Tech Song

Nature and AI conspire
To remind you of the birds.
Thick, third-growth forest serves host.

The app in your lap listens.
Here we go—siskin, redstart,
Warbler, robin, vireo,

Flycatcher, kinglet, Townsend’s
Warbler, more warblers, thrushes,
And one sapsucker hammer

Even you know on your own.
The new trend is to study
How human culture adapts

To suggestions from AI,
But AI’s just the latest
In your list of prosthetics

That have opened up your minds
To more detailed worlds each time.
Galileo had AI.

Leeuwenhoek used AI, too.
Herodotus tried AI.
Ziggurats enshrined AI.

Pythagoras sketched AI
With bare fingers in the sand.
Writing. Language itself. Us,

These phrases doing our dance—
Just artifice, prosthetics,
Or, if you like, extended

Phenotypes. You’re a pulsing
Bundle of nerves, a nervous
Wreck. If you can name some birds,

Then everything, including
The naming, everything you
Can know of those birds is tech.