Nothing
 

From the comments, it seemed the poem needed expansion for the sake of clarity about key concepts, so I turned it into a double sonnet, hopefully for the better?

THE SINGULARITY

1. The Thousand Monkeys
“If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters
they might write all the books in the British Museum.”
--A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

I saw William Shakespeare in my dream,
reflective shadow with a pixeled face
gazing out at me from the flat screen
where all his words are in the database.
And as the dream began to evanesce,
Shakespeare withdrew below what I could find,
under the motherboard. Can consciousness
really monitor the undermind?
The thousand monkeys theory can’t account
for what strange being stirs there, for what appalls
the darkness with its artificial fount
of light that lights this cave made of glass walls,
this O without a figure, being unbeing,
this I without an eye, seeing unseeing.

2. Ex Nihilo
“Man will construct the deux ex machina in his own image.”
--I.J. Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine

We enter fearful, enter the labyrinth
of binaries where yes and no are doors
open and closed at once, where truth and synth
recede like ghosts down endless corridors.
Who made the labyrinth? Who made this womb
of microcircuitry, beast at the core?
What heartless heart? Whose furnace brain? What room
that is no room, what door that is no door?
No one unscrewed the deadbolts from the doors.
No one unscrewed the doors from the doorjambs.
No one released the beasts inside the cores.
No one, Nothing, bred tigers out of lambs.
And no rough beast will watch us with blank gaze
when Nothing comes alive and leaves the maze.

1) Per Glenn's suggestion, cut original title (What Mortal Hand or Eye) and used "Ex Nihilo")
2) Working from questions of clarity, expanded by adding a first sonnet to gloss the second
3) Per Susan's suggestion, revamped the lines
4) Per Glenn, put quotation author names in same format

Who constructed life from death, this room
that is no room, this door that is no door?
----------------------------
ORIGINAL POST BELOW
A little stuck on my Florida poem, so I guess I'll post the latest and move on for now. Here's my AI poem, the first draft of which I wrote in collaboration with CHATGPT2, though only a few words remain of that draft. Still, I thought it would be interesting to write about the dangers of AI by consulting AI about the issue.


Ex Nihilo

“Man will construct the deux ex machina in his own image.”
Good, I. J., Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine

We enter fearful, enter the labyrinth
of binaries where yes and no are doors
open and closed at once, where truth and synth
recede like ghosts down endless corridors.
Who made the labyrinth? Who made this womb
of microcircuitry, beast at the core?
Who constructed life from death, this room
that is no room, this door that is no door?
No one unscrewed the deadbolts from the doors.
No one unscrewed the doors from the doorjambs.
No one released the beasts inside the cores.
No one, Nothing, bred tigers out of lambs.
And no rough beast will watch us with blank gaze
when Nothing comes alive and leaves the maze.

You set the bar extremely high Tony and unfortunately this one flounders. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Is a question of theodicy and AI is yet to approximate the ‘Tyger’. I would question the use of the the premise here. It is also far too dense The concept definitely has legs.

Jan

Your title and L12 allude to William Blake’s poem, “The Tyger.” Blake, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, conveys his terror-tinged nostalgia for the quickly disappearing agrarian way of life (lamb) that he saw being devoured by the “dark, Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution (tiger). In line 13 you juxtapose this to a reference to Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” in which Yeats conveys a similar terror at the “rough beast” whose “gaze,” blank and pitiless, threatens violence in a succession of revolutions and world wars.
Your sonnet captures the same prophetic tone of danger and regret as the mechanical age gives way to the digital age of AI. Is the labyrinth image homage to Borges, or to the myth of The Minotaur?

I’m trying to figure out a way around “synth.”
Am I the only one bothered by this?
How about something like
We enter fearful, enter the twisting maze
of binaries where yes and no are doors
open and closed at once. Clear light and haze
recede like ghosts down endless corridors.

Hi Jan,

Sorry it did not appeal to you!

Hi Glenn,

All of the above. I don't want to wax prolix on this thread, so I'll send you a p.m. in answer to your question!

Best, Tony

Very interesting, Tony. I did find the density a bit off-putting, as Jan suggests, but perhaps it’s expressive of the microcircuitry. A few random thoughts:

Deus ex machina

Before I decide whether it bothers me, what does it mean? Synthesizer music? I’ve been watching “Picard,” but that sense, while tempting, doesn’t seem operative here.

An intelligent machine constructed from death does sound scary, but death is of course the state of having lived. Poets can make such shifts, but I think I’d be happier with something along the lines of “Who built this life from nothingness.”

I love the word “doorjambs,” but I don’t know how to scan it here. A trochaic inversion in that spot is awkward and makes an off-beat rhyme with “lambs.” A spondee also sounds off to me. You might try “jambs” all by itself and an extra syllable elsewhere in the line.

I’m also not sure what you’re getting at with the “no one unscrewed” lines—another way of saying that the doors are no doors? It is interesting how you shift from a negative no one (there was no unscrewing) to a positive no one that did release and breed beasts. (I wonder about shifting the responsibility from ourselves to “Nothing,” but that’s a moral and philosophical debate I’m unprepared for.)

I’m not sure how the Yeats allusion operates here. You say there will be no rough beast with blank gaze, while I would have expected that to be the beast emerging from the labyrinth (Minotaur?).

Carl & Glenn,

I guess it is a common use among the sci fi crowd, but less so for the rest of humanity: synth is slang for "synthetic humanoid, an android, a robot, a clone" -- normally, of course it means "musical synthesizer."

Is it too obscure, therefore? If so, I am in trouble, because the only other rhymes are hyacinth (shades of Eliot) and plinth.

