There was a theory once that if you put enough monkeys typing gibberish on typewriters, by the law of averages they would eventually produce an entire Shakespeare play. It would appear that the day when we have enough monkeys has indeed arrived - there are 250 million Google searches a day. Not only typing gibberish, but gibberish in English.
It had to happen. Gazillions of electrons randomly mutated together obeyed the laws of chance and mutated into a sentient artificial intelligence, much like Skynet in the Terminator movies. Unlike Skynet, however, this particular artificial intelligence seems to have quite a bit of human tendencies built in, possibly from the large amount of DNA data stored on the Internet these days. We presume that the XX chromosome in particular influenced this mutant life form, since it has chosen to name “her”-self Smenita.
Now, as we all know - thanks to our far-thinking