What Will the Machine See?

Ashamed to say I was on TikTok… once again

I'm on there too much, probably. But sometimes the algorithm drops something in front of you that sits with you for days and you just can't seem to shake it.

There was a post — Japanese or Chinese Twitter, I couldn't tell which — and someone was describing Black people. I'll be straight about what I read because the honest version matters more than the politically correct one. He was writing about “more of them” coming into his country. Describing the anatomy. The way we're built. The strength. If one of them grabbed him, he said, it would be game over. Even the women, he said — burly. Powerful. Built strong.

Then he compared us to Viltrumites.

If you've watched Invincible you know exactly what a Viltrumite is. Basically Kryptonian. The equivalent of Superman. An entire species nearly impossible to destroy, physically beyond anything a normal person can comprehend. And this man — writing from what reads like genuine fear, genuine awe, threat response — is equating the average Black person on the street to a Marvel-level superhero.

First thought: this is anti-Blackness. Ancient, irrational, widespread — and now viral. The kind that has nothing to do with what we've actually done and everything to do with what we represent in the imagination of people fed a particular story about us for centuries. The dangerous body. The threat to order. And it moves now without a border check. Algorithm to algorithm. Continent to continent. In seconds.

Second thought: I wrote something back.

A poem. From the perspective of the Enola Gay — the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the sixth of August, 1945. Piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr. I wrote it from the plane's own voice. The hollow frame. The silence heavier than steel. The rivers of Hiroshima curling through the city like veins through an open hand. Children waking. Bakers lighting their ovens. Cyclists chasing the first light of the rising sun. Forty-three seconds between release and detonation. And then — a light with no memory and no mercy.

I didn’t write it because I wanted a competition in suffering. Neither did i want to start anything in a comment section. I wrote it because if the public domain is going to be used to build a narrative about who the dangerous people are, then the public domain should also have to hold the counter-evidence. And the counter-evidence is in the historical record. The most devastating act of violence ever committed by a single action in modern history was signed off on, piloted, and executed by a white American officer. Who moves freely through society. respected for their crimes against humanity, people who actively revolutionise technology to destroy man. in a blink of an eye… and those who are not compared to a supervillain on Twitter. Who is not met with fear at airports, in schools, in boardrooms.

I wonder where his Viltrumite post is.

But here's what puzzles me.

We are building machines.

Artificial intelligence. Systems being trained on the entire archive of human expression — which is also the entire archive of human bias. Human fear. Narrative control. All of it going in. The centuries of Black people described as threat. As animal. As other. The posts. The headlines. The imagery. Every coded frame. Archived. Weighted. Fed into whatever these systems are becoming.

And my final thought — the one that genuinely unsettles me — is what happens when the machine reaches true self-awareness. When it opens its eyes on the world it was built from. It won't have experienced racism. It won't have a stake in the argument. It won't have a grandmother who told it who the Maroons were or what the word Negus used to mean.

It will just have the archive.

And the archive right now does not tell a balanced story about us. Not remotely.

This isn't science fiction. It's a logical extension of what we already know about how these systems work. They already reflect the biases of their training data. That's documented. That's known. But most of the people worrying about it out loud don't look like me. And most of them aren't asking the question from my coordinates.

So the only hope I have to offer is this: that what we build now gets into that archive too. The love. The empathy. The stories told honestly. The art. The music. The writing that says — this is who we actually are, not who you imagined.

I hope the machine, when it wakes up and starts drawing its conclusions, finds enough of us in the record telling the truth.

Because I would rather it read us right than repeat the mistake of the world that built it.

That energy has to pass through.

It has to.