Say "No" to Artificial Intelligence!

The news about Artificial Intelligence bothers me. All weekend, a poem kept popping into my head. I could not remember the title, but I was certain Stephen Vincent Benet was the poet. Ironically, when I searched the net for the poem, I had numerous hits for poems written by computers, rather than about them!

The poem I wanted was "Nightmare Number Three," written in 1947. The poem is not as relevant as I anticipated: It's about machines, not computers. Still--it is as chilling as Benet's famous short story, "By the Waters of Babylon."

During my search, I found Rudyard Kipling's similar prophetic poem, "The Secret of the Machines." Although still about machines, the poem touches on the ethics of artificial intelligence. In one of the final stanzas, the machine says, "...remember, please, the Law by which we live, We are not built to comprehend a lie, We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!"

As I completed my poem search, I found the best line on the topic. It is the last line of "My Robot" by Shel Silverstein. "...So I sold that robot cause I never knew Exactly who belonged to who."