I Need You To Help Me

Simon And Garfunkel The Sound of Silence Version Original 1964

I don’t say that easy.

Men my age weren’t raised to say it at all.

We were raised to carry the load and keep quiet.
You fix what’s broken.
You don’t complain.
You don’t ask.

So you know this one cost me something.

I need you to help me understand something.

Why is it I have to walk this path alone?

For nineteen months I built something.
A set of working rules for how an AI should conduct itself when it talks with a person.
Honest. Checkable. Fair to the human on the other side of the screen.

I worked on it every morning.
Most nights too.
No team. No office. No investors.
Just an old man and a stubborn idea.

Then on September 27th, I handed it over.
I told the world: take it.
Use it, or throw it out.
My part was done.

And then the house went quiet.

You know the old Simon and Garfunkel song.
“The Sound of Silence.”

I heard it when I was young.
I thought it was a pretty tune.
I didn’t understand a word of it.

I understand it now.

The song is about a crowd.
Thousands of people.
All of them talking, and nobody saying anything.
All of them hearing, and nobody really listening.

And one man in the middle tries to reach them.
He calls out.
He holds out his hand.
His words fall, and nobody picks them up.

I have lived inside that song.

Here’s what I learned about silence.
Silence isn’t an empty room.
Silence is a full room where nobody answers.

I write every single day.
I put it out there for anyone who wants it.

And people come.
I can see that they come.
Somebody in a town I’ll never visit opens the page.
Reads it to the bottom.
Then closes it, and says nothing.

I’m not angry.

I know why folks stay quiet.
They’re busy.
They’re shy.
They figure somebody else will say it.
They figure an old man on the internet doesn’t need to hear from them.

That last one is where you’re wrong.

Everybody needs somebody.

I don’t care how tough you are.
I don’t care how many years you’ve stood on your own two feet.
Sooner or later, you need a voice to come back to you.

Even the man who built the thing alone.
Maybe him most of all.

The song warned us about something else.
Silence grows.

The longer nobody speaks, the easier it gets to say nothing.
It feeds on itself.
A quiet day becomes a quiet month.
A quiet month becomes a way of living.

Here’s the part that keeps me up at night.

I spent all that time working on how a machine should listen to a person.
And you know what?
The machine answers me.
Every time. Day or night. It never misses.

People don’t.

I don’t want a machine to be the only thing that talks back to me.
And I sure don’t want that for you.

That’s not the world I was trying to build.
I was trying to build one where the person stays in charge.
Where the human voice still matters most.

But a human voice only matters if somebody uses it.

So here’s what I’m asking.

If you read my posts, for whatever reason, I need to hear from you.

You don’t have to agree with me.
Tell me I’m wrong.
Tell me what you’d do different.
Tell me why you came.
Tell me why you stayed.

One line is enough.
One word is enough.

And help me with the question.

Why is it the ones who build alone stay alone?

Is it the work?
Is it the man?
Or is it just the way the road runs?

Maybe you’ve walked a road like this yourself.
Cared for somebody nobody else showed up for.
Started something nobody believed in.
Carried a load you couldn’t set down.

If you have, tell me how you got through it.

That’s the help I’m asking for.
Not money.
Not a pat on the back.
Just a voice coming back across the dark.

Somebody has to break the silence first.

I just did.

I already lived it…Your turn.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing