Artificial Ignorance

[deckardcanine]

If sentient and sapient robots were real,
I doubt that they’d think quite like us.
No matter how smartly the programmers tried,
There’d always be more to discuss.

Old Asimov noted how hard it must be
For robots to learn when to laugh.
Our senses of humor run way too diverse
To plot it all out on a graph.

There’s also the question of how long to wait
When dealing with human attention.
Our patience is finite, but still we need time
To come to a full comprehension.

A similar problem concerns all the things
We’re likely or not to remember.
A bot might presume that we wouldn’t forget
A face we saw once last December.

Perhaps what we need is for robots to start
With baby-like levels of knowledge
And work their way up at whatever their pace,
Concluding no sooner than college.

Oh, none of this quandary worries me much;
Such robots may never exist.
But thinking it over is my kind of fun;
The subject is hard to resist.