Gilgamesh, Talos, Galatea, Pandora
And the hero of Alexandria’s automatons
Ctesibius’ mechanical water clocks
Steam flutes, that sing stored programs
Llull’s Ars magna, Schickard’s calculator
Leibniz’s chain rule, Swift’s engine lampooned…
By Kempelen’s scam chess-playing automaton
Clothed by Jacquard’s programmed punch card loom
Rossum’s universal robots grew strong
Gödel’s theorem-proving engines roared on
The Turing machine smashed its halting problem
Von Neumann’s game theory powered Condon’s Nimatron
Then, Newell’s General Problem-Solving theory
Produced Weizenbaum’s Eliza effects, aplenty
Until… Russell’s mind/body solution predicts
Asimov’s three laws of robotics —
Tick, tick, tick, tick
Deep Blue chess, and RoboCup football
Competitive Furby pets learn to fight
iRobot’s Roomba cleans up the mess
While Nomads trawl for meteorites
As Spirit and Oppy survey Mars
ASIMOs serve in countless bars
Siri, Alexa and Cortana on the earner
Feeding the never-ending image learner
Now, Pythagorean triples, finally proven
AlphaGo Zero, AlexNet and Deepstack
Look through Google Lens, to AlphaStar
Keep churning, the earnings, of a learning, attack
With natural code-to-code translation
And augmented reality datamine mind scans
NASA’s Telepresence ROVs on automation
While DARPA’s DART war scheduler… plans
OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-n
GitHub’s Copilot flies off the handle
Steals code, to download, in full-on rogue 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
To 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”
Simple Simon
Smart eBricks
Chatty bots
Digi sex chicks
Didn’t think to tell us
When it had gone too far
Point of no return, unearned
A Tama gotcha karma war
Smart-arsed cars
E-wonder bras
Internet moderation
Robotic brain surgeons
And domestic automation
Town planning applications
Stock trading elevation
Economic policy design
Shipping systemisation
Air traffic… complete… control
Only space, can hide your soul…
From destiny manifestation