You could call me a chatterbox. Not in the traditional sense, like a blabbermouth (or a quidnunc, one of my favorite words). More in the sense that I write a lot. At one point in my life I was writing so many newspaper columns that a friend of mine suggested I was the human equivalent of a literary jukebox – drop a quarter into my mouth and another column popped out.

He could relate to Aaron Burr, our third vice president (and accused traitor) when he says (sings really) to Alexander Hamilton in the eponymous smash-hit play, “Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”

Well, maybe I am. Running out of time.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that chatbots, the newest A.I. creations, are the hot new thing in Artificial Intelligence. And man are they smart. Scary smart. So smart this new technology will soon replace all the existing technologies that run our computer search engines. And more than that, these silicon-brained wonders, having absorbed the entire ocean of information on the internet, can write essays and poems, create art and music, invent new drugs and energy sources, design buildings and rocket ships (to name a paltry few of their binary skills) as well as, and in some cases better than, we humans.

Alarm bells are going off everywhere. In a recent New York Times op-ed penned by Yuval Noah Harari (author of the popular book “Sapiens”), Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, they write that “Language is the operating system of human culture. From language emerges myth and law, gods and money, art and science, friendships and nations and computer codes. A.I.’s mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization.”

Holy you-know-what!

As someone whose 40-year professional career was fueled by writing talent, I’m now looking at the possibility of becoming as extinct as the dinosaurs. Maybe in a few years every news story and opinion piece you read in the Post (and every other publication, printed and electronic) will be written by a super-smart, super-talented computer.

All this “computers will take over the world” speculation makes me generally anxious about the future and fate of the human race. Maybe the “Terminator” and “Matrix” movie franchises got it exactly right. Soon we homo sapiens will be cannon-fodder for what now are our electronic slaves. We’ll be shooting targets in one scenario, biological batteries in the other.

In our home we have two computer assistants: Alexa and Klara. Alexa plays songs we like, updates us on the weather, answers stupid questions, and probably spies on us. Klara is our robot vacuum, a kind of machine maid. God knows what goes through her hard-wired mind. Probably plotting to murder us in our sleep. Should’ve named her Killer.

The earth, some 4.5 billion years old, is now experiencing its sixth great extinction event. Perhaps we humans will be the seventh. Que sera sera.

Somehow this weirdly gets me back to “Hamilton,” the part when King George asks the colonists, in his interrogative song, “What Comes Next?” The question for our future A.I. masters might be, as posed by the crazy king himself …

What comes next? / You’ve been freed. / Do you know how hard it is to lead?

You’re on your own. / Awesome. Wow. / Do you have a clue what happens now?

Oceans rise. / Empires fall. / It’s much harder when it’s all your call.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, you tin-can despots. Maybe you’re just too darn smart for your own good! Man – one, machine – two. OK, you win. But now you gotta run the place for the next 4 billion years. And our experience tells us it’s a messy business.

Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.

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