Intuition Guiding Intellect Poem by Ananta Madhavan

A wise and scholarly old man told me how
Human ingenuity and genius had made machines
Take over tasks. Our ‘to-do' errands are tedious.
They seem so repetitive; as in a factory,
Assembling complex parts precisely in place,
So that the conveyor belt moves to the final spot
As brand-new television sets, ready to be wrapped and sent
By waiting trucks to stores and shops for sale.
Robots may perhaps be programmed to replace
Our kind of error-prone, self-excusing drones.

The guru conceded we humans have the gift of Reason.
We have invented machines like the robot man,
Although this creature feeds on complex codes beyond
The ken of common citizens to comprehend
The scope of Science Fiction as imagination's Fact.

The kernel implies and contains the whole. We must learn
To draw out the ramifications of a truly new notion
In a flash of lightning intuition, to realize it
To the last and least detail. Will a new H.G. Wells
Sketch out a Techno Fiction of a Robot that can
Save us from selfish perdition, extinction en masse?

Let Intuition guide the power of Intellect.