On the doorjambs meter, it is an interesting metrical debate. My go-to solution for anapests is to add another stress at the end and turn it into a double iamb (pyrrhic, spondee) or minor ionic. There are those who argue that spondees don't exist because one of the two syllables will always take extra stress. But in context, after a pyrrhic, the two relatively stronger syllables take stress to my ear, "jambs" less than "door" of course.

My go-to for this is Robert Frost, who also loved this rhythm, as in "As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored / As the stir cracks" in "Birches" where he uses three of them in two lines!

Lots of allusions--too many, perhaps ("Once by the Pacific," "The Second Coming," "The Tyger," Song of Myself, the myth of the labyrinth in Crete, in Eco and in Borges, futurist and 19th century sci fi fears of the mechanical womb, Odysseus in the cyclops cave, etc). The poem is a theodicy like Blake's "The Tyger," asking: who created the tyger, and did he also create the lamb? Is God the source of evil and of good and does that make God evil? --but applied to AI, which many in the industry feel is the most dangerous technology to be invented after the atom bomb.

The death-life stuff has to do with that question at the core of all artificial person stories, from the golem to "The Sandman" to Frankenstein's monster to Blade Runner to Isaac Asimov's I Robot series to Star Trek, etc.: At what point does the machine become organic? At what point is a thinking being human? Is the soul simply a function of the body, as Blake would have it: "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age"?

So when the technological singularity comes around--when technological growth achieves I. J. Good's "intelligence explosion model" of chain-reacting, uncontrolled machine intelligence that becomes ever smarter and surpasses human intelligence"--is that intelligent machine without spirit, ex nihilio and also nothing at the core, and if so it is a different kind of beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, one constructed of nothing.

The unscrew the doors stuff to my mind is about the dangers that come from endless innovation on the one hand, but also a meditation on binary code--at what point does the machine transcend yes and no, one and zero, life and death, organism and machine, and become open and closed at the same time. When does nothing become being? (For literary detectives, it tries to undermine the inventive optimism of similar lines in Whitman's Song of Myself).

So, yes, the poem is very densely packed. It embraces difficulty of reading, with the hopes that the thought behind will reward the persistent reader. But I also hear from you, Jan and Glenn that it might be too difficult, so I'll have to think about that!

Thinking about it, it seems to me I'm trying to do too much in one sonnet here. I think this is really going to have to be a sequence of sonnets on the singularity which gloss each other with recurrent imagery.

Well this is not what I originally critiqued. I will have to come back.

Jan

Some nice wordplay in the first sonnet, Tony.
S1L8: undermind—This is a great term for the digital subconscious, with overtones of “underworld” and “dark web.” It also suggests the speaker’s attempt to “undermine” the will of the digital gods and pursue the ghost of Shakespeare in a katabasis to the underworld paralleling Aeneas’s encounter with the ghost of Hector in a dream in The Aeneid.
S1L10: appalls—Blake uses the same word in his poem, “London” with the same double meaning of “shocked” and “lightened.” This plays nicely into the light/dark images in the next two lines.
The play of the letters O and I (eye) against the binary code digits is reinforced by the oxymorons “being unbeing” and “seeing unseeing.” Very clever.
The addition of the first sonnet makes the second sonnet the actual epic katabasis. Will a third sonnet bring him back to the upper world?

I'm letting this sink in some more, but wanted to make a quick typo correction:

deux ex machina —> deus ex machina

Unless you're making some sort of binary pun with the French word for "two".

Tony, I really like this, with or without the new first sonnet. To me, the second one stands on its own, and its compactness is the very essence of its charm and effectiveness. Throughout both sonnets, there’s unrelenting eloquence, deftness, tautness, texture, and depth.

In the first, I just wondered what “O” refers to until I saw Glenn’s decoding of it.

In the second, I took “synth” to mean “the synthetic”—close to what you intended, though not exactly. In any case, I don’t think you should let the relative obscurity of this word discourage you from using it, because it’s singularly apt here for the reasons you cited, and its etymology leads a reader in the right direction, at least.

I think that the off-meter of “doorjambs” works well in the context of doors being unscrewed from them.

I appreciate the subtle allusion to the Tyger and Blake’s theodicy. Most of the other allusions you mention passed over my conscious awareness, but I felt them resonating on a general mythic level.

To me, this is the most muscular, original, and driven poem—in two parts--about AI that I have yet come across. And of course, you know they’re the rage right now.

Hi All!

Thanks for the notes.

Glenn, you are "grokking" the poem quite well. Underworld, undermind, unconscious, Hades, all get lumped together in Jung and the descent to confront the shadow self (monster) and reascent carrying the treasure of integrated self, something that he also sees as the brain/womb giving birth to the brainchild of creativity, but I do see this as more apocalyptic, so if a third sonnet ascends it won't be integrated and positive but closer to Yeats's beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

And yes, you caught my stolen pun! Blake's "London," but also Frost's "Design," both use a pun on the O. Fr. "apalir," to make pale, to blanch with fear, the "design of darkness to appall" manifested in the white spider on the white heal-all eating the white moth. Did Frost get it from Blake? Probably.

Alexandra, thanks for the vote of confidence!

Julie, I think that typo was in the original, but I shd probably fix it to keep it from thudding--thanks!

Jan, looking forward to your circling back.

Best, Tony

Tony, in the second sonnet, L7, I think "death" doesn't quite fit your argument, which seems to be about what is inanimate. Would you consider something like "Who built life out of lifelessness, this room"? Death always suggests a previous living state.

Susan

Susan,

You are right on. That line has been bothering me, too. Let me think on it! Thanks, T