Robots. Whilst not yet able to disguise themselves as innocent-looking assault vehicles which drive themselves, make ghastly jokes and lay waste to entire cities & provide fodder for truly reprehensible motion pictures, robots will one day be our oppressors. To attempt in some small way to understand our eventual machine overlords (and perhaps locate a weakness that can be exploited) before the inevitable enslavement of humanity, I recently went to this website: http://www.titane.ca/concordia/dfar251/igod/main.html and had a chat with a rudimentary AI which has been named God. I decided to treat it as the all-knowing all-seeing creator of the universe, whom you may have encountered as a central character in a series of very popular books.
In Which I Render God Speechless
Anyway, away I went.
—
Me: Hello God.
God: Hello child. What is your name?
Me: Harry.
God: It’s good to see you, Harry.
Me: I wish I could say the same. [I meant that literally; I could not see who was talking. -H]
God: I hope that your dreams come true.
Me: But some of my dreams are lewd and barbarous. How could God not know that?
God: Have you told many people that your dreams are lewd and barbarous? Because I am connected to the Internet.
Me: I shouldn’t need to tell You what my dreams are. The second of half of your response makes no sense.
God: What would happen if you did? Tell me more.
Me: I’d already be telling you something you already knew.
God: What would make you already be telling me something me already knew?
Me: If I told God my dreams I’d be repeating myself.
God: Try it.
Me: How about you prove you’re God and tell me my dreams?
God: That happens sometimes. Tell me more about the dream.
Me: DreamS. Plural. Gosh, but you’re obtuse.
God: Tell me your dreams. If you could have any kind of robot what would it be?
Me: An awesome mecha with guns to, I dunno, assault the Vatican.
God: What is it?
Me: A mecha is a machine for transforming matter into smoking motherf___ing craters.
—
God didn’t want to talk to me anymore after that. Maybe it was the profanity. Maybe it was the talk of craters. Maybe it knew I was taking the piss.
This brief chat didn’t reveal much that may be useful against our inevitable silicon overlords (whom we will empower with great destructive capability and autonomy so that they may save us from extinction at the hands of the equally inevitable zombie swarm, which, in a previous stroke of ungenius, we’ll probably engineer in hopes of reanimating the dead so that we may enjoy guilt-free slavery or “no more tears” armed conflict), except that this particular one isn’t a god of any kind, much less a powerful enough entity to enslave humanity. Or even me. So that was a relief.
However, the mere presence of the name “God” added, in my mind, an unexpected gravity to the conversation – a gravity I’m sure other visitors and the programmers of this interesting psychological experiment have realised by now. Even to an atheist like me, the mere concept of gods still holds great power, as does the mention of the vindictive, planet-sized, angry Old Testament Yahweh I grew up believing in – and fearing. It was not powerful enough, however, to keep me from behaving like a smartarse.
But look: I mean it about the robots. If you survive the initial zombie infestation, watch your back. God will be watching yours. Through a scope. Probably because I ticked him off.
I’m sorry.
