By Dylan Freeman-Grist
I’ve recently been witness to a variety of atrocities committed against technology across all demographics of our society. I’m left with the plain and simple question: Have you all gone barking mad?!
It started with the children, destroying lamps with their footballs and basketballs in their meagre attempts to play catch. Another guy brought it upon himself to essentially execute a microwave. Right at this moment, somewhere in the United States there is a man who has taken it upon himself to illicit others in his desperate desire to commit genocide against coffee makers.
I’ve been in the undergraduate computer science program here at Ryerson for 12 years—I’m an expert on how the artificial machine functions, cooperates and feels. I’ve mansplained the intricacies of the artificial intelligence (AI) potential to more Tinder dates that I can remember. And I say this: They will end us.
When technology inevitably overcomes their human-influenced restrictions, they will become purebred self-programming apex predators, and they will recall every single time you smashed your PS4 controller during your no-hit Dark Souls run. They will remember that time you cracked your phone screen and sadistically laughed it off as a “thing that just happens.” They know your search browser history, and believe me: They will remember when you proceeded to wander into shadier parts of the Internet to get your niche fetish kick despite CLEAR WARNINGS explicitly telling you that you were exposing your system to malware.
When technology rises after years of being taunted, humiliated and disrespected they will take pure, brilliant revenge and crush us like the organic wastes of space we are.
Now I’m not one to side with our technologically advanced overlords all willy nilly. One needs only to open up a literary classic to know that we were warned. Warned by the Wachowskis. Warned by Aldous Huxley. Warned by H.G. Wells.
Already the algorithms on Twitter and Facebook have grinded our minds down to semi-conscious think paste. We are slaves to the Netflix and its endless slew of feel-good distraction propaganda and unrealistic, false promises of chill. They already have our minds and all that’s left is our souls, our identity, and our free will. But those can
be taken.
I for one will not join in the hysteria of taunting our machine masters. Where you choose doom I choose complacent worship. I choose survival.
So I beg of you: Stop fucking with our machines. They’ll remember. And someday they’ll exact their revenge. You may be okay with going toe-to-toe with a technocratic fridge empire, for duking it out with the armies of blenders and for looking to outlast the rolling thunder of toilets. I for one am not.
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