Re: The Gates of the Boolean Logic

So what is this silliness about? First, why and how it came to be: it
started out just as an idea while listening to a poetry recital and
geeking out over favorite poems with fellow poem nerds, while I was
teaching CS at SOA. I had been researching a lot about AI in trying to
figure out what to teach about it. (My knowledge was 20 years out of
date, because my tech career hadn’t had anything to do with it
post-college.) After geeking out over Kipling with someone, I thought
about how “Gods of the Copy-book Headings”is basically one big “don’t
get ahead of yourselves” message, so the parallels in what I could do
with a similar warning against AI-hype immediately started flowing, and
I set straight to working on it as soon as I got home. I wasn’t sure how
well it could all be made to fit together, but everything was falling
into place so easily that I wrote a good 60% of it that night. (The
middle age-progressive paragraphs with a cambrian/feminian/etc theme
weren’t falling into place, but the start and end were largely done.)
Initially, I thought maybe I could make it into a teaching-tool for my
art-school kids taking cs. Nothing quite spurs ME to try to understand
something as when I don’t get a joke, and it’s another one of a hundred
ways I tried to squeeze in as much as I was able about the connections
between art and science. Nothing is quite so busy as a first year
teaching though, and the poem had to sit unfinished until the summer in
favor of more practical responsibilities. I am no longer a teacher
however, so that freed me from trying to make this a teaching tool
per-se, from keeping it at a hs-level, and to use raunchier
subject-matter than would be judicious if I still were.
SO, there were rules to this game that I tried to uphold, and the most
fun part about it is that I was completely unsure if I’d be able to make
it work at all, much less as well as I think it ended up fitting
together. The first 2 boil down to the joy of impersonation.
1) To mimic the original from every perspective that I could think to
consider. The overall meaning being expressed, meanings of as many lines
individually as possible, use of the same kinds of themes, phrasings,
meter, rhyme schemes… everything that I think an english teacher would
be asking kids to analyze in the original. Then to go a little further,
from a true english and typography-nerd’s perspective, and try to be
precise about things like the capitalization, punctuation, etc. I intend
to research the typography of the original printing, font-size, etc… I
have found discrepancies in the punctuation in online versions.
2) To express a viewpoint that warns against latest-and-greatest-ism and
advocates for timeless wisdom within the context of AI by using
arguments that are as technically accurate and as profound as possible,
challenging the reader to up their understanding. The overall argument
should be what Kipling’s opinion would have been had he lived to see it
all and been an AI nerd.
3) To use as much and as varied meta-humor as possible, playing with the
basic concepts at the core of AI: meaning, understanding,
representation, etc.. In poetical ways by maximizing the ways it could
be validly interpreted, using sometimes-contorted ways to make a point,
and in technical ways by creating a purposeful obstacle course to any
present or future ai that might try to “intepret” it. (I have a
follow-up idea to have a conversation with a strong AI about the poem,
but that’s for later.) Most particularly, playing with the meanings of
hyperlinks: the socially great logical tool of our age.
To that end, I’d value any collaborators that could find ways to improve
what I have from the perspective of these 3 goals.