A Toast to the Bard, Wi’ Apologies Frae a Machine: The Immortal Memory 2026 for the Mermaid's Tavern Burns Supper
Each year for a decade or more, I have delivered the Immortal Memory at a Burns Supper that I helped found. This year, that event landed three weeks after I retired in the face of AI and globalization (read more on that here). I asked myself—What would Robert Burns do? He would probably not have experimented with AI. But I'm an early adopter and a data governance professional, so this was my first case study in applied data ethics for the folk community. It felt very Star Trek, like encountering Data as Robert Burns at a Burns Supper in the holodeck of the Enterprise in The Next Generation. My audience was skeptical at first, but they laughed in the middle and warmed to a toast at the end. I hope you will too. The Immortal Memory 2026 for the Mermaid's Tavern Burns Supper Friends, welcome. Whether you come to Burns by way of song, story, scholarship, or sheer good habit, tonight we gather for the same reason: to remember why Robert Burns still speaks to us. Not as a marble mon...