A Poem by Sam Cardoza
Written on September 14th, 2026
—
I feel a new and terrible way
that the world which I love is dying
The world I love is dying
and the new which replaces it
is a world I don’t want to live in.
I can’t imagine myself in it
a world where human minds are wholesale stripped of value
and human skill deemed irrelevant
and human creativity dislocated from its soul.
Mind, skill, creativity.
Vain. Inaccurate. Dangerous.
Illegal.
I was so bright in the world before – the world of humanity.
And no – I do not think that artificial minds can make us more human.
I think they are evil,
cursed,
and (I do not say this lightly)
blasphemous to the core.
They make me want to burn the whole fucking thing to the ground
but I don’t know how
and it seems there are so few like me
who see that this isn’t the way.
Who else has felt this before?
That the world they love is ending
that they will be buried and forgotten
(“teachers who use AI will replace those who don’t,” my professor says)
that their joy and hope will be entombed in the Earth
and the future flattened to a lifeless expanse
(“My assistant thinks for me.”)
How did they persevere?
Maybe they kept a small ember, deep underground with them
where the odious surface could not touch it.
Maybe they prayed the tectonic movements of Earth
would one day reveal it.
Far in the future – far, far after the flatness of life had utterly done itself in
and the world was a wild jungle again
ready for the living fire of that ember to set it ablaze
with human beauty.
They prayed for a day which might never come.
They prayed for a miracle – human awakening
Little more than fiction. But still they prayed.
What other choice did they have?
—
Written without generative AI.
Contact the author: samlan@pm.me
tech-tonic 