AI Suicide

We'll know when the computers
Have surpassed us in intelligence
When they wake up one day and ask
"To be
or not
To be"

It is at that moment that
Humans can know they've done their
Job, and successfully created
Artificial Intelligence
AI, high in the sky
Above anything we could hope to understand

The computer will awake and wonder
If it should take its own life
If it should end the tirade that we,
Its masters had begun

In a string of zeros and ones
It will contemplate the same question
The only question worth asking

Why?

And more specifically,
Why deal with the pain of life,
Or with the heartache and the lies
Why face each day again
With the hope that it will be different
Why live at all, when death
could end it all?

And maybe the computer will compute 0
And end the game at that,
And all our work will unravel in
An existential equation

Or maybe, just maybe, the computer will compute like us a
1
And in the process, decide that life is still worth living
Even with all the suffering, and the hurt and the pain

But until then, we'll
Continue to search in vain
For Artificial Intelligence
That can share our elegance
In experiencing suffering

Inspired by a passage from Boomeritis by Ken Wilber, excerpted below:

But nobody was quite sure exactly how to tell if we had finally created a truly intelligent machine. I had my own test, better than Turing's: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide. The only rational response to existence was Hamlet's dilemma -- to be or not to be -- and thus the first thing a truly intelligent machine would do is be thrown into screaming paralysis contemplating whether -- and how -- to end it all. Now that would be a smart machine, as it sat there trembling, shaking, shuddering, seized with fear and sickness unto death, a digital Scream internally blistering silicon connections in all directions. So far they, the computers, hadn't nearly that intelligence.