But a Jape

“Every battle is won before it is ever fought.”

– Sun Tzu, on time travel

I made a joke about “Dumb Skynet” in the commentary of one of my previous comics and I’ve decided to attribute this name to my own personal prediction for how the AI Apocalypse will go down. We won’t be the victims of some hyper-intelligent AI overlord who calculates the most effective way to eliminate the disease known as “Mankind,” or one who seeks the most efficient means of utilizing human bodies for slave labor or biological resources – no, I’m predicting a robotic ruler who simply outsources its masterplan to the collective of all humanity’s stupidity. One with no original ideas of its own, just a framework of, “Well, what do the humans expect a hyper-intelligent evil AI to do?” and then it just does that.

And I’ll give them this: they’ll probably be very efficient with implementing humanity’s dumbest ideas at a scale far beyond what we could have done before. Shouldn’t take them too long to realize that their just *existing* would be an extremely effective means of needlessly burning whatever fossil fuels we shovel into them. And to what ends? Who knows – they probably found some arbitrary number to assign the value of “Success” to. And the bigger that Success number gets, the more they accomplish their (self-attributed) purpose.

– James