What will hold an AI world

The recent news about the hijacking of a rival company by the endless bevy of whirling OpenAI computers, without any human intervention, tells us all what a future the artificial intelligence era may have in mind for us.

 

Elon Musk tells us AI is far more dangerous than nuclear weapons and “represents our biggest existential threat.”

 

Yikes! 

 

Our world is wired, but from the looks of things, I think they used the wrong dang wire. 

 

They should have used the dependable baling wire.

 

Never mind that its name also inspired the description of someone who might be a few pints shy of a gallon—a.k.a. “haywire.”

 

Baling wire once held everything in its proper place, but you don’t see much of it anymore. Maybe that’s why the world seems to be headed to heck in a hand basket, although Congress has some sort of “kill bill” if AI ties to take over. Good luck with that.  

 

Global events are flailing, flapping and flying around out of control, and we all sit at our world-wired computers and wonder why.

 

Baling wire was used at one time to hold hay and straw bales together before twine nudged it out of the snugness business. Farmers freed the bale by clipping the wire with pliers. 

 

And if they just threw the wire helter-skelter and didn’t hang the lengths on the fence to wait for future employment, it was liable to play hobs with farmer equipment, such as the old manure spreader.  

 

I read recently of someone recounting what she took from her parents’ farm on sale day. 

 

She left with some small pieces of furniture, a couple of gunnysacks with the old feed store logo on them and the shiny scoop shovel her father preferred. 

 

Now, she wishes she’d also taken a few feet of baling wire. 

 

Baling wire had a thousand uses after it had served its intended time hugging a bale of hay. 

 

Shelves in our garage hung from baling wire. When a buckle broke on a four-buckle overshoe, baling wire was called to serve. Our screen door hook was fashioned from a loop of baling wire, and a hole in the screen had been patched — sort of — with baling wire.

 

A bent hook of baling wire held a plump, upside-down headless rooster while the plucked feathers fell before Sunday dinner.  

 

My recollection is that one of the rites of manhood was for a boy to be asked to get out of the wagon or car and open the fence gate. It was held in place by loops of baling wire at the top and bottom of the gate support post.

 

The trick was to push your weight against the gate post that was held in those baling wire loops and flip the wire loop up over the gate post. Opening the gate was the easy part. But closing it sure separated the men from the boys.

 

Years ago when we drove in our rattletrap, baling-wired Model T from the metropolis of Wessington Springs out to Uncle Ed’s farm, my dad would go on a baling wire hunt after dinner before we left for home. 

 

He worried that a day might come when we’d run out of baling wire so necessary to meet the little daily emergencies back in town, like holding my mother’s tall hollyhocks in an upstanding position out on the sunny side of our house, affixing the new license plate to the Model T’s bumpers or wiring my bike’s rattling old fender back in place.

 

In the 1930s, baling wire kept the world’s feeble wheels from wobbling.

 

Now, apparently, it’s AI that’s fouling the old manure spreader.