Distaste for Big Tech is one of the few headline topics on which my conservative mother and I agree. We sit at her kitchen table, trying to outdo each other with hell-in-a-handbasket reports.
Well, did you hear about the restaurant where people can have dinner with AI dates?
Or tech companies forcing regular people to foot the electricity bills for their environment-destroying data centers!
Every time I hit reply, Gmail generates a response written in “my voice”—and every time, I delete it, instead choosing the unexpected word, the random anecdote, always trying to throw AI off my track. I don’t read the notes AI sends me after meetings, don’t want my son going to AI with relationship questions someday, don’t want AI making military decisions. I’m not a fan, is what I’m saying.
When I had a recent MRI, the type of scan that took two hours when I was a toddler took 15 minutes.
Of course, faster MRIs are good news. I was 14 months old when I first held my body perfectly still inside the tunnel of a scanner. When they found the tumors on my spine, it meant, among other things, many more unsedated trips inside that passage. Every few months, then every six, then every year until I was 9 when a surgeon hooked and screwed metal rods into my back to keep my trunk from crushing my lungs and made further imaging with the available technology impossible.
I don’t remember that first MRI, but it’s not hard for me to conjure a memory of the space. The rough white sheet covering me up to my chest, my nose and cheeks chilly. The smell of sterile floors, gowns, instruments on clinking metal trays. The tickle on my face I refused to scratch. And then—thud, thud, thud, BUZZZ.
I wonder how long it took me to learn what to do next. I’d shoot off in a rocket, leaving my body for the weightlessness of outer space—among the stars, unable to tell if I was right side up or upside down. Out there, everything was tiny and time held no power. I wa
