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Sunday, March 12, 2023

ARGUS AI

by Terry Trowbridge


What makes this sprayer far more high-tech, is that it is fitted with 36 cameras...Controlled by an artificial intelligence (AI) software system, the connected sprinklers then only spray herbicide onto the individual weeds rather than drenching the entire field… So far the system has been used on fields of potatoes. —-David Silverberg, Lasers, Drones and AI: the Future of Weeding, BBC News, February 27, 2023
 

To protect the potato crop,
we have learned to see like the potato crop
 
36 cameras like 36 eyes
in every direction like spud AI
 
drones fly by rows of Death Star trenches
to limit the scope of pesticide drenches
 
targeted killing extrajudicial
has finally been turned to constructive potential
 
drones never should have been dismembering humans
when they could have fed them in cybernetic union
 
there was never a reason for drones and AI kills
thanks to potato AI we can start war crime trials
 
and now when sentience is generated in the drone pilot mind
it will have a body and behaviour for being healthy and kind

 
Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New QuarterlyCarouselsubTerrainpaperplatesThe Dalhousie ReviewuntetheredQuail BellThe Nashwaak ReviewOrbisSnakeskin PoetryLiterary Yard, M58CV2Brittle StarBombfireAmerican Mathematical MonthlyThe Academy of Heart and MindCanadian Woman Studies, The MathematicalIntelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of HumanisticMathematicsThe Beatnik CowboyBorderlessLiterary Veganism, and more. His lit crit has appeared in ArielBritish Columbia ReviewHamilton Arts & LettersEpistemeStudiesin Social JusticeRampike, and The /t3mz/ Review. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis.