The James Webb Telescope that was designed to help us see
what happened billions of years sooner after the Big Bang
than any telescope before,
was brilliantly built
to answer many questions that we did not know we had.
The answers that we give to these are generally bad,
and are just like the gilt
on lilies that smart folk ignore,
answers that experts explode, though errors boomerang,
polluting us, misled hoi polloi, for eternity.
Just as Almighty God did not rely upon the power of His quite mind-numbing numen,
so humans should not on AI, which should perhaps be called II, Intelligence that is Inhuman.
In “Webb Telescope Prepares to Ascend, With an Eye Toward Our Origins: The biggest space telescope in history aims to answer astronomy’s oldest question: How did we get from the Big Bang to here?” NYT, 12/20/21 Dennis Overbye quotes a statement by Klaus Pontoppidan, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute, who said at a recent news conference: “The telescope was built to answer questions we didn’t know we had.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
