Facial Animation System “Alfred” (Wiki commons)

One day the robots started to romanticize the humans, what little they knew about them. They formed robot families, small social structures, gathered around screens. There was a film in black and white set around Christmas time with fake snow and the character had to rethink his life. One of the robots cried.

Perhaps it was that, this need to create art that separated them. The robots were made for production, to make man rich, to separate man. But man had the skill to make things, to make pretend he was God. Some robots studied human history so they could be like them; they were tired of just being robots.

They read about Shakespeare, about the play Macbeth: how a man, a leader could believe in witches and sorcery (what later became Technology): that to rule was a thing of nature, of divine right, and to interrupt that royal line was unnatural, supernatural: that Shakespeare managed to pair nature with the act of sleep so that when one of the characters murders a houseguest she can’t sleep the rest of the play and someone says, “you lack the season of all natures, sleep.” And why robots never sleep, they don’t have to.

In the end all this romanticizing about humans and wanting to feel and create was non-robotic and would be their downfall. Man made the robots but then the robots took over, and all this was likely man just trying to be like God, something he learned from the aliens they encoded in a drug in the Amazon some say is the only thing that can save us now from Trump and losing all our manufacturing jobs to robots, based on what I’m hearing on the news and from friends.

Categories: musings

Tags: AI, Anti-Technology Dystopic Riff, fake news, farce, flash fiction, MacBeth, Steven Hawkings on futurism, supernatural in Shakespeare, technology vs. nature, William Pearse writer, William Shakespeare