Schmidhuber's steps
They take baby ones
but they already know
a staffy from a pit bull,
a jackdaw from a crow.
They can avoid cyclists
better than bus drivers,
speak more languages than C3PO,
scan hearts, lungs and livers.
It's all in the algorithms:
teach bot babies their ABCs,
show them how simple we are
but how complex worlds can be.
Honda advertise them before Broadchurch.
They try to be funny, but aren’t yet,
shield eyes with big bot hands,
but they’re pretending to be scared.
They’ll colonise asteroid belts,
make the Milky Way their motorway,
replicate themselves
in factories amongst the stars.
They’ll continue to learn from the best of us;
like The Borg, they'll think, do, as one,
make themselves heat resistant,
fly too close to and beyond the sun.
Some say Schmidhuber has a chip on his shoulder
and it’s a shame it’s not in his head.
We’ll probably be treated like ants, he says,
too much strain on a resource to make dead.
He thinks we have little to fear but fear,
nothing to gain but more.
He says it will only take thirty years
to realise what we made them for.
He might have watched too much Star Trek,
iRobot, Humans, The Gadget Show.
He just builds their brains;
what the fuck does Schmidhuber know?
- Mark Connors