Struldbruggery

Thomas Cole, Destruction. From his 1836 series The Course of Empire. New York Historical Society Museum.

. . . [they] would in time become proprietors of the whole nation, and engross the civil power, which, for want of abilities to manage, must end in the ruin of the public.—Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)

 “The American experiment will soon turn 250. Is its time running out?” Johan Norberg, Washington Post, October 12, 2025

Artificial General Intelligence,

It's thought, may in time

Reduce the world to paperclips,

And thus exterminate us all.

But our intelligence is both artifical and general,

Computers are only paperclips on stilts,

And as for public ruination . . . why, it’s always been.

Rome fell, a German scholar calculates, for 210 different reasons.

We’ve uncounted more—they come on thick and fast.

The likes of human AGI learn little from the past,

Would be immortal, with eternal youth,

Buy the highs and sell the dips,

Live on Mars, if so it goes—

Nothing like Swift's Struldbruggs' woes,

Who lived for ages, then got confused.

Notes: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/12/america-roman-empire-decline-fall/?itid=hp_mv-top-stories_opinions_p001_f011; https://courses.washington.edu/rome250/gallery/ROME%20250/210%20Reasons.htm.

Elegant Variation

“the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge”—William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, act 3, scene 2 (1609)

Better my own immortal line:

“the bellowing raven croaketh for revenge"?

What, though, to say, if Shakespeare nods!

Give us a break, undying gods!

George Cruikshank, hand-coloured lithograph (1817)

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Haruspex

Life-sized bronze model of a sheep's liver with a diagram and Etruscan inscriptions used in haruspicy, or divination, found at Piacenza, Italy

. . . the king of Babylon . . . at the fork of the two roads . . . looks at the liver.—Ezekiel 21:21 (NKJV)

The liver, romantic ancients believed,

Was the seat of love and passion.

But Etruscan seers were not so deceived

When, in their haruspical fashion,

They plunged their hands into a sacrifice's guts

To grab its bulk and pull it from the paunch.

Postfactual hepatology avers today the liver is the seat of doubt,

Our best defense against certainty's ten thousand cuts,

Whence we may trip musing down the primrose path,

And, bypassing greedy heart and noisy brain,

Seek out the winning secrets of the human strain,

Its liverish panoply of ifs, ands, and buts.

Tuesday, August 14, 2025