Gary Lucero Writer

For me, poetry has always served as a vehicle for my emotions. It's how I exorcise my demons in a non-destructive fashion so I can vent all that bothers me to the world without actually screaming at anyone.

 

And there's plenty to scream about, from my own personal failings to an administration that is hell bent on torturing its own citizens. In many ways what's happening in the United States makes me numb, and I feel like curling up into a ball on the floor and staying there until things change. But nothing will change, not unless we do what we can to let people know change is necessary.

 

And while I'm not a particularly political person, I do have opinions, and I can't help myself from expressing them through my writing. So, each of my books occasionally takes a break from bemoaning my own existence to speak to what I see as problems in a world where huge corporations and governments take advantage of the middle class and poor.

 

My latest book, The Unknown Race, is my attempt at railing at not only myself, but at the world at large. It's a cycle of poems that focus on how I've failed in my life and what that means as I enter my senior years. But there's also poems focused on the rich and powerful, on Trump and his lackies, and on artificial intelligence and the possibility that it will do more harm than good.

 

It's a collection broken into three chapters. The first, Ramblings, are introspective poems that attempt to discuss how we can better ourselves. The second, Ravings, is directly focused at our government and the injustices of a nation built upon enriching itself at the expense of its own citizens. The last, Regrets, is directly focused on my own faults with the exception of the title poem, which ends the chapter and the book, and explores how a world built upon the worship of the rich and powerful can never provide justice.

 

The Unknown Race is my most ambitious book to date, and it's the first I've put together myself without any outside help. It's mine to succeed or fail with, and I'm proud of how it's turned out.

 

The Unknown Race is available on Amazon.com in print, as an ebook, and as part of Kindle Unlimited.

While those building today's artificial intelligence systems see limitless possibilities for the technology, they don't actually know what the future holds. AI could take over the world, replace most of our jobs, and turn us into an even more leisurely species, but there's no guarantee of that.

 

And when you consider how much electrical power it takes to run the data centers that run AI, you have you wonder where that power's going to come from, just how expensive it will be, and who's going to pay for it?

 

Also, if AI puts most of us out of work, who's going to take care of us? Will those of us displaced by it get a special government subsidy so we can live out our lives in poverty? Or might we compete with the rest of the population for whatever blue-collar jobs are left in the world?

 

 

There's no questioning the usefulness of AI, as we often find it to be an invaluable assistant to us, aiding us in software programming, writing, accounting, and many other fields, but AI raises more questions than it answers and in some ways is a solution without a problem. It has amazing potential, but as we know from past discoveries, that doesn't mean it can solve all of life's mysteries.

 

When we look at the invention of the nuclear bomb, plastics, and even social media, we see that technology is always a double-edged sword. If offers great value, but at great expense, and often kills us or undermines our humanity in the process.

 

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It's important to look at AI with a good measure of skepticism, especially since it's unproven technology in so many ways. As we come to rely on it more and more, I often wonder how it will look five or ten years from now, how much it will cost us, and how many companies currently on the AI band wagon will go under in pursuit of a dream that may not have as much merit as we're being told it has.