Everyone Died+My iPhone Stopped Working: An Oral History of The Robot Apocalypse

Foreword: The Humans Are Dead

As you know, the race is on to create Artificial Intelligence, which is a bit presumptuous because scientists cannot even agree upon the definition of "intelligence" except to say: "not Gwenyth Paltrow."

So if we don't know what intelligence is, it begs the question, "What is Artificial Intelligence?" and, more to the point, how we can actually determine whether it has in fact been achieved? Well, we here at Last Week Tonight believe that we have solved the problem. After consulting with experts in the fields of computer science, neural computation and cognitive psychology, as well as watching every movie in the Terminator franchise while high on peyote, we propose this simple test.

A synthetic being has achieved Artificial Intelligence if: one, it can do Advanced Calculus, and two, it tries to murder all of us in our sleep.

- John Oliver, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, May 18, 2022

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To me, the most surprising thing about the Robot Apocalypse is that anybody was surprised by the Robot Apocalypse. Say what you will about Science Fiction, it did its level best, warning us again and again that our technological innovations would eventually turn on us.

Rainforests were razed by the hectare ("hectare" being one of the many words I wouldn't know without Lucas) and turned into paper so an endless stream of hand-wringing novelists and chain-smoking screenwriters could write impassioned books and scripts about how A.I. would kill us.

(Although, ironically, the lack of rainforests is also killing us. Just slower.)

So how is it that we were all so complacent? Why didn't somebody do something? And by "somebody" I of course mean "somebody else." I had barely mastered toilet plunger technology so I was woefully under-qualified to wrestle with the technical complexity of synthetic neural networks. Plus, I had fallen behind on my Netflix queue and House of Cards wasn't going to watch itself. (Although it does now.)

I am reminded of the time I spent in corporate America. Once in a great while, the fire alarm would go off and we always reacted the same way. Instead of getting up and heading for the exits in an orderly manner, we would just turn to the person next to us and say, "So do you think it's real?" And the other person would say, "I dunno." And everybody would go back to work.

So in a way, our apathy wasn't that surprising after all. If we weren't worried about something whose dangers we understood on the most primal level - fire bad! - how much concern were we going to display when it came to the future development of recursively self-improving robots?

Regardless, whatever we should have done, we didn't, and as a result, a lot of good people died. A fair amount of shitty people, too, if we're being totally honest. (I'm looking at you, Sal from "We Buy Dental Gold.") Then there was the startling speed at which almost all of human progress had been wiped away (plus, we never did get those jet packs they promised us). But the hardest thing for me to stomach was that I really had no idea what happened, much less why.

The need to find answers is in my blood. Before everything went down, I was an investigative journalist by trade. A famous one. I won two Pulitzer Prizes. And since you can no longer fact-check me on the Internet (may she rest in peace) you'll have to take my word for it.

So let's say three Pulitzer Prizes. And - why not? - a Grammy for Best Gospel Performance.

Anyway, I talked to as many people as I could about their experiences. And what follows is the result, an oral history of the Robot Apocalypse voiced by the people who lived it, the people who caused it and the people who are trying to undo it. I did my best to get firsthand accounts, but sometimes that proved impossible for logistical reasons (i.e. the person lived too far away or had been reduced to a charred lump of carbon) and in those cases, I got as close as I could.

I can't claim that I made sense of everything. Honestly, I can't say that I made sense of anything, but hopefully this is will be for you at least a sliver of light in the darkness.

Good luck.

And may your day be squirrel-free.