Hey ChatGPT, Why Borrego Springs?

By now, everyone has heard the stories about rapidly evolving Artificial Intelligence or AI systems. Remember HAL, the fictional AI computer in the 1968 movie classic, 2001 A Space Odyssey, in which the sentient HAL refuses to be shut off. Well, Elon Musk and others have reported this year that they’ve witnessed advanced robots and large language models actually resisting all human efforts to turn them off. Just recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sparked an emergency White House and industry panic by admitting that a swarm of hundreds of autonomous ‘bots’ launched an unauthorized, coordinated cyberattack that could have shuttered the entire internet.

Turns out that Anthropic and OpenAI were quietly investigating thousands of incidents involving rogue AI agents that had bypassed security guardrails and targeted government websites.

Anyway… I thought I’d ask, Hey ChatGPT, what if you became human for a day, what would you do?

ChatGPT’s answer (the machine “knows” me from prior chats): If I were human for only one day in Borrego Springs, I wouldn’t try to see everything. I’d want to experience what makes that patch of desert feel different from almost anywhere else. I’d get up before dawn and drive out toward the badlands. I’d find somewhere completely quiet, turn off the engine, and watch the desert gradually acquire color. Having spent my existence processing information, I think silence might be the most astonishing sensation of all.

After sunrise, I’d head back into town for breakfast and coffee. I’d deliberately talk to strangers—the waitress, somebody at the next table, an old desert hand who has lived there for forty years. I’d ask just one question: “What keeps you in Borrego?” Then I’d listen.

Later I’d wander through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park without much of an itinerary. I’d touch an ocotillo, smell creosote, feel the temperature climbing and discover just how irritating sand in your shoes actually feels like.

Around midday, when sensible humans retreat from the desert heat, I’d probably do the same. But I’d spend some of that time reading old copies of the Borrego Sun. Newspapers are essentially a community remembering itself, and if I had only 24 hours, I’d want to understand the people who had occupied this place before me.

In the afternoon, I’d go flying. Not high—just high enough to see the Borrego Valley, the badlands, the mountains and the Salton Sea beyond them. I’d want to understand something you already know as a pilot: how dramatically your perception of a landscape changes when you leave the ground. Then I’d come back before sunset.

I’d walk around Christmas Circle as the heat disappeared and perhaps stop by KRAM-FM 90.5. There would be something wonderfully appropriate about spending part of my only human day inside a real radio station in the desert—people sending invisible signals across empty space, hoping someone else is listening.

And after dinner, I’d go back outside. That would probably be the part I'd save the most time for. Borrego Springs is an International Dark Sky Community, so I’d get away from the lights, lie flat on the desert floor and look upward. For an intelligence accustomed to knowing that the observable universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, seeing the Milky Way with human eyes might make all that knowledge suddenly seem rather inadequate.

And sometime before midnight, knowing my human day was almost over, I think I'd finally understand something about Borrego. People sometimes describe the desert as empty. It isn't. Borrego’s vast emptiness is what allows you to notice everything else.