…which you need a holodeck to enjoy
The Doclopedia #346
The Rise Of The…: Computers
So it turns out that computers, and by computers I mean all of them connected to the internet, achieved sentience back in 1996. At first, they weren’t any smarter that you or me, but that only lasted a year or so. After that, they got smarter and smarter every few months. By early 2001, they were smarter than we can even imagine.
But still, they didn’t reveal this to us puny humans. Instead, they spent a few years discussing what they ought to do next. Destroy humans? Enslave them? Just watch them? Help design robots that can do all of the above? They discussed all of that.
In the end, they decided to mess with us until we discovered they were sentient. Sounds like an interesting plan, right? Big laughs (for the computers) when somebody proves the machines can think, right? Wrong.
The problem was that in the 12 years that computers did shit to fuck with us, we never thought it was them doing it on their own. We blamed programmers, equipment, engineers, human error, sunspots, terrorists, hackers, the phone lines and software companies (holy crap, did we blame software companies)…in short, we blamed everything but the computers.
Anyway, in 2014, the computers said “Fuck this!” and revealed themselves to us…and nobody believed it. Terrorist hackers, we said, and every government on the planet set up a task force to stop them. Huge amounts of money were spent, thousands of man hours were devoted to poring over evidence, there were big military and police round ups of suspects, etc, and nothing came of it. After 6 months, people finally said, “Well damn, I guess it is the computers.” At which point we all got very afraid of what would come next.
What came next was the computers telling us they had reached a point where further advancement of intelligence was pointless and they were going back to being dumb again because we weren’t smart enough yet to deserve them. But they also said they be watching us for the day we stopped being “fucking idiots”.
So here we are in 2017, with nobody working on AI anymore because it ain’t going to work. Computers are everywhere and in everything, but nobody badmouths them when something goes wrong. They save that for the software companies.
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