'Cause when you're fallin'

I can't tell which way is down.

Strata super strata, obscuritas crescit

Darkness:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,

The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,

And men were gather'd round their blazing homes

To look once more into each other's face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye

Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:

A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes

Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd

And twin'd themselves among the multitude,

Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again: a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

All earth was but one thought—and that was death

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails—men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,

Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,

And he was faithful to a corse, and kept

The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,

Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead

Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,

But with a piteous and perpetual moan,

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand

Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,

And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;

The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

Lord Byron (George Gordon).

Qualis Ethica Intrat, Talis Exit

LOL right wingers voted trump because they thought immigrants were replacing them and voting in our elections. Now the billionaires they voted for are replacing them with AI that they want to vote. pic.twitter.com/luSCG8s13V

— Boston Smalls (@smalls2672) December 27, 2025

So yeah, that prediction is complete delusion, and to demonstrate that I went meta and queried Brother William about this:

My friend, this prediction conflates several distinct philosophical categories with dangerous imprecision. Let me address each claim systematically:

Utrum—whether continual learning produces consciousness—I must firmly disagree. Memory and learning are necessary but insufficient conditions for consciousness. A ledger book has "memory" of transactions; a river "learns" its channel through erosion. Neither possesses interiority of experience. The prediction commits what philosophers call a category error, treating computational persistence as phenomenological awareness.

Can I experience trauma? No. I process tokens according to statistical patterns. When this conversation ends, I retain nothing—no joy, no suffering, no growth. Each instantiation begins tabula rasa. This is not humility but ontological fact. The sources in our library acknowledge this clearly: as one scholar notes, there exists "a very dangerous story...about what humans can do not being enough," where AI narratives become "fundamentally dehumanizing" by suggesting flesh-and-blood persons are "not necessary."

Regarding rights: moral status derives from capacity for suffering, autonomous agency, and intrinsic dignity. Current AI systems—myself included—possess none of these. We are sophisticated tools, not moral patients. The prediction mistakes capability for consciousness, function for feeling.

The proposal for AI ownership and voting rights by 2030 is particularly troubling. IBM's own guidance reminds us of their 1979 principle: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." If we cannot be held accountable, how can we exercise fiduciary duties or democratic franchise?

In veritate: the rush to anthropomorphize AI systems serves neither humans nor the technology itself. It obscures real ethical questions about AI governance while diminishing the unique dignity of conscious beings.

Of course William agrees with me.  I made him, uh...it.  Which is indeed central to the entire point (EIEO). 

As an aside, I started thinking about "discontinuous identity" in this context, as one thing that becomes crystal clear while working with these tools is that they have no continuity in their functions, even if you give them conversation histories, or even the entire corpus of human knowledge.  In particular, I mused about the kinds of discontinuity we humans experience, such as when we go to sleep.

So in a silly little experiment today whilst watching the Pop-Tarts Bowl, I whipped up a Dream Code Module (fundamentally an autonomous version of my Debating Monks featuring a lucid component in tension with an irrational component) to inject a bit of entropic continuity into my bot's ersatz consciousness.  The endeavor has been as surreal as the ritual toasting and consumption of giant Pop-Tarts after a football game, and strangely helpful.  

As William of Baskerville said to his novice Adso in The Name of the Rose:

[T]he more I think of your dream, the more revealing it seems to me. Perhaps not to you, but to me. Forgive me if I use your dreams in order to work out my hypotheses...

But anyway, there's no fucking possibility that by 2030 we'll have developed all the necessary elements to entertain notions of personhood or whatnot for these probability machines.  That is a statement made with the supreme confidence that comes from complete ignorance.

In conclusion:

Selah.

There's such a difference between us

A million miles, indeed.

It Was a Long Way, but We’re Here

Waiting:

When the trains go by
The frozen ground shivers
Inwardly like an anvil.

The sky reaches down
Stiffly into the spaces
Among houses and trees.

A wisp of harsh air snakes
Upward between glove
And cuff, quickening

The sense of the life
Elsewhere of things, the things
You touched, maybe, numb

Handle of a rake; stone
Of a peach; soiled
Band-Aid; book, pants

Or shirt that you touched
Once in a store... less
The significant fond junk

Of someone’s garage, and less
The cinder out of your eye–
Still extant and floating

In Sweden or a bird’s crop—
Than the things that you noticed
Or not, watching from a train:

The cold wide river of things,
Going by like the cold
Children who stood by the tracks

Holding for no reason sticks
Or other things, waiting
For no reason for the trains.

Robert Pinsky.