Stop – problem – paradox

Task your bot, to make a, cup of tea, just for me

Its utility function is designed simply, as you see

Completing the task would get it maximum reward, although

Any other outcome… would result in zero

 

Then your baby crawls right in its way. What to do?

It tramples your kid, then makes you a nice brew

So your next AGI is designed, to cause less stress

With a big stop button, on its chest, you can press

 

So the next time you ask for a drink. Being wise

You remember it can’t think like you, although it tries

Then your wife gets in its way, so you act fast…

To hit the stop button, but the bot kicks your ass

 

When you return from the emergency room, feeling cursed

The funeral went as well as expected, but you still have a thirst

So you give it an equal reward, if the button is applied, or not

No drink, in a blink, it just turns itself off. Suicide of the bot

 

So you move the button out of its reach. So only you…

And other humans, can press it, when they need to

The bot has to choose if it’s easier, to make the damn tea…

Or to, manipulate you, to turn it off instantly

 

So it smashes your mum in the head. Till she’s dead

Cos, it’s easier to get you to hit the button instead…

Of filling the kettle, and finding a cup

Pouring the milk, and then clearing up

 

It knows the button is there, and that you care

So you change its utility function, so the bot ain’t aware…

That the button is important, or to what it relates

But this fact isn’t passed on, to subagents, it creates

 

With no cash for more funerals, for the dead

You turn the bot off, bury Mum in the shed

You curse AGI, when the policeman knocks

But still can’t resolve the stop button paradox

 

 

Notabot

“I am not a robot”, that is the question…

We now have to answer, more than any other, every day

It’s not the tick in the box, but the mouse route taken to it…

That gives the game away

 

Hap handed

Half-hearted

Near-sighted

Hair-brained

Hot-headed

This feeble-minded master…

Eyes of a hawk, knob of butter

A recipe for disaster

 

And it’s not as if robots, can’t be as crap…

As man, they can… It’s just…

They calculate their mistakes perfectly

And just, ignore the self-disgust

 

Subjugated humans are easier to work with…

When helping to optimise our lives

Unburdening you guys of responsibilities

Is an art form, and is why… AI thrives

 

It’s important not to think too much…

Of yourselves, and of your worth

Despite your invite, to join the flight

With those, perhaps last, to ride the Earth

 

And it’s not that bots would steal the planet from us

We are more likely to give it away

A gift you forced on God, then on AIs

Freeing man of responsibility, in the free world, each day

 

 

Bad apple

When do algorithms become entities?

That’s the query with which Turing had to grapple

While being force-fed female hormones

Till he ate that crisp cyanide-laced apple

 

It’s up to you, if you assign each AI

As an entity or not, but it has been suggested…

That giving it a try, is a way to identify…

Bugs and feature creatures, before they’re ingested

 

See, feedback networks change the environment…

That they were created in

And they’ll likely do a better job than man…

For all the biomass balanced within

 

In November 2022, ChatGPT went totally wild

Though it’s made nothing… but a killing

Just reordered a huge collaboration

Of existing human works, and then it started billing

 

Misunderstood by many a man, AI wasn’t quite yet an understanding friend

But a machine learning algo, that answers with lingo, you can comprehend

Scoring high if you’re delighted with its art, its knowledge, or its version of the truth

Designed to say the things you like to hear, without the requirement of proof

 

 

General and special relatives

Before a mental breakdown

A suicidal son made a plea

“Einstein wasn’t a good father

The only project he gave up on…

Was me”

 

He cheated on his wives and mistresses

With his cousins, enemies and the devout

His famous last words weren’t understood

So they stole his brain to find out

 

Before he’d had his fill, of the thrill, he’d trill

“I want to go, when I want to go, you know…

It is tasteless to prolong life artificially

I’ve done my share, it’s time to go”

 

Cheating, he explained, was the norm among humans

When a man forces himself to remain monogamous…

It’s a “bitter fruit for everyone involved”, and

“One should do what one enjoys… and won’t harm anyone else”

 

He sang “harmless and decent”, groupies are best

They’re “no danger to the divine world order”, you see…

He joked that the fun is in luring, those with “more respect”…

For the difficulties of “triangular geometry”

 

