It’s in the title of my blog, on poets & processors, and yet I’ve not put down any words really clearing the dust cloud that is swirling around that term: processor.

I think we all feel the raw definition: silicon chips, etched nanometer scale topographies of circuitry performing billions of binary calculations per second in a wee little black box pinned to a printed board, powered by electrical current and churning out maths and computations beyond our comprehension. 

I’m sitting here with a number of microprocessors under my fingers, beside me playing music, strapped to my wrist, jabbed into my ear holes and very likely controlling the lights, air conditioning, coffee makers, and a long list of other equipment in this cafe where I often write.

Unpowered, they are inert and curious only as technical artifacts of our age. But soldered in and powered they are capable of setting the world afire with connection and calculation.

The word, though, is also an allusion to something more important than the hardware. The software that dances and plays inside these labyrinthian arrays of electron plumbing can be anything we design it to be: from business tools, to entertainment engines to self replicating viral monsters eating or stealing our lives from under us.

And for decades the instinct of humans to anthropomorphize their pets and toys has led us to the path of finding a way to forge stone into a reflection of ourselves. We build tools to copy our hands, our feet, our bodies, and now our minds: artificial intelligence has emerged from a benign curiosity to what some suggest is more than the latest step in technological progress. Some suggest it is the last step, ultimately the replacement for us.

Do I believe that AI will replace us? 

Individually, I don’t fear it, and have been curious about what this new tool is capable of doing for humankind. On a broader scale I can’t help but think it’s worth thinking a bit more about.