Humans want to be machine...
Nazım Hikmet, 1923
AI wants to be human...
Stanislav Lem, 1961
I want to be
machine…
Trump, rumble,
rumble!
trak tiki tak trak!
Being a machine is what I want!
This originates from my skeleton, my brain, and my flesh!
I am frantically trying to subdue every dynamo, like a whirling dervish!
Auto-draisine locomotives are dashing through my veins as my salivating tongue licks the copper wires!
Trak tiki tak, trrrrump, trrrrump…
Being a machine is what I want!
I will undoubtedly find a solution, and I will only be pleased with it, really.
The day I attached a double screw to my tail and mounted a turbine on my belly!
Trrrrump!Trak tiki tak!
Being a machine is what I want!
Nazım Hikmet, 1923 [with contribution of Veysel Batmaz]
Nazım Hikmet Ran, the Turkish poet and political activist, is one of the greatest literary figures ever to emerge from Turkey. Not only a communist committed to revolution, but also a romantic who was passionately in love with his country and his people, Hikmet was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and sentenced in 1938 to twenty-eight years imprisonment. Although an international campaign helped to secure his release under an amnesty in 1950, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1951, where he died in 1963 stripped of his Turkish citizenship. The poem, "Makinalaşmak İstiyorum-I want to be a machine," he wrote in 1923 in the Soviet Union.
