Haibun: Technology Marches On

Recently I’ve had trouble with my Apple personal assistant, Siri. I doesn’t matter how often I say, “Hey Siri,” my voice assistant doesn’t work. Also, very random texts are read to me through my AirPods, and important ones seem left unread. I’m learning to not depend on them like I was easily doing.

I get Siri, like Alexa and Google, will experience these ebbs and flows as the Artificial Intelligence and the engineers learn new things. In the mean time, I’m driving, trying to put down a thought, hands free, and it is now lost to the circumstances. I will never know what I was wanting to record, just the frustration of not being able to.

This is the story of technology and technique: As every river west of the Continental Divide seems dammed, some forests left to old growth and some cleaned almost spotless because of forest fires, we believe we are doing the best possible thing and we can trust the process. Our learned techniques, we are taught to believe by culture, are always moving forward for our better and we should trust in its benevolence. But should we?

old growth to decay,

nothing cleared away just as

a cold fall’s in play