Strange days, indeed. I saw this image on a Youtube channel I listen to just for background music while I’m working. Though I do quite like some of it, I suspect it’s all AI-driven. So, the music is not played by musicians, the image is not the real picture of a beautiful personal library that exists in the actual world, that would be my fantasy library, in my own dream home.
I never expected the strangeness of life to increase with age. I expected the exact opposite in fact. When I was a child watching TV after school–the Mickey Mouse Club, Zoom, Bugs Bunny and Friends–I knew, even as a small child, that what I saw on TV was a fantasy world. Similar to when kids are watching a puppet show, they see a performance in front of them on a stage while they sit in the audience. Clearly pretend, even to a child.
It was not the real world where Mom went to work and my sister and I went to school, where we were learning real things about the real world.
That’s what I thought. As I teen I read a lot, but I was not attracted to most pop fiction, and not to the sci-fi/fantasy genre at all. I feel lucky to have grown up with many avid readers in the family, though we rarely read the same things.
It was my pragmatic side perhaps that made me believe that fantasy was for the children’s world and once we left childhood those things would be left behind as life got more real.
Of course I can witness now very clearly the error of my naive thinking, or lack of realistic foresight, or practical knowdedge of human nature, or the patterns of civilzations rises and falls, or whatever. I was wrong. Adults also prefer a fantasy-based reality, or have come to prefer one in the last generations.
Where we used to play grown-up as kids, now we play kids as grown-ups. Our politics read like old B-movie plots. Our actors look like cyborgs. Our ‘elites’ want us ingesting lab-concocted chemicals so badly they inject them into everything imaginable, from seeds, to every manner of foods, to the air and water and soil.
And now it seems the takeover of illusion over reality is nearly complete, as folks allow AI to conquer their minds. Engulfed in Total Immersive Illusion seems to be the end goal.
I had to ask Hubby if he thought the library in the image was AI generated. “Definitely AI” he replied after gazing at it for a split second.
I keep staring at it, imagining myself lounging on the couch. There are 4 or 5 little stacks of books around me, just 3 or 4 high each one, but I keep getting up to get another, and then another. So many books, so little time! The ladders to the upper stacks give me just enough exercise so my legs don’t cramp up and there’s an adjoining little breakfast nook, not visible here of course, where I have stashed a simple but elegant array of snacks–some pistachios and some smoked salmon and capers on crackers and a carafe of fruity, refreshing homemade sangria.
Back to the real world. It’s still right here. Here, where I have hundreds of books with no stacks for them. I got tired finally of the clutter of ugly book shelves in our tiny space and packed the vast majority of them into boxes where they sit stacked shoulder-height waiting . . .
Waiting perhaps for AI to come and build them a new home. Kind of like in the hugely popular TV program for adults of the 60s ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ who will rise out of the bottle and with the swing of her ponytail and nod of her head, grant us all our wishes.
Jeannie was so much better than AI though, she would never have used her powers for evil, that’s for sure. She was like the Mother Theresa of Genies. She was like the Easter Bunny who would sneak you chocolate eggs when you were in a Timeout because you pulled your sisters hair in order to be first to find the plastic egg, which was filled with coins, sometimes even a dollar. Not that you wouldn’t have found it first anyway, the hair pulling was just an extra bonus. Jeannie didn’t judge.
What do y’all think: Has the fantasy-based reality gone too far for your taste?