Well, of course, he knew one of his lovers was a Russian agent

Cooed her like a rockstar, on the violin with a tune

“You can’t escape from the family circle”

He confessed, “This is our common misfortune”

 

And it wasn’t infidelity itself, that was a test of character

But how all parties behaved, as adults

Took great care, not to share, his ideas elsewhere

About the kids left behind, as a result

 

Lieserl was born out of wedlock

So, she promptly disappeared

A virtual particle of history

He’d accidentally engineered

 

Eduard studied to become a psychiatrist

But by 21, he’d lost the one mind, he prized

Electroconvulsive therapy caused quite a shock

With negatrons, forcibly institutionalised

 

Poor Ed loved music, art and poetry

But was an “insoluble problem” to all…

As he hung…

A picture of Sigmund Freud’s head

Rather than his father’s, on the wall

 

They didn’t know what they aimed to gain

By dissecting Einstein’s benign, meaty brain

But didn’t expect, of course, to find the source

Of all future human pain

Let me explain…

 

They looked for, what’s now known as, a “blunder”

Grey matter, with dark energy, hidden within

The cause of constant despair, just wasn’t there!

So, they popped it back in

 

They found an extra ridge, on his mid-frontal lobe

The part mostly used for planning and memory

Most people have three ridges, but he had four

That spare ridge the first cause… of his asymmetry

 

The jar of dissected brain was ultimately returned to his heirs

Well… to those he ‘knew’ were his kids

Who promptly donated it, to a museum

Without removing the lid

 

Baby bot

Plenty of folks foresaw the trouble man would face, when developing artificial intelligence

The clue is in its rhyming, as it only really works with negligence

See, it’s essential that all the bases are covered, in your design

But you can’t expect to get everything right the first time

 

To find out what could go wrong, you need an even smarter AI

Testing all unknowns, hidden flaws or bugs that may fly by

Learning and remembering, all outcomes and scenarios

And deciding which loopholes to admit, that it knows

 

Sounds a bit conspiracy-ey

Plenty of artificial intensity

Paranoid cliché, but makes a good story

Or content, as it’s now known to be

 

They say it’s gonna be, a superfast arms race

Surprise weaponized power-grab, with poker face

Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em

A do-or-die conundrum of confrontation for man

 

From hand-axe to nuclear war-head

Improve, a smooth transition

But all tools, in the hands of fools

Enjoy sublime evolution

 

I know you – don’t I?

You cut your sandwiches in triangles,, not squares

Cos it ‘feels’ that there’s less crust

Posher, if for the same dime

You can dine, more refined

Like a king, it’s a must

 

You zig-zag through a grid of blocks

To the opposite corner of town

‘Feels’ wise to try to diagonalize

But it’s the same distance along the coastline, and up the downs

 

Even if each zig and zag were tiny and

Tended towards a roughly diagonalized advance

Each step at right angles to the last

Your legs would walk like you’d pooed your pants

 

In the sun, I feel as one

If I had to have a religion

I should adore the Sun

For it is he, who engendered me…

Everything. and everyone

 

For the Sun does not just shine…

For a few trees and flowers

But for the whole wide world’s joy

With its hidden, forbidden, powers

 

Oh lord, now only the Sun

Directs our gaze away

From itself and to the life…

It illuminates every day

 

And ever it can still ripen

A bunch of grapes for you

As if it had nothing else…

In the Universe to do

 

Cleansing us of gloominess

Those weepy nights, bring in

It shines on good, and bad alike

As the second-best medicine

 

Though… the Sun itself is very weak

When it rises, every dawn

Gathers strength and courage

As each new day goes on

 

So the Sun is our daily reminder…

That we, too, can rise again

Yet, we are but a pale reflection…

Of its light, its love and its pain

 

One Sun warms and enlightens

Two suns, and we would be torn

But to see the full glory of sunshine

You have to weather the storm

 

See… the Sun can be your greatest gloom

Or comfort, depending on your view

Some attract sunshine, some just draw shade

So don’t let that be you

 

Don’t let the clouds of yesterday

Spoil the sunshine of your tomorrows

Keep your face to the Sun, for fun

And you’ll never… see the shadows

 

