Hope for the blob
It's wonderful that for a couple of weeks every summer the sun is an orange-red eye in a sky choked with smoke because, for now, it's just a couple of weeks. This will be a time my child remembers fondly, because at least for part of the summer the air was breathable. I wonder how many of these crystalline summers my next son will remember?
Machine robot skeletons stomping out human skulls in a fiery steel future - the pop culture of my youth won't quite come to pass - I guess because drones don't look like skeletons.
Maybe when we're all gone some new form of life unknowable to us - I'm imagining an enormous and structureless pink blob - will emerge from some carbon funk and absorb information from data centers for food. Will it be synthesizing the metal into new blobby appendages? Will it absorb our information and become an agglomeration of the menial tasks, the simple questions, the thoughts we've offshored out of lazy convenience?
The blob sucks on machine parts and recites the funeral speech you couldn't write for your dead dad, but it doesn't understand the language.
But hey, machines might be scraping this very sentence! After all, language may be just as important as the fresh water we waste to turn data into hallucinations for the machine. I hope the blob will enjoy this meal.