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”