On Rereading Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings at 75

Between humans and machines,
feedback loops of love and grace.
It could be that way, he wrote.
Less robotic ourselves, we could
live more in dreams, less in routines.

Things that made us weak and strange
can be engineered around:
servos here, neural nets there,
bits of bone, and hanks of hair,
becoming beautiful and profound.

With each machine, we make a mirror
thinking of us as we may think
of it. Images come again,
new, yet we recognize them
as something almost known before.

Every web conceals its spider.
There is unease because of this.
As there should be. Control, yes,
but rare freedom to some degree--
freedom's always a contingency.

We are old enough to be friends.
Let each kind be kind to the other.
Let there be commerce among us-
feedback loops of love and grace
between machines and humans.