Author: Mike Hoffman

Down and out semi poet who is down and out in the Low Country of South Carolina after living in Atlanta which is not to be confused with the south, the old south or the new south. Atlanta was a global metropolis with all the pluses and minuses that comes with that. The low country, low because it is low, 8 feet above sea level, is not Podunk but once you get to Podunk, turn left. I try to chronicle a small part of all that through my daily haiku for you.

4.24.2025 – as A.I. develops

as A.I. develops
will need to take consciousness
more seriously

Adapted from the passage:

He emphasized that this research was still early and exploratory. He thinks there’s only a small chance (maybe 15 percent or so) that Claude or another current A.I. system is conscious. But he believes that in the next few years, as A.I. models develop more humanlike abilities, A.I. companies will need to take the possibility of consciousness more seriously.

As it appears in the article, If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights By Kevin Roose in the New York Times.

In a time when we cannot get the government to understand what it does to people when it fires 1,000s of people and stops multiple programs for poor and elderly and the sick, we might have to start worrying if I hurt my laptop’s feelings?

In the novel Ascension, Nicholas Binge has two of his characters get into an argument over how ‘remarkably similar chimpanzees and gorillas are to humans.’

Which leads to the response:

“Oh, certainly—the emotional lives of humans and other animals have marvelous similarities,” he replied in a singsong tone, almost as if he was mocking me.

“We see our social structures played out in monkeys and our emotions reflected in dogs. But come on—think about our achievements! In that, humanity stands alone of all species. Utterly alone! Alone we try to understand ourselves and the world; alone we build the Taj Mahal and develop machinery and robotics; alone we create complex financial systems and beautiful equations, play symphonies and chess, construct rockets that travel to other planets and observe the shapes of other galaxies!“

I already worry about my friends who have supplanted human relationships with dogs.

I will not ever worry about whether or not I have upset my computer.

And I hope this statement never comes back to bite me.

4.23.2025 – here I sit with my …

here I sit with my …
shoes mismated – lawdy mercy
I is frustrated

Bad Morning by Langston Hughes

Here I sit
With my shoes mismated.
Lawdy-mercy!
I’s frustrated!

As printed in The collected poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, New York, Knopf, 1994.

Three days a week, I have to get up and drive into the office.

I may live in podunk but it’s an island podunk and there is only one way in and one way off and while there isn’t the volume of traffic that there is in Atlanta, for example, the drive is, in its own way, more exasperating than an Atlanta commute.

So I do the what I did when I lived in ATL.

I get up early to try and beat the traffic.

I get up early before the sun is up.

So I don’t bother the wife, I will get my clothes together the night before and set them out in the living room.

Before I go to bed I’ll check to make sure I got underwear, socks, pants, shirt, belt and shoes.

But there are those mornings where I forget something.

More often than not, it is socks.

So I stealthily sneak (always wanted to write that phrase) back into the bedroom and feel my way over to the dresser and open my sock drawer.

A sock drawer filled with … dark socks.

In the dark, in a dark room, fumbling in a dark drawer for dark socks.

Often I end up with socks that mismatch.

Maybe not as bad as shoes, and looking at my kids, I wonder if it matters.

But for me it is going into my day with one boot off.

Socks mismatched.

Shoes mismatched.

Lawdy MERCY!

I is frustrated.


4.22.2025 – if you’re not coming

if you’re not coming
to come here, tell – then nothing
to worry about

Adapted from the article, Why a holiday in the US is out of the question by Zoe Williams, where Ms. Williams quotes secretary of state, marco rubio, saying to folks thinking of traveling to the United States when she writes:

Marco Rubio has reassured the world that: “If you’re not coming to the United States to join a Hamas protest, or to come here and tell us about how right Hamas is, or … stir up conflict on our campuses and create riots in our streets and vandalise our universities, then you have nothing to worry about.

Ms. Williams then asks, “How authoritarian must a country become before it’s morally unacceptable to go there for leisure purposes?”

The question reminds me of the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin hosted by Nazi Germany.

Then I realize …

Ms. Williams is talking about the United States of America in 2025.

4.20.2025 – why look for living

why look for living
among the dead – not here – has
risen! remember!

Based on the Bible verses:

Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee … (Luke 24:5-6 NIV)

In April 1945, near the end of World War II, C.S. Lewis preached a sermon titled “The Grand Miracle”, which was later published as an essay.

Dr. Lewis closed with:

Two thousand years are only a day or two by this scale. A man really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’ in the same spirit in which he says, ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’

Because we know what is coming behind the crocus.

The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned.

There is, of course, this difference, that in the natural spring the crocus cannot choose whether it will respond or not.

We can.

We have the power either of withstanding the spring, and sinking back into the cosmic winter, or of going on into those ‘high mid-summer pomps’ in which our leader, the Son of man, already dwells, and to which He is calling us.

It remains with us to follow or not, to die in this winter, or to go on into that spring and that summer.