Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind

There is no algorithm to explain

away suffering or to reanimate

the skitter a leaf makes as it crosses

a boyhood memory of idleness,

and the most disturbing part of the brain

turned positronic is that indolence

would dwindle or be rewritten with code,

but what would be lost would skitter there still

in the ether as binary sequence,

the idea that laziness cradles

love and love overrides neural networks

in the same way that one note from Coltrane’s

horn could surely undo a universe.

Dante Di Stefano’s poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer’s Chronicle, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Southern California Review, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea Gonzalez Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He currently serves as a poetry editor for Harpur Palate and he was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Selected by Maisha Z. Johnson.

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