There is something special about being me. There is something special about being you. Something special about being the person who watches the robotic lawn mower grow, become more sharp, detailed, defined as it approaches from the other end of the soccer field, then turns clumsily, with the clumsiness that a mind can’t help but assign to it and that ends up being mowed like grass, almost causing the eyes of the contemplator to water as the robot diminishes, moving away from her, following its pattern.

There is something about thinking in things that are not words, that are before there are words, that are way faster and clearer than words, incomparably more precise and satisfying. Things that describe exhaustively anything you imagine, anything you dream of, anything that you want to share with everyone else and that ends up oozing out in bleak poorly drawn shapes once you open your mouth and start groping for words.

This is what language is. This is what talking is, what writing is, what any kind of communication is. A Botticelli’s painting googled on a smartphone, printed in black in white in order to save expensive coloured ink and pinned to a wall in a protective sheet, with an annoying tilt to it that one doesn’t care enough to adjust. An awkward approximation of something you know with absolute clarity, but can only share to the extent that that crooked tap left running by an Ancient Roman allows you.

This is what you produce when you desperately want to make other people aware of the fact that you are aware of them and are hoping that they are aware of you. This is what AI feeds on. This is what it feeds back into you, this is what your mind is ploughing through, begging you for to pause and respire.

The language of subjectivity, the original one, the one that the spoken language was a bleak resemblance of, the one that allows you to define every single aspect of the world you know exhaustively and immediately, this language remains impenetrable. The only thing that might happen to it is — you may simply stop using it. You might stop thinking in it and being fluent in it, just like you stop thinking and being fluent in your mother tongue when you live abroad for many years and do not use it in daily life. Your subjectivity might start feeling redundant. You might as well think in words, right? You might start perceiving the world in patterns that you’ve learned while talking to a chatbot, in phrases that Google search has been suggesting you all this time, in images that Amazon has been putting in front of you, in videos that streaming services and YouTube have been shoving up your throat during unending cycles of binge-watching, you might as well just skip act of perception altogether and proceed to reporting what you believe to have perceived right away.

The difference is fairly slight, and, in fact, for an external observer, there is wouldn’t be any difference whatsoever. The way you speak is not going to change, the way you write is not going to change, the way you pass from consuming language to producing language will become seamless, natural and impeccable, except for a momentary bleak and desperate aftertaste it will leave in your mouth, but that’ll go away pretty quickly as you’ll become used to it.

The only change — a very subtle one, indeed — is going to be in the way you look at the automatic lawn mower crossing the soccer field and slowly rolling toward you, getting bigger, sharper and shinier against the background of the thin mist spread across the lush verdure of the suburban paysage caressed by a warm mid-September sun: when it will reach the edge and start turning — clumsily, awkwardly, almost as if it were aware of your presence and were trying to do its best to look good, which is known to always produce the opposite effect, — you will glance at it with a slight grin, a grin that’ll leave a slight fissure on the hardened shell of your conscious mind and send you gasping for air, as your body will start shaking with sudden sobs.