Maybe by now, no one has to speak. If Neuralink developed the tech,
your mind is connected
to all other minds & machines, and just a thought can unlock the door
blocking your understanding
from her experience. Do you still write poems? What even is a poem
when joy is the idea of joy
and not the best iteration of a series of failures? What do we call art
when there are no filters
on the complexity of any psyche? Possibly, there’s no more makeup sex.
Or breakup sex. Since miscommunication
doesn’t exist. omg what is sex like? Are we all immediately honest about
that thing I really want you to do to me,
but am too embarrassed to say out loud? How do we apply our bodies
to this world? Who opted to live
& die by the anchor of the mouth? Who did we price out of the path
of least resistance? Did they congregate
in Utah? What trouble isn’t solved when the concept of dishonesty is a man
who won’t share his awareness?
I can tell Andrew’s hiding something, because the picture isn’t clear.
I’m trying to imagine the shape
of our institutions: governments, markets, schools. Do we still have
politicians when every citizen
can be polled? Can you buy stock with a thought? Ally against oligarchs
churning liquid for the whales?
Did we stop cringing at the complexity of simple percentages
because those elegant proofs
ceased to be a translation, became for all a knowing? Seriously,
does anyone write poems?
What need for writers when the connections are bare, our consciousness
fully shared? What witness
must be borne? How quaint it must seem to compress the body's
bruises into language, to insist
upon the sensory, to make of your life an immense loneliness,
an archive of your ignorance.
- This poem jumps off of a lengthy write-up of Neuralink that Tim Urban published on his website, Wait But Why, taking for granted that the company will accomplish its most ambitious goals.