Round Top Register - Texas Fun Travel Guide - The Courtjester
UNCLE SACK
Artificial Intelligence
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Sometimes I hear them making odd cricket noises when I go in the kitchen to get some coffee. Other times, I’ll see strange things flicker across the screen when I haven’t touched a single button. They think I’m not smart enough to figure out what’s goin’ on, but after 191 years...this old coot knows a racket when he sees one. I recently hitched the two computers in my house together. They call that a network. That way computer A, with the purdy, high resolution monitor and computer B, which is lost in a fog, can talk to each other... That’s when all the trouble began. Now I know why...
At first these two machines could barely communicate. They were like children, learnin’ their first steps, kinda cute in their clumsiness. I got real interested in watchin’ them work. One by one, snafus began to clear up. Things went smoother and smoother as I spent more and more time in front of the screen. Problems I didn’t even know I had started going away. That’s when I began to realize I wasn’t myself. I had changed. Something was running my life and I had no control over it. I had been hypnotized by a computer.
They keep up with our money... run all our machines... control all communications. They have captured the minds of our children ... and they’re alive! It’s sad what humankind is coming to. This makes us about number six on the food chain, right after cockroaches... how humiliating. The next thing you know, we’ll all be computer technicians, slaves to quench their every desire. It’ll be the way it is with our cats...working ourselves to death just to provide them with cat food and comfortable downtime. It could happen...in fact, it may have already happened.
I’m not sayin’ they’re easy to catch. A computer is mighty sneaky, but chew on this...if you could think that fast and remember everything you saw and heard all the time, don’t you think you could outwit the kind of talent a bunch of goofy bald apes could put up? My computer remembers every period in every sentence. I can’t even remember my mother’s birthday. ‘Course she’s been dead 142 years but that’s no excuse. I just don’t have the memory of a computer. No human does. Everyone I know wants a PC. Anyone who can’t work with one is thought slow and behind the times. So, people are classified into two categories... computer "literate" and not. Some people are so literate that they begin to understand the computer’s language very well. The next thing you know they are mind slaves. They become obsessed. (See Net Junkie Primer http://www.rtis.com/reg/roundtop/junkie1.htm) They turn traitor. They start to take the computer’s side. They try to tell us our PCs are helping us. They try to tell us that they are "conveniences." It’s all becoming obvious to me now. They’ve already gained control. The "digital revolution" is just the cover for their takeover. That’s it. Just like the poet said, man’s reign ends not with a bang, but a whimper. The party’s over. I’d sing "turn out the lights" but the new masters of the world probably wouldn’t like that. Jokes about plugs and sockets are most likely considered in bad taste. To a CPU, I’d guess, it must be "off-line" humor, "dark humor," humor for forms of life that operate without a dedicated power source...humor about being "turned off." Turned off...that’s what our world must seem like to them...a dark, primitive slum occupied by undedicated meat-people.
But you are not! You can have a life free from digital domination. Just run out and disconnect all your electricity at the pole. That’s what I’m goin’ to do. I’m writing my electric utility a letter. No more computers. No more AC. No more satellite TV. No more radios and telephones. No more lights...I’m goin’ right out there and shut it all off as soon as I get me another cup of coffee and check my e-mail... 
Okay... I admit we have our failings. Sure we spoil the planet, overpopulate, starve our children and
fight every chance we get...but that doesn’t make us bad people. |
