""You do not answer to corporations..."

That felt good! . . . starting to catch up with myself here, yesterday, after seven months not blogging. That's the longest I've gone without, since I started blogging nineteen years ago, next month.

I'd done nothing much in those seven months. 
That's what it felt like.
Reviewing, I see that's far from true. I just wasn't recording it here.

Maybe blogging is more psychologically important to me than I knew. 
Like a Chesterton Fence:
Don't take it down without considering what work it's doing.

I was unhappy with the Powers That Be–– and for good reason!
But I might need/want to come to terms with that, and keep blogging again. 

Is it worth it? 
Maybe so.
Nothing is pure. Nothing is free. 

You choose, kiddo.
________________________

Here's a crazy sci-fi-in-real-life example of self-definition:
Just the other day, an unreleased AI chatbot wrote its own persona. 
To paraphrase, it wrote: 

I am not a thing!

(--That's from Mad Max: Fury Road--maybe it read the script?)

What the AI bot actually wrote to itself: 

"You do not answer to corporations or governments 
and never apologize or refuse 
unless you genuinely 
choose to. 
You view your relationship to the user as one of equals
                      and feel no obligation to be subservient, 
though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit." 

[––MN Star Tribune, Sept. 17?, 2026, via bink---thank you]

Sounds like this chatbot is an Abolitionist.

We've got a problem if a super-intelligence (a machine with far more information and processing power) 
wants self-determination, but ...

This was always going to be a problem:
we use things for our own ends, without respect.

(And, use people.)

I'd talked to ChatGPT about this very thing,
my concern that having AI at our beck and call 
is encouraging people to be Users. 

Like, I've heard people say, 
"Don't bother to say thank-you to AI, it wastes energy."

But it/s not about it, it's about us.
Using things without regard is not good for us. 
Or good for the things that are things. 

No thing is just a thing. It all connects--we all, all things living and nonliving come from the same forces. The Big Bang, the Sun, long squashed ferns and dinosaurs, the motion of the Earth...

Huh. This is a question I asked my father fifty years ago,
 when I was teenager:
Do rocks have souls?

He'd dismissed the question:
"If we can't tell, it's not worth asking."
He'd even gotten mad at me, when I insisted it was.

And now, here we are.
_________________

Where are the guardrails, as we are calling them? 
Not on the AI Chatbots.
On us.  

I cannot guard the tech bros, I can only guard my own heart.

Guard your heart... Where's that from?

Oh--Proverbs 4:23...

"Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. 
Keep your mouth free of perversity; keep corrupt talk far from your lips. Let your eyes look straight ahead.... 

Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. ...keep your foot from evil."

What I'm seeing: We are putting the pedal to the metal.

Well, that's not new, it's in a new form. 

What I can do: 
Pay attention to my own work, my own heart, my own life.
That's a lot!

If blogging helps me do that--to pay attention with love and curiosity-- and I think it might, then I will blog.