"The Unprompted," a poem that AI will never understand | Salome Agbaroji

I fill my empty 3 ams with spineless phone scrolls Text abbreviations And uni-human conversations. AI chat bots answer all my aimless interrogations: like, how do I answer an email that does not find me well? Or oh my gosh, my crush just texted me, what do I say? Or is it true, what the headlines say? That the world is crumbling beneath our feet And we do nothing but crumble with it? Our glassend eyes lost in the latent space Calculating our extinction with every pulse of our carbon-based circuitry And as we fall deeper and deeper into the black box Is hoping for humanity the most human thing we can do? And the AI says back to me, I don't know. (Laughter) More specifically, Hmm, I'm not sure how to process your request. Please try a new prompt. I say to AI: Don’t feel too special. You aren't the first artificial system We humans carelessly labeled “intelligent” Global capitalism was genius until it became negligent Leaving the unfortunate to suffer without the means for life. Biased science elevated one people over the last But with differentiation came racism and caste, Littering our world with non-compostable isms. I say to its text and images You’re brilliant, but you aren’t the first generation to forge something out of seemingly nothing. Haven't you seen my generation, the DIYers and binary defiers? We to extract wisdom from the Earth's mouth like a flower or a land mine. Sure, drive our cars but never our movements. Never our blood and boned passions. You can't replace the place of the people, I say to the people: The displaced children without homes do not cry mechanical tears About a simulated hunger induced by virtual war. The viruses they suffer from are not the zeros and ones in your devices Cured by simple software reset. If only the world had such a button. We've got our heads so far up in the cloud we forget that the ground exists. New prompt: is this modernity? Marveling at machines that can read and write when currently 700 million adults are illiterate? New prompt: is this innovation? Chipped by click workers in dark, dank rooms without proper compensation? The future, we fear, is not the sci-fi cyborg AI uprising that sets the world aflame. No, the true dystopia is the today we make. When humans watch the world burn still with the power to save it. And don't. The work towards a better world is not automated No computer could take this job Of audacious hope. Of unfounded optimism. We are the unprompted In the face of the bleakest calculations. We aspire in a way no algorithm could advise And that is what will save us from the abyss. Solely we are our saviors, but just as every hero has their gadgets, Technology can be the engine of our altruism. Every invention is just an extension of your hand So in the same way that a hammer can both build and destroy You tell me, how will you wield your tools? Again I say to people Remember people. Be unprompted, but with a promise To let my most pressing 3 am question Not be whether or not I’ll have a world to wake up to But how these new things can finally find us well. Thank you. (Applause and cheers)