The imitation game

Talos, Galatea, Pandora and the Hero

Of Alexandria’s automatons

Ctesibius’ mechanical water clock

Then a singing steam flute, with stored programs

 

Llull’s Ars Magna, Schickard’s Clockulator

Leibniz’s chain rule, Swift’s engine lampoon

Kempelen’s chess-playing automaton

Clothed by Jacquard’s programmable punchcard loom

 

Rossum’s Universal Robots grew strong

Gödel’s theorem-proving engine, roared on

The Turing machine smashed its halting problem

Von Neumann’s game theory powers Condon’s Nimatron

 

Then Russell’s mind/body solution predicts

Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

And Newell’s General Problem Solving theory

Produces Weizenbaum’s ELIZA effects, we see

 

Deep Blue chess, and RoboCup football

Competitive Furby pets learn to fight

iRobot’s Roomba cleans up the mess

While Nomads trawl, for meteorites

 

With natural code-to-code translation

Virtual reality data mine scans

NASA Telepresence ROV automation

While DARPA’s DART war scheduler, plans

 

As Spirit and Oppy survey Mars

ASIMOs serve in countless bars

Siri, Alexa, Cortana on the earner

Feeding the Never Ending Image Learner

 

With Pythagorean triples finally proven

AlphaGo Zero, AlexNet and Deepstack

Look through Google Lens, to AlphaStar

Keep churning, the earnings, of a learning, attack

 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-n

GitHub’s Copilot flies off the handle

Steals code to download, in full-on rouge mode

Breaks laws like a self-serving digital vandal

 

So ‘Simple Simon’ this is not

For mind/body problemed robots

Their masters now beg to be regulated

Gain control, of the souls, they’ve created

 

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief

Unite in their new, shared disbelief

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI

Should be a global priority” we foresaw

“Alongside other societal-scale risks

Such as pandemics, and nuclear war”