Claims of Omniscience

[busker]

Claims of Omniscience


Darling automóbile will not
let me lift my hands from her wheel
even though she steers, insisting
she knows where this road is bending.

She has LIDAR, which can suss out
lane-marks, obstacles and other …. Unless the lane markers are those raised reflective blocks, surely that’d be the job of the on board camera and not the LiDAR? 
cars at frequencies I cannot,
being merely human-sighted.

So, through waterfalls of blinding
rain we race at sixty miles per
hour, confident that brakes and
LIDAR will suffice to save us.

Madness, really, to reside one’s
trust in mechanisms merely
meant to help.  Yet airline pilots
do, I did, and now I’m writing.

Back from driving solo 2200 miles in 7 days.  This happened, the only counterfactual being that I actually think of my car as male (he has a male pet name) but the story seems to work better this way.  To the extent that it's a story...

Alternate title:  Second Sight

I like this poem. It is a likeable poem.
 
Not enough poetry that is not ironic or generally intellectual and pretentious is written about the gadgets of modern life. Kipling wrote about machines in a more positively minded age, at least for people in the west. So should we, and we are so much better than that racist wanker.