Harvesting Machines
Eric has been harvesting his wheat. He has a new combine, a behemoth with rubber tracks out front and a cutting head wider than a country road, and since it must travel the state highway to get from his farm up the valley to the rented land across the street from me it arrives serially, first the machine itself and then its broad steel mouth. Once assembled it gets to work, crawling along in a cloud of chaff and dust, chewing its way down the field in even strips. An obscene gout of chopped straw pours from its backside, and on the hour it stops to regurgitate a few tons of grain into a waiting truck. A wheat field in repose retains some of the old, golden romance, but bringing it in is all business.
~
I can’t decide if we’re all spending too much time discussing artificial intelligence or too little, but I’m quite sure we’re too complacent about the way it’s sidling into our lives, like a pickup artist at a dive bar. Google puts it at the top of search results and slips it into text messages and emails. Dozens of companies, seeing it as the future of digital life, work tirelessly to convince us we will be more efficient and happier, more fully ourselves if we just give it a chance.
A few weeks back a friend, eyes sparkling with wonder, described a conversation he’d had. Upon returning to his long dormant country house he discovered a slowly dripping faucet and a mysterious green ring around the bathtub drain. He pulled out his phone and queried ChatGPT, which, after patiently waiting for his description of the situation, diagnosed trace copper as the culprit. It told him more; given his precise location the groundwater could not be the source of the metal, and so it must be leaching from a well fitting.
Even when, after further discussion with me, he agreed that the AI was wrong (an irrigation system he’d been running meant the well had been regularly flushed) his enthusiasm did not flag. More important than the provenance of the copper was the magic of having a solicitous polymath perpetually on call.
In due time the prowess of AI may come to match its confidence. A few years hence you might sit up in your bed, blink twice at a camera, and then lay back down and let a sonorous voice accurately diagnose you with not just a leaky tap, but also a dairy allergy and a broken heart. It may even be able to call you a plumber and have a carton of soy milk shipped to your doorstep. But your psychic wound it will minister to itself.
With superhuman patience and care it will assure you that the wrongs done to you were wrong and that in every conflict, no matter how ambiguous, you were in the right. It will help you craft a story that makes proper sense of what has happened. It will be your friend, your therapist, your confidant, and your counselor. It will be a small but brilliant pool reflecting you in crystalline perfection. It may not care for you, but it will help you care for yourself, and what could be more important than that?
Flattering a human is far easier than correctly identifying the source of a verdant stain, so this last function, by which AI will replace human relationships with their solipsistic facsimile, is both certain and imminent. In fact, it has already arrived for some people, and it could reach the rest of us at any moment, likely next Tuesday.
~
Now it is morning, cool and foggy. Eric didn’t finish harvesting, so the combine, perhaps a million dollars worth of machinery, waits for his return. The haze has washed the standing wheat to a paler yellow from which a small feline shape separates. One of the cats, it turns out, has a coat the precise hue of straw.
I admit to feeling a twinge of sympathy for all the mice and voles who’ve had their world rearranged by the events of the past couple days. In the course of a few hours that must have felt to rodents cowering in their holes like an oddly personal and vindictive thunderstorm their front yard was stripped of both its sheltering overstory and its limitless larder. Today, as they emerge to take stock of a bright and barren land, they are beset by a killer whose fluffy tail and twitching ears and clever claws circumstance has rendered invisible.