Rise of the Machines

Back in the Eighties when I was young and (slightly more) foolish, most of the people I knew worried about the chance that the cold war would escalate and that that mankind would be vapourised in a nuclear holocaust. For my part, I gave a little headspace to this crazy notion, mainly because you need to have something to have 'serious' drunken conversations about at parties, right? But deep down I knew what would be our ultimate undoing.

A steady diet of films like Wargames and Terminator fed my overactive imagination. I genuinely worried that somewhere, in top secret military labs, boffins in white coats were working out the secrets of artificial intelligence. I worried that they would succeed and unwittingly create a code-based Frankenstein's monster that would become sentient and do for us all, seeing the human race at best as an irrelevance or at worst a handy power source.

The years moved on and the nuclear threat subsided. Holes in the ozone layer, global warming, diminishing oil supplies and global economic meltdown all took the place of the mushroom cloud, vying for the title of Thing Most Likely To Finish Us Off. I hadn't worried about technology taking us to the cleaners in ages.

Until today.

I set a form to print (150 copies). I watched the first 10 or so come off and then, satisfied that all was well, went of to do other things. I came back to this:

Not quite Skynet, granted. But the printer is definitely saying 'up yours'.

NDC