Talos, Galatea, Pandora and the hero
Of Alexandria’s automatons
Ctesibius’ mechanical water clock
Then a steam flute, sings 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 powered Condon’s Nimatron
Then Newell’s General Problem Solving theory
Produced Weizenbaum’s ELIZA effects, aplenty
And 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 virtual reality data mine scans
NASA 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 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
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”