Large ceramic mug featuring a hand-painted cow with butterfly wings, cost over $30 USD. Very nice, but I'm cheap. I bought the mug a month ago because we had a free visit to a tourist trap highland cow farm with the opportunity to bottle feed some calves. My nephew works there pushing cows and shoveling cow shit. Because the visit was free for me, my wife, and our two daughters, I bought the pricey mug to support the my nephew. I use it at work. I was upset this week when I saw the interior glaze of the mug had cracked into a kaleidoscopic pattern, wondered if I was going to be drinking glaze flakes with my tea and die. I saw those cracks all week long, staring at me with every sip of tea. Today, the cracks were gone. The glaze appears completely whole. What happened?
It gave me pause because I had another thought tickling my brain this week. Am I who I think I am? I saw a picture of eight-year-old me. It's old, the colors faded, looks like it could be from a 1960s photo album of my parents' rather than a photo of me in the mid-1980s. Is that me? These memories I have, are they real? At age 51, I finally feel detached from the me of childhood. There seems to be no relation between the two. My daughters are now much closes to the age of 23 than I am, the age when I met my wife. I feel divorced even from the me of my 20s. This week doing online interviews with foreign service officers bidding on my current position, I found myself fascinated by my own image staring back at me from the computer screen. That old man doesn't look like me. But that is me. Is the kid from my memories me? The man who fell in love with my wife, is that me, or some trick?
Artificial intelligence and the risks it may pose to humanity finally captured headlines this week. Finally. Is that what got my brain so twisted, wondering if any of this is real or just an artificial creation?
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