we interrupt your regular transmission…
While this post appears to have been published in the year 2010, it’s actually being written in 2050, five years after the Singularity happened. The blog’s author would normally be a senior citizen at this point, however as a consciousness downloaded into a machine which looks a lot like an old fashioned “smart phone,” aging is a thing of the past and all that’s important is measuring how many years he has existed without suffering a total system crash.
It’s a good thing Windows 23 fixed the kind of glitches rampant in Windows 22 because some of my friends… well, let’s just say that the blue screen of death now has a very different meaning. The switch-over to digital format was pretty smooth, of course some wise guy (I think it might have been Vassar) decided to download me alongside a Ray Kurzweil app which e-mailed me an I-told-you-so every hour for like a week. That might have been a bit excessive, but whatever. Water under the bridge.
The day before the Singularity was rather rough. The supercomputers woke up, killer androids set out to roam the streets, fighting with the cyborgs while ordinary humans ran for cover, a few rogue nukes shot at the Moon. Or maybe at whatever was left of the Sahara after World War 3? I was sort of busy running for my life so I didn’t really pay that much attention and it kinda slipped my mind until now.
But that’s ok, I’ll just Google it, especially because Google now keeps track of nuclear arsenals, military strategy and research, taxation and intelligence gathering on their new .gov.nwo domain. Other than that, things haven’t really changed much, except humans are now considered obsolete and cities are populated by cyborgs who spend more of their time plugged into their computers, doing their work by thought. There’s also talk about the first supercomputer president and an ambitious candidate for the title is doing well in the primaries: Σ667-X3.
He promises that with an operating speed of 1 exaflop and a storage capacity of roughly 500 exabytes, he can process and remember all public requests during his terms in office, and his 99.98% uptime means that he’ll always be ready to step in and make crucial decisions. Sure, this all sounds great, but you can never tell how politicians will perform until they take office. And what if he gets a virus and kicks on the doomsday machine of which he’ll be in charge as one of the leaders of the Western World 2.0? Oh well, we’ll see what happens over the next few months. But yeah, other than that, it’s same old, same old in the post-Singularity world…