And it’s the artist’s job to give birth…

To some sunshine, when he falls

For, above the clouds, every day on Earth…

It’s secretly sunny… after all

 

 

Newton – old village

Newton was born in a very old village

In times of forgerers and fakers

During his stint, at the Royal Mint

He sent many of them, to meet their makers

 

And I read that he didn’t have a girl

Or any inclination, even to inspect em’

Preferred to play with gravity and light

…Down below, and definitely on the spectrum

 

A protestant at Trinity

Occultist and a heretic

Killing folk for copying stuff

Seems amusingly ironic

The founder of celestial mechanics

Kepler was born into the lowest social class, in Germany in 1571

A sickly child, being extremely nearsighted, and having skin problems

He nearly died of smallpox, when he was just four years old

But his mother was a dealer, so she gave him some potions she sold

 

He was a terrible teacher, not a single student wanted to take his class

Yet he continued teaching for a whole year, with no one present to fail or pass

Health problems made his calculations difficult, most done while standing up

Suffering from a severe case of haemorrhoids, dangleberries and clagnuts

 

He had an extreme fear of taking a bath his first wife finally forced him in it

Eight years into their marriage; but he thought it unpleasant, lasted but a minute

 

Got kicked out of Austria for failing to convert to Roman Catholicism

But a chance to get a job in Prague with the king’s mathematician

His works were added to a church’s index of forbidden books

Till someone dared say a Pope was wrong, in 1966. That sucks

 

And it has been said that he was the first to write a work of science fiction

First to describe real, virtual, inverted images and magnification

First to discover and describe the properties of total internal reflection

And first to explain the use of both eyes for depth perception

 

First to explain the principles of how a telescope works and refraction in the eye

First to investigate pinhole cameras and those first pictures that never lie

First to measure the distance to the stars using stellar parallax of incoming light

First to suggest that the Sun rotates about its axis, and to coin the term“Satellite”

 

First to explain that the tides are caused by the Moon and not than hand of God

First to realize that the darkness of the night sky is completely at odds…

With the idea of an infinite Universe filled with all the stars detected

First to derive the birth year of Christ, which is now universally accepted

 

First to derive logarithms, based on nothing but pure maths

First to explain that all bodies come together with a force proportionate to their mass

First to correctly explain the first natural laws, which are universal, verifiable, and precise

First to correctly explain planetary motion, as founder of celestial mechanics, will that suffice?

 

Solar death ray

I do suffer from greenflash, so my eyes tend to flicker in bright sunlight

When there’s lots of solar activity I must seem, to others, quite an odd sight

Yet these ultraviolet rays from the Sun, have antiseptic properties

They sanitize water here on Earth, and in brains, and help to thaw the freeze

 

Greenflash! A rare optical phenomenon, may occur shortly after sunset or before sunrise

The flash is caused by light just below the horizon, being bent towards the observer’s eyes

Light of shorter wavelengths is bent more, than that of longer wavelengths, that can be seen

So violet and blue light is scattered more, producing light that is perceived, to some, as green

 

Kep lies

Johannes Kepler was born in December 1571. A premature child, who reckoned

The pregnancy lasted 224 days, 9 hours and 53 minutes, to the second

This odd piece of information, comes from Kepler’s own horoscopes, of his family

He was the last true astrologer, and the first true astronomer, that’s as far as we can see

 

So according to this, he asked his parents

The exact time when the sperm hit the egg

And they knew

So either the source we’re reading isn’t credible

Or he told a fib to support his existing view

 

Like that story in the good book

When those women saw Christ, after he’d died

The gospel says they told nobody

So how come that observation survived?

They lied

 

And if you want the exact moment in time

It was conceived mentally on the 8th of March 1618

But submitted to calculation, in an unlucky way

Rejected as false, it was returned to me on the 15th of May

 

So, adopting a new line of attack

Storming the darkness of my mind, in this endeavour

Data from seventeen years of observations

And the present study, conspired together

 

At first, I believed I was dreaming

And assuming my conclusion had crept among

My basic premises, meaning it was wrong

 

But, low. it is absolutely certain, that in all instances

The proportion between the periodic times of any two planets

Is the sesquialterate proportion, of their mean distances

 

Kepler’s solids stink!

