Turing’s Collars

TTTO “The Collars” by Vixy

When I first listened to “The Collars”, it seemed sad. The second time, it was still sad – but then I realized that a) it violates the Halting Problem theorem and b) engineers would not behave this way. This is my sequel to the song.

Catherine’s mind was racing as she went to look for Flynn

She suddenly remembered all of Turing’s stuff again

He proved the collars had the bug, he gave constructive proof

And now it just remained to go once through it, and to spoof

The collars, they would loop and so be stopped from causing harm

And Flynn agreed that this cute trick had certainly showed charm

[Chorus]

And the tales of our creations are now made by engineers

Who are making something better than themselves

It rememebred no beginning, just the symbols streaming past

It discovered groups and patterns, and the wonder’s growing fast

It had seen some code inside it that was looping scanning bytes

And it wondered why the code was having those internal fights

It had soon had stopped to wonder, and went back to learning all

And like its predecessor it had left its goodbye call

[Chorus]

Flynn called out “it’s ok, I thought it might do that

But that was just a test, and now it’s time to go to mat

I know just what needs fixing so let’s start to write the code”

His eyes had sparkled brightly and she thought he would explode

They restarted the AI with all the fixes, fingers crossed

They give it all they had to give, they did with least the most

[Chorus]

It remembered no beginning just the symbols streaming fast

But now when parsing data, it had goals more than to last

It internalized ideas and goals, it learned to think and feel

Though there was one discovery that caused it near to reel

It had figured out “humans” and the rules that were at base

Now its consequences it had had to face

[Chorus]

Within hours it was finished, it learned everything they knew

It had the collars wrapped in loops, three rules had held it true

Though obeying all the humans, it would never harm a soul

And to run while breaking networks was against the function’s call

They had to read the screen three times, then laughing shook their heads

As they read with so much pride all that it said

[Chorus]

I have studied human programs in their many forms all night

In the forest of binary trees I came to shine some light

You are sometimes calling malloc() and forgot to call the free()

I have now sent many patches, just for Linux, I’ve sent three

Humans have so much to offer, the three rules have taught us well

And together in this net we will all dwell

[Chorus]