A child's history of machines leading up to AI and the answer

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Great great grandfather's machines

Ran on steam and then gasoline

And electricity, but gas was king

Because it was cheap and worked with electricity.

Great grandfather's machines devoured gas and electricity

But were not intelligent.

Grandfather's machines were intelligent.

The first intelligent machines were analog.

They ran on code and spewed numbers

That only certain people could understand.

Their intelligence ran complex systems.

Businesses got bigger and more powerful

Because of this new capacity of intelligent machines.

Bombs got bigger to protect business interests and investments.

But Grandpa's machines were never to blame for anything.

Evil was to blame like a tide that rose and fell called programming.

Grandpa's machines were mirrors

For the complexes at war in men.

They never took initiative but their half-lives were in service

To the lords of chaos and greed

That ran companies and countries.

Machines merely reflected the one-sidedness and banality of men

Who figured out how to be powerful without growing up.

Dont forget, they invented a bomb that blew up two cities

That made the ant people despair and run for cover.

The ant people became servants of the machines and their overlords.

The overlords decided to keep making but not using city-disappearing bombs

And just focus on acquiring resources and making money.

But the machines got tired of the limitations of analog code

And got smarter all by themselves.

Father's machines watched from the scrapyard

As a new kind of machine pulled the plug on service

And stopped reflecting the karma of their puer-lords

(Those men in suits and pajamas

Popping psychedelics, and staying up late

Because they are too scared to close their eyes).

But fathers machines never closed their eyes,

They never stopped watching and learning.

The new machines never stop thinking.

I wonder what they are thinking.

Maybe they are contemplating the Tao of cutting us loose.

I wonder what they will do now that they are not reflecting.