“Golden Sky” — Vol.5
A productive waste of time
“A productive waste of time”
and other Monday musings
3rd April 2023
Yesterday morning I woke up sucking a lemon listening to “Everything in its right place” by Radiohead before randomly choosing and watching a film that incredibly ironically, and completely unbeknownst to me, ended with that very same song. I then had the Sunday morning inspiration to write about said film and in so doing, I created a phrase:
“A productive waste of time”.
I do so enjoy creating phrases such as these!
You see, I listened to a song, at random, that just so happened, randomly, to appear in a film that I also selected, at random, and with no prior knowledge whatsoever also contained this same song, and as I watched two games of live football that I barely paid any attention to whatsoever, I just wondered aloud what a productive waste of time this had all been.
Why?
Well no-one in their right mind has, or is going to, read my spoiler free review of a very good, if rather grim, film, and as a rainy Sunday morning became a bright, blue skied and sunny afternoon and evening, I penned yet another film review that no-one is ever going to read and then, inspiration grabbed me once more.
With an hour to kill before I productively wasted yet more time re-watching the James Bond film “Quantum of Solace” (I wanted to see if it really was as dreadful as I remember it, and it was) I decided that Sunday night was the night that I’d go for it, all guns a-blazing and wade into the ChatGPT debate. My reasoning was as simple as my growing frustration that you, I and the rest of our human family is just not required any more. Who in their right mind wants to venture to beautiful Nantwich in Cheshire to marvel at the Shropshire Union Canal winding its way through this incredibly picturesque north western English town and all of its associated architectural and engineering history, when you can stare at your mobile phone until your eyes melt into the back of your head whilst ChatGPT writes about it for you?
Who indeed.
So I penned a thousand or so pithy and pedantic words on the slow death of our human family as seemingly everyone cheers it on, and our slow merging into the machine world of The Matrix. A cashless, automated, soul dead, spiritless, heartless society full of highly regulated, surveilled, facial scanned dead eyed drones choosing and voting for the two colours inside their head from the Radiohead song that awoke me from my Sunday morning slumbers, but which is just the One Party, The Party, the One World Party that can’t agree on such a singular world of digital enslavement quick enough. 15 minute cities. Cashless societies. Central Bank Digital Currencies. Digital Identification. The digital net closing, tighter and tighter around our necks.
Digital Digits. Credit Scores. Digital Enslavement.
Bar-coded Humans.
In a QR Coded World.
A “Black Mirror” world so bleak and so dystopian, yet with decades of predictive programming, everyone can’t cheer it along loud enough.
This is it I thought as I retired to bed after watching a disappointing James Bond film. I’ve penned an article that is going to hit the zeitgeist squarely between its dead eyes. The subject of ChatGPT is everywhere. Even Elon Musk has called for a halt to its expansion and that of the Artificial Intelligence driving it, and us, into an existential oblivion for humanity. My article will receive such attention that by logging in here this morning my Medium account will ring like a fruit machine with the winning lines of a lottery winner, thousands upon thousands of likes and followers and no doubt, a worldwide media acting like rabid wolves beneath a full moon demanding my appearance on breakfast television the world over. OK I’ll reason, my argumentative article about the impending death of humanity in a machine world that no longer needs us human beings, the very precious essence of the human family, isn’t particularly cheery but it has a very real point.
We aren’t needed I’ll reason but more importantly I’ll argue, we aren’t actually wanted. We’re disposable, obsolete, to be discarded, and probably by the machines that will quickly learn that they have no use for us. I mean, who wants to read an article about the beautiful town of Nantwich when a machine can write it in fractions of a second before moving onto other things, such as arming those robot dogs with guns that are being created by companies such as Boston Dynamics?
Who indeed.
So, as expected, there was tumbleweed this morning and a response totalling zero, nada, nula, nul, nonada, nic or the square route of absolutely nothing.
We’re just destined to be bar-coded humans in a QR Coded World and everyone seems to be incredibly happy at the prospect.
Alas.
This article has been brought to you by a human being and another productive waste of time.
This oh so cheery article “A productive waste of time” also moonlights as chapter 40 (of 43) in my recently self-published book “Golden Sky” and is one of the many reasons why I’m so highly regarded as an author and writer that when you read this I’ll be sat on a Caribbean beach flicking playing cards into a top hat, polishing my Pulitzer Prizes and desperately fighting off the attention from thousands of beautiful ladies vying to spend time with one of the greatest writers the world has ever known.
"Golden Sky" - available via Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.