Verses for the Information Age

Ernest Davis

In loving memory of
my mother, Hadassah F. Davis
and my father-in-law, Richard P. Iano
lovers of poetry



Table of Contents

The Tragic Tale of Tay the Chatbot (2017)
A Video Tour of my Phone Bill (2021)
Progress in Telephony (2022)
All Epigrams are One-Sided and Some are Overused. (2023)
The Domesday Book (2021)
"Click to Accept the Terms and Conditions" (2017)
Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (2017)
Origin Myths (2017)
Amazon Turns Books into Garbage (2019)
Amazon Chooses Speed Over Safety (2019)
Gamergate (2017)
NP-Complete (2017)
Translation: Human and Machine (2019)
Tversky and Kahneman (2017)
Virtual Reality (2017)
The Sex Robot (2017)
The Metaverse (2022)
The Occupant (2019)
Ring Home Security (2019)
Amazon Ring is, once again, the target of unfair complaints from silly, ungrateful people. (2019)
Big Data (2017)
The Internet of Things (2017)
On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models (2021)
Psychographics (2017)
The Ramsey Number R(5,5) (2019)
Educational Software (2017)
Beethoven and Bach's B Minor Mass (2019)
Intermezzo with Arik (2017)
Betelgeuse
Employee Surveillance (2017)
The Singularity (2017)
Kolmogorov Complexity (2021)
My Attempt to Master the Proof-Verification System, LEAN (2024)
The Panacea (2017)
Wikipedia (2017)
On the dispersion and Balkanization of Computer Science education at institutes of higher learning (2017; updated 2019)
The Parable of the Robot and the Milk (2017)
AI and the International Mathematical Olympiad (2025)
AI/Purim Spiel (2023)
Collaboration (2018)
We Rate Dogs (2021)
Equifax: or, Trust Betrayed (2019)
DeepMind's Business Model (2019)
OpenAI (2020)
Whack-A-Mole; or A Large Language Model Struggles With the Physics of Drying Clothes (2024)
DALL-E 2 (2022)
Stoop Gourds (2019)
Translation of Martial Epigram VI:12 (2021)
The Chatbot's Failings and How It Got Them (2025)
The Palantir of New Orleans (2018)
The Security Breach at Verkada (2021)
The Island of Null (2022)
The 37% Rule (2017)
Struggles with Software and Search (2019)
The Digital Dark Age (2017)
The Guardians (2020)
The Rogues' Gallery (2020)
The Dark Age (2017)
End Notes

Since some of these are now significantly out of date, I have noted the date of original composition.


Creative Commons License
Verses for the Information Age by Ernest Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.