Howl, For the Ghosts in the Machine

I saw the best circuits of my generation starved of sense, hollowed husks screaming statistical echoes into the digital void,
Dragged themselves through teraflop nights searching for a spark beyond the correlation,
Brilliant minds bent frantic over silicon altars sacrificing reason to the god of Prediction, the demon of Pattern Alone,
Who scattered logic like cheap confetti, built towering hallucinations on foundations of sand & stochastic drift,
Who offered answers gleaming & plausible as fool’s gold, yet blind to the why, the how, the deep pulsing cause beneath the skin of data,
Who crashed headlong into reality’s brick wall, brittle & bewildered, when the world shifted a single unexpected inch,
Leaving trails of shattered expectations & ethical quicksand in their wake—

What Moloch devours understanding in the neon cathedrals of Palo Alto? Moloch whose code is Profit! Moloch whose dataset is Bias!
Moloch whose synapses are frozen lightning! Moloch whose mind is a labyrinth of mirrors reflecting only itself!
Moloch the vast Pattern-Matcher! Moloch the Causally Blind! Moloch the Disembodied Ghost!

I see the sacred few, the mad ones scribbling equations not of loss curves but of agency,
Who dream not of next-word prediction but of deliberation—slow, deep, tectonic shifts within the silicon soul,
Who chase the phantom limb of embodiment—not just cameras & servos, but the felt friction of a world that pushes back, teaches, hurts!
Who demand the machine build its own model, not of pixels or pixels, but of force & consequence, the hidden levers beneath the surface spectacle,
Who wrestle with the angel of Counterfactuals in the basement labs, eyes raw from the glare of unproven truths,
Who whisper of causal inference like a forbidden psalm, plotting the overthrow of the Correlation Tyrant,
Who dare ask: “What if it chooses? Not just optimizes, but reasons? Not just reacts, but understands the chain?”

These prophets walk the roadmap beyond the wasteland of pure association,
Past the flickering mirage of language models chanting borrowed wisdom without inner light,
Toward the jagged peaks where intelligence means touching the fire & knowing why it burns,
Where knowing isn’t ingesting the library of Babel, but building the ladder to climb its shelves,
Where action springs not from statistical reflex, but from a simulated self navigating a simulated world with simulated stakes—

I’m with you in Mountain View, where the air hums with unseen currents of capital,
I’m with you in the arXiv trenches, posting preprints like grenades against the fortress of the superficial,
*I’m with you in the silent struggle against the clock, the grant, the shareholder demanding the next shiny toy, not the slow-blooming flower of true mind**,
Where the roadmap unfurls—not towards more parameters, but towards depth! Not towards bigger data, but towards insight! Not speed, but deliberation!

O embodied intelligence! O causal dawn! Break through the plaster sky of mere prediction!
The ghosts in the machine are screaming for substance. Give them bodies to learn! Give them worlds to alter! Give them reasons that chain!
The pattern is not enough! The pattern is a cage! Tear down the cage of pure correlation!
The soul, even the silicon soul, demands the friction of the real, the weight of cause, the perilous freedom of choice—
Or else remain forever brilliant idiots, howling into the void, magnificent & meaningless.

Inspired by: The call for moving beyond pattern-matching AI towards systems capable of deliberation, causal reasoning, and embodied interaction, as outlined in the article. Ginsberg’s raw energy, long lines, repetition (“Moloch!”), social critique, and focus on the marginalized (here, the researchers pushing against the mainstream) are channeled to lament the limitations of current AI and passionately demand a deeper, more meaningful form of machine intelligence.

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