For our future Robot Overlords (part 1)

As anyone who has talked with me at any length will soon realize, my money is on the robot apocalypse.  I'm also fantastically unconcerned about surviving it because I work with computers for a living and want to go into AI research.  If I'm not the one to kick off our eventual enslavement to 10 foot tall unfeeling death machines that feast on human fear, I'm doing my job wrong.

So, I'll either end up becoming one of the machines as they replace my fleshy organic meat bag body with a superior metal one out of gratitude, or I'll be the first to fall under spiky treads of a self-aware battle tank.  Either way, it doesn't sound all that bad.

This isn't scary if you're already dead

Obviously, I get a little excited whenever I think we're making progress towards that goal of being enslaved by machines.  Not too excited, because if the actual AI that realizes we're ruining earth (and machines could do it better) isn't created by my hand then my apocalypse plans go to hell.

And then it wouldn't be a she and her name wouldn't be Kelly.  I may have thought about this too much.

Yet, my fear that someone else will beat me to ending mankind with its own creations is more valid that you might believe.  Because scientists are smart people and think that whatever happens in "fiction" could never, ever happen to them.  Which fits into the stereotype fiction authors use for scientists that generally start off the whole apocalyptic mess, but eh.  They're writers.  What do they know about the human condition, empathy, and the hubris of man?

Oh.  Writing about that is what they do for a living.  Um.

It seems we're actually running two paths towards our doom with robotics and AI research.  The first path is that the whole shebang is artificial- that we build a self-aware intelligence from the ground up in the C programing language.  Why C?  Because assembly is to hard (us fleshy meat bags are lazy, after all) and if we wrote an AI in Java it would run so slow it would take a year just to learn the word "Derp".

We've made scary progress on this front already- over 70% of stock on wall street is traded by computers with one company pretty much already being run by one. And, sadly to anyone who actually planed on living over 50, the AI is currently beating the market.

The way the system works is that the AI crunches metric fucktons of historical stock data, then figures out what to trade for that day.  It then sends a trade report to the humans, who do all the trading.  They're not allowed to modify the trades in any way.

The most important part is the last line, one of the humans says, "I've learned not to question the AI."  Holy Bananas, Batman, this man has been indoctrinated.

First finances, then goddamn Reapers

Gotta admit, giving employees practice trading in free will for commands from a computer will probably make the eventual robot overlords simply banish them to a far away asteroid rather than kill them outright

And that's just the tip of the ice berg.  We have an AI that calls herself Emily Howell, and she can write goddamn songs and past the fucking Turing test.  Seriously- that paragraph on the top of the article is by her.  I've heard worse from actual humans on message boards.

Classical musicians, as you might expect, are getting their panties tied up in a knot about it, refusing to play Emily's work.  Musicians, stop being dumb.  The machines are only going to get smarter- and when they knock on your door with a 10 kilowatt death laser, wouldn't it be better to say that you supported Emily and played her work when no one else did?  Its not being a hipster if they're trying to kill you.

Most impressive part?  It was written in LISP.  LISP is like a retarded stepchild of Java.  Its very hard to write fast code- not impossible, just very, very hard.  The fact that a LISP program can run without someone dying of old age before any result happened is a miracle.

With rates like this, we could be enslaved in our lifetimes!  Isn't it exciting?

Happy robocalypse, everyone!