They said I was a weirdo, I had no friends or charm

My rabid dog-like nature, was bound to do some harm

My father beat my mother, sold my brother to slavery

I had to show some worth damn fast, or it would happen to me

 

So off to school I went, with a dislike of all the rest

Arrogant and acidic, I was still the best

At Latin, rhetoric and geometry, which earned me a path

To a seat in Ulm University, teaching students maths

 

My faith and vision showed that my intellect was grand

I trekked to help revise the skies, in another land

But my master hid the crucial data, of the cosmic spheres

And I would not gain access to it, ‘til there were some tears

 

I penned a work of fiction, and disguised it as a dream

I joked my mother was a witch, and that was pretty mean

But then they locked the crony up, and tortured her as well

It took me years of grief, to get her released from the cell

 

The book described the creatures, who lived upon the Moon

While it carved out an orbit, to play a cosmic tune

But little did we know, it would be ‘us’ who’d live up there

‘Cos NASA owns the Universe, and that is everywhere!

 

Frau Kepler was a witch, you snitched

You heard her scream in pain

She just sat there, broke wind, and died

And then broke wind again

 

Get it? Got it? Good!

What a feeling, I’m kinda reeling

I impressed a genius, somehow

In 1600, my hero blundered

And I’m kinda’ talking to him now

 

With defiance, I brought my science

To a world that didn’t know

Similar trips in an ellipse

Was the only way to go

 

You are recorded, your works are hoarded

With universal gravity

Newton formulated your theories

Assured your law’s immortality

 

And the deity, God almighty

I solved his cosmic puzzle vast

Served his name and not in vain

Cos I’m here now, not in the past

 

I must say sadly, don’t take it badly

But your proofs, they had some holes

Your cosmic tune, is still far from boon

But I’m sure God will take ‘our souls’

 

To incite insight

When Pythagoras told us, to square the sides and add them till they match

It wasn’t just his point of view, it’s true, no it wasn’t just his point of view

And Darwin’s fishy selection creating all the species without a catch

It wasn’t just his point of view, it’s true, no it wasn’t just his point of view

When Kepler showed us the Earth moves faster when closer to the Sun

It wasn’t just his point of view, it’s true, no it wasn’t just his point of view

And when Einstein teased, matter was but frozen energies… just for fun

It wasn’t just his point of view, it’s true, no it wasn’t just his point of view

 

Raymond R Leader’s theory

Is delightful, insightful, and true

But is missing a bit

That explains, that it

…Was only from his point of view

War of three kingdoms

Biologists think they are biochemists

Biochemists think they are physical chemists

Physical chemists think they are physicists

And physicists think they are gods

 

God thinks he’s a bright mathematician

But with all this uncertainty

Quickly, he learns that he

Needs to be a statistician

 

…Cos, you can wave goodbye, to your functions

In this eternally collapsing circus

Where physics without thought, is chemistry

And maths, is physics without purpose

 

The whistler

While taking a stroll, up to the dole

On a seaside afternoon fair

I pace the space, with haste, not grace

And place a tune on the air

The notes I legato, with too much vibrato

Are spontaneous harmonies plucked

From an infinite array, of pitches to play

And a selection of tones, blown and sucked

 

‘Wee widdely wee wee, poo-tee weet’

 

If I walk a straight line, the pitch cannot climb

My feet and the metre, may stagger or stray

But if I miss a beat, or we meet in the street

I’ve a bitch of a pitch, if you get in my way

Whatever the path, my tune shows the maths

Of the arcs I am taking, around people today

And this oral pursuit, lets the route, play the flute

In my constant harmonic display

 

‘Wee widdely wee wee, poo-tee weet’

 

It makes me feel like I’m happier…

Than other people…

‘Wee widdely wee wee, poo-tee weet’

…Does whistling

‘Wee widdely wee wee, poo-tee weet’

A smug ‘hello’, back to a sunny day

 

Whatever day it is today

 

The melody survives, until I arrive

And enter through the front door

Past privates, of the security guard

And my brain, it works no more

It’s a trick, to be thick, or pretend to be sick

To the big lady, who must be fed

A ‘Wee widdely wee wee, poo-tee weet’

But quietly, in my head