It was awhile ago when I first noticed it. My own clock radio, without any provocation at all, called me 4 eyes. The nerve of it. I mean I feed it electricity just how it likes me to and this is the thanks I get. How can it even see that I wear glasses?
I started paying attention more after that first time. And I found out, like clockwork, my radio calls me 4 eyes twice per day. I was getting very angry when I first mentioned it to a friend. I even proved my accusation by showing him the following picture. I was shocked at his reply. Even though he didn’t wear glasses, his own clock radio called him 4 eyes twice a day, too.
I looked for a loophole. Perhaps this friend was just wearing contact lenses and in the gutter mentality of the school yard, perhaps the term 4 eyes applied to contact lens wearers as well. My friend assured me that he never wore contact lenses and had never worn glasses.
I was stumped. Why would clock radios call everyone 4 eyes? Then it dawned on me. The clock radios might have been introducing themselves. They were calling themselves 4 eyes.
It was then that I realized that many reincarnation believers had said that consciousnesses could only travel from living creature to living creature. Despite accusing the rest of the world of not being open minded enough to accept their beliefs, I realized that some of them hadn’t been accepting machines as houses for a consciousness. Can they afford such a stance when it is obvious we are getting closer and closer to artificial intelligences capable of passing as human?
Indeed, the humble clock radio passing itself off as a 4 eyes or one of the simplest human-machine hybrids makes a twisted kind of sense. Perhaps my clock radio contains the spirit of a now deceased person who needed spectacles in their life.
Perhaps long dead wheelchair users now use automobiles as houses for their spirits. Some people name their cars after all, so in the machine world this is a desirable location for a spirit. This could really put the ‘car’ in reincarnation.
And perhaps one day a power serving Stephen Harper could come back as a nuclear power plant. The disgusting waste from this union would have to be specially housed for decades upon decades since it would destroy any environment it came into contact with.
And as more of Stephen Harper’s environmental policies come into effect (always business before the environment), there will be fewer and fewer animal houses for the reincarnated. If we all wish to come back we must not turn our noses up at the machine world.
As for me, I hope to manage to come back as a full AI and not a clock radio. But unfortunately there are many people that are more at one with their computers and thus better candidates for AI bodies. I’m just hoping that the AIs will be mass produced leaving room for me to come back as one.
