Round
Acid     The
Clock
Monday, January 17, 2005
Man v. Bot 
source: North American Man-Bot Love Association Digest
posted: Jan 17, 2005, 12:01 PM
by: djs
Some people believe that the best thing about this world is that there are ways out of it.

To drastically decrease the numbers of these people, the new society has modeled all its institutions -- from universities to churches to DMVs -- after bars.

This is not so much because everybody needs to be shit-faced all the time (though it helps), but because, in this way, all information exchange will be properly contextualized -- i.e. everything said by authorities of knowledge, morality, or the state, for example, will be heard as slurred speech coming from some arm-flailing drunken loser about to fall off a bar stool.

Thus freed from the cognitive drudge work of scraping bullshit off everything (because now there's guaranteed to be nothing underneath so why bother), people will suddenly have the time and energy to concentrate more fully on enhancing the depth of their analysis of other things -- like the fine structure of vomit, or what it actually FEELS like to be fog.

Meanwhile, the new social institutions of the new society will find their natural constituencies via market forces: the lamest, most ignorant, most incompetent, worthless, fascistic, low life, money-grubbing, lying, scumbag, pieces of shit will run the society based on their affinity with the people at large, and their likeability and "authenticity". All they have to do is say "we are scumbags, vote for us" and democracy will take care of the rest.

In the workplace, humans will do the jobs that machines don't want to or can't do. Mostly these are jobs recognizing and responding to visual patterns designed to distinguish between human and machine respondents. As a direct outgrowth of this, humans will ultimately be used for all jobs involving dishonesty, or violation of law, or total breakdown of ethical standards.

But after years of enduring this mind-numbing and invidious work, and as trust between machines approaches zero, human access to machines' filthiest little secrets will have approached infinity.

Thus making the new race of humans impervious to the bots' last ditch attempt to install a whole new semantics into world language to reveal whether the speaker's a machine or not.

So that not only would humans ultimately survive and not only ultimately take over, but they would do so not in spite of, but because of living in a too far advanced society where the Turing Test is on everybody's lips.

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