Tag Archives: Gary Shteyngart

A final found poem from Gary Shteyngart’s “Thinking Outside the Bots,” in the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine (pp. 78-80).

The cult of perfection

will extend to every part of us, and the cosmetic-surgery bots
will chisel us
and suck out our fat
and give us as many eyelids as we desire.

Our grandchildren will be born perfect; all
the criteria for their genetic makeup
will be determined in utero.

We will look perfect, but inside we will be
completely stressed out and worried
about our place (and our children’s place)
in the pecking order, because even our belt buckles
will come equipped with the kind of AI that could beat us
at three-dimensional chess
while reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets
and singing the blues in perfect pitch.

And so our beautiful selves will be constantly worried
about what contributions we will make to society, given
that all cognitive tasks will already be distributed to devices
small enough to perch at the edge of our fingernails.

Gary Shteyngart’s “Thinking Outside the Bots,” from the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine (p. 80), once again provided the material for this found poem.

As the great rush of technology envelops us

and makes us feel as small as the stars used to
make us feel when we looked up
at the primitive sky, we will be using our Samsung
NewBrainStem 2.0 to send out streams of emojis
to our aging friends, hoping to connect
to someone analog who won’t beat us at Go
in the blink of an eye, a fellow traveler in the mundane
world of flesh and cartilage.

Others of us, less fortunate, will be worried
about our very existence, as armies of Hubos, built
without the safeguards developed by kindly scientists
like Professor Oh, rampage across the earth.

And of course the balance of power will look nothing like
today; truly, the future will belong to societies – often small
societies like South Korea and Taiwan – that invest
in innovation to make their wildest techno-dreams a reality.

Can you picture the rise of the Empire of Estonia, ruled by a pensive
but decisive talking toilet?

I can.