poetry does this very effectively especially with the choice of images.

    Well done!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Spam prevention powered by Akismet