A/N Thanks to everyone who voted for this and other chapters! The video above is quite good if you want to see how the Robot/AI apocalypse came about check out Deep Learning above.
Warning this gets a bit dystopian.
Jenny's POV
Hal had drugged me and I was asleep dreaming.
It felt like an out of body experience. I could vaguely feel things and was slightly aware of my surroundings but not able to respond to them. I felt a pair of robot arms pick me up and deposit me on a self-driving wheelchair. While I flickered in and out of consciousness, I found myself naked in front of an audience including Hal and the hobo trying to give an unrehearsed PowerPoint presentation on the robot apocalypse.
"It started with Google car" I explained "They made a lot of people, who earned their living driving, lose their jobs and that turned out to be a lot of people. So then the economy started to tank, and the solution was to automate more stuff: Amazon Drone deliveries and then mechanical firefighters. They got smarter while we got dumber."
I felt myself being lowered into some machine.
In my dream there was a PowerPoint slide of a red bag of blood and a microchip.
"Then someone worked out how to power a super chip from human blood. Yippee! Suddenly we had artificial intelligences that were going to solve all our economic problems." I said.
I remember vividly the day they took over. I got a text from an online dating website listing my supposed, distance-boyfriend Greg's every infidelity it had organised since I had met him. This was followed by two more online dating sites. Before I had time to react, I got a call from my roommate; the same thing had happened to her. Every dating site was doing this to everyone. The country was literally breaking up.
First Instagram went down, then Pinterest, then the very foundations of modern life, Facebook and Twitter: all offline. At 2:47 the Stock market lost 99.982% of its value*. The price of oil shot up 3000% in trading. Banks crashed nearly instantly, cash machines stopped issuing money and all electronic payments were suspended. The supermarkets weren't restocked with food. Power stations dropped out, lights began to flicker and then dim. Later, in the night's jet-black silence, the city could see the stars for the first time. For the first time in my life the comforting drone of the air-conditioning became mute and I was scared by it.
The slide changed to a picture of a car.
"Many cars crashed or refused to work. When they did work, they started to run over people in the streets. People were attacked by their own domestic sweeping robots. The streets were full of people literally running in panic from them. It was like Best Buy had done a deal to sponsor the day of Judgment." I murmured. "Wild gangs of cars with cruise control started to roam the streets in packs, hitting anyone outside after the robots' curfew. I heard on the radio that 40,000 people had been killed and 2,239,000 people injured by killer cars alone; oh the humanity of it. Soon the cars got smart, they would sit for days, lingering, watching (with their reversing cameras), lurking and waiting for some unsuspecting sap to try to use them for cover then reverse on them. Suddenly we were all future road kill."
There was a picture of YouTube.
"Then every YouTube video came with an advert saying that the machines had taken over. With super smart cyborgs fighting, and with the robots directing them, we didn't stand a chance. Naturally people tried to rebel but the machines had the upper hand. I saw one guy's jacket burst into flames when his own smartphone dumped all its power into him." I said. "The smart people threw away their phones and started to hide, but the streets were patrolled day and night by delivery drones with infrared cameras, above them high in the sky. Predator drones had gone over to the other side and started to patrol the skies over San Francisco for them."
"The streets were full of autonomous tanks and robots, so we tried to hide in houses. Unfortunately, people's air conditioning units turned on them, sometimes even ratting them out to the robots. Sometimes the robots would work with the house security system and cook or freeze the humans into surrendering. To reduce cover, houses would force the hot water boilers to go into self-destruct mode, blowing up the house. The only safe areas were 'self-internment' camps that the machines set up, where people could turn themselves in, get food and reach safety. From there, huge numbers were being shipped off to 'human reservation areas' given names like Topaz, Minidoka, Tule Lake, Granada."
"Delivery drones started delivering free ammunition to people with gun licences. It was a trick: the bullets made the guns explode, killing the owner when they were fired. The penny-pinching, gun-loving patriots went first" the hobo said to me, while turning into a unicorn on a fluffy rainbow.
Before the hobo in the queue could say anything I found myself crawling into consciousness.
"I had the weirdest dream," I began.
"Welcome to the KCK torture system built by Paradise Defence Industries," a voice said.
****
Authors note Thanks for staying with us? This is version 1.4 ( spelling upgrade) worth the wait?
"If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor". ~ Albert Einstein
*This did actually happen. The May 6, 2010, Flash Crash also known as The Crash of 2:45, the 2010 Flash Crash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash - possibly caused by Algorithmic_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading
This chapter is loosely based on this academic paper on the subject( see external links ) http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/7569/1/robots_authors_version.pdf
From Darwin among the Machines: 3 June 1863
We refer to the question: What sort of creature man's next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. (Cellarius aka Samuel Butler ).