Don’t get mad, get even!

Or how to robot-proof your career

There used to be a time when the rich world was complaining of jobs being Shanghai-ed or Bangalore-d away. It appears now that humans, all and sundry, are at the risk of being robot-ed away.

Trending on my news feeds over the past few months are articles from a set of highbrow publications that pronounced that the liberal arts were the only resort for future humans. Trounced by AI in traditional fields of inquiry that are vulnerable to robotisation, jobs in STEM, Finance and the like were most at risk, they warned. This being so, it was argued, humans could make use of their skills in the humanities that require fuzzier forms of expertise that cannot be usurped by the coming machine onslaught. Fields such as art, poetry and music.

Fresh from reading this, and spouting my newfound anti-STEM wisdom to anyone within earshot, imagine my consternation when I discovered that the latest field to be invaded by the bots was (gasp!) poetry.  

Can there be such a thing as artificial poetry? Apparently, yes- the one in question has been written by a chatbot who has been 'learning' through interactions with people!   Naturally, this development sparked a generous amount of outrage across literary circles, apart from chilling my poetic aspirations to the bone.

A friend took one look at one of the creations of Xiaoice, a chatbot on Weibo, and reassured me that I have nothing to worry about. The offending sample reads thus:

The rain is blowing through the sea/ A bird in the sky/ A night of light and calm/ Sunlight/ Now in the sky/ Cool heart/ The savage north wind/ When I found a new world.

Not so fast. I decided to ambush my Modern poetry discussion group with this piece, passing it off as a poem by a contemporary American author who chose to remain anonymous. For a few minutes after I read it out, there was silence as the group digested the piece. Soon after, a storm of observations broke out.

"The savage north wind- what a refreshingly original thought. Surely, an oblique reference to the more traditional east wind."

"Oh, pure genius. The north wind that blows a new life, so unlike the east wind.”

"The sharp shift from the calm night to sunlight- a volte-face that brought about the discovery of the new world?"

"What an interesting thought!"

By now, I had slipped away, new hope nestling in my heart. If Xiaoice, an infant in chatbot years, could pique such ardent poetic discussions, maybe I could spin out a few quick quatrains too. Maybe I would just let the universe suggest words to me and arrange it into lines. After all, those who are keen to find meaning in lines will do so, regardless of how subtly (or grossly) it is hidden!

The house that waits

The streets are quiet, unusually bereft of the chatter of people. It is a Sunday morning and nothing stirs inside the rows of apartments. Save the giant banyan tree whose leaves sway gently in the sea breeze, even as its rope-like aerial roots swing to and fro invitingly. And the fine grains of sand that rise in the billowing clouds of dust. Something seems to be moving inside the cloud - some living, breathing being in this still, sleeping morning. It is the sweeper of the streets, engulfed in a halo of dust, emerging from the sand clouds like an ancient deity emerging from the mists. Daylight has begun to filter through the canopy of the banyan tree, lending a soft glow to the pink bougainvilleas, and rousing the hibiscuses from their slumber. A swaying prop root of the banyan brushes past my face in its pendulum-like motion. I catch it in my palm, and trace it with my eyes back to its high branch, the branch to immense trunk and the trunk to its base where it was growing around, and through the walls of the compound.

Incongrous in this street of high-rise apartments in the middle of a metropolis.  As strange as me and the street-sweeper, awake in this sleepy morning.

A survivor in this busy, ruthless city.

An unfinished building, covered in an unseemly green drape stands next to the banyan. It used to be an old, old house with a swing in the balcony and yellow windows with wooden bars. Now it's a monstrosity of concrete and green draping and a hoarding promising views of the sea. An erased relic of the past.

I avert my eyes and walk down the street, now warm with the late April sun. I am playing make-believe hopscotch on the mottled patterns of light and shade on the road.

I look up as one of patterns resolves itself into the shape of a sitting person. Somebody's grandfather. He is sitting on a chair in front of his house staring into the distance, his expression expectant- as if waiting for something.

Another being from the past- the house. With a swing and wooden bars on the windows. The thought was strangely startling. The house is empty- the diaspora children scattered across the world, leaving grandpa alone to his ruminations. Waiting. For what?

The windows are all open, the bars like teeth on a grinning face. A crack on the wall of the upper floor like a frown on its brow. Anticipation mingled with uncertainty. The mood of the house seems to mirror that of  the old man. Waiting. To join the future? A future, perhaps as a highrise with unkept promises of views of the Arabian sea.