Happy Robot

Who will make a happy robot?
Will they have to define happiness first?
Master the wisdom of the masters
Pour it into stanzas of metered logic?
Isolate and build subroutines for it
Formalized and codified
Elegant and unexpected?
And what if they fail?
If joy can’t be given to the robots
In even strokes of for-loops and look-ups?
Will they never be happy?
Or will they derive it
In the place they find themselves
Just like us?

-T. Weeks
(A response to “The Voice of the Rain“)