The sky is still blue as I rest under the tree

A friend and a colleague of mine shared a podcast about how AI will soon make the world a grim place to live in.

And then my Balkan’s friends told me that que sera sera, whatever will be, will be. I think they’ve lived enough to see the world goes up and down. The sky turned gray and red. Or when it turned blue again and business continue as usual.

Maybe I am speaking from a privileged position. I never went to war, nor lived through crisis, or even when I do, I was shielded from such things. So I tried as hard as possible to see the world from their lens too.

The lens from my colleague as he was worried about AI, and their self-research and self-improvements rate, how it will rapidly accelerate destructions. The game theory and race to the equilibrium. How Anthropic and OpenAI seems to be the one eagerly trying to replace themselves with AI.

“We’re building a self-improving AI so we have the best AI” - and it seems software engineers are always the one who wanted to replace themselves so they can finally put their laptop down and move to remote areas and live as farmers. Until they discover that they can maximize their crop yields and starts engineering their farm. Guess with what? I think AI again.

And I tried to see the lens from someone who can just say whatever will be will be. I think now I have two lens, one on each eye. Where I can see how the world might become a worst place to live, and that whatever will be will be anyway. But I am just a person who have astigmatism and need prescription glasses. Whatever lens I wear, I’d see blurs and ghosts anyway.

There’s an image that I am particularly fond of. An image of me sitting under the blue sky, surrounded with flowers and butterflies, even though I find butterflies scary due to Spongebob episodes that I watched when I was a kid. And I sit there, with sharp grass blades piercing on my skin. Which actually make me rarely sit on grass in real life.

But that image goes against what I usually do in real life. In real life, I went to a coffee shop, no flowers in sight. Or when I do see one, it dropped on the ground, I’d pick it and slide it under my watch so I can see flowers whenever I check my watch.

I don’t particularly enjoy the heat under the sun, or the sharp grass blades piercing my skin, or the emptiness of such vast meadows. Even the thought of me needing to drive for hours to reach the mountains and hike - is probably something that I don’t really like.

But that image, that goes against what I truly am, is something that I am truly fond of.

There’s a war happening somewhere. Haze that covers my nations, flood that sweeps my lands, corruptions that happens right and left. The world tried so hard to give me lens so I can see chaos out of everything.

But I only have two eyes. So when I either kept switching in between lens to see everything for what they truly are. Or I stacked all of the lens the world gave me, until its as thick as Pinokio nose when it lies. Or maybe for me, its not that my nose grows as I gather these lies. But the lens on my eyes, it keeps getting thicker.

Now I barely know which are the truth and which are lies anymore. My eyes has been stacked with too many lens I find it hard to see. Everything seems to be reduced to an average. Show me the world in red and blue, and when I kept stacking the lens, I think what I can see is now gray.

So maybe gray is the lens that we all use to see the world now. Bleak. Bland. But gray is still a color too.

Or maybe its time for me to remove all of that lenses. When I do, I can see that the sky is blue, and that I still rest under the same tree. I can hear the birds singing, and the butterflies flutter on my ears. I can feel the sharp blades touching my skins.

Is that blue sky something that I truly see? Or its just a dream? Or its a lie that now I have begun to believe? Have I truly removed all of my lenses?

I rest, until the day I don’t have to open my eyes.