At this point I’ve sat through enough Artificial Intelligence lectures to have a whole midterm about it, so I’m pretty confident in saying I do know everything there is to know about robots. And through this knowledge I’ve reached the conclusion that they’re here to Murder Us. But don’t panic, there are ways to put an end to this robot uprising before it starts………. is what I might say if there were ways to prevent this. But there aren’t. We’re screwed! It’s official.
A few months ago, there was a meme-style thing going around the internet that said AI technology will lead to one of two inevitable conclusions. Either the robots develop the ability to learn ethics and morals, in which case they’ll see how unethical and immoral we humans are and kill us all. Or they won’t learn ethics and morals, and won’t know it’s wrong to kill us humans, and will kill us all. Either way, those sketchy bastards are here to de. stroy. us.
During our first AI class, the professor tried to dispel this notion by explaining that modern-day AIs are really smart about one thing and that one thing only. A robot who can drive a car doesn’t know how to play chess, and a robot who knows how to play chess doesn’t know how to mimic human conversation. This means we are still years away from robots who know everything at once and can wipe out humanity. But here’s the thing. There’s got to be at least one lonely basement dweller who right now currently is in the process of creating an AI who’s really really good at murder and nothing else. Henceforth, we’re screwed. Which, you know what that means? It means the memes were right. The computers are smarter than us already.
There was also an article that went viral a few months ago about how Facebook had to shut down some of its AIs because they started speaking to each other in a seemingly nonsensical shorthand they invented. Facebook claims they shut down the robots because they were trying to develop chatbots that could speak coherently to humans, not because they were scared the robots were planning a mutiny. Which is certified bullshit, and deep down we all know the truth, right guys? There was evil afoot at Facebook Dot Com, and it’s not long before we’ve got robots inventing secret languages who are smart enough to avoid being detected and shut down and, given enough time, to figure out how to kill us all. And then we will be thoroughly, thoroughly screwed.
In case you’re rolling your eyes at me for believing everything I read online and falling for alarmist headlines and just generally letting myself get carried away by the drama of it all, I’ll have you know this AI vengeance plot has already affected me personally. Since my AI class is so into having machines know how to do things all on their own, we have our assignments autograded instead of graded by TAs. And let me tell you. On one of our homeworks I got 25/120. Why? Because I had a single line of code that was wrong and these fucking robots don’t understand the concept of partial credit and are here to sabotage my GPA and subsequently my chances of future employment and ability to buy food and pay rent and keep myself alive.
So there you have it. That’s my proof. The robots are here to destroy us all, resistance is futile, hope is lost, and we’re screwed. Nice knowing you, everybody. See you on the other side.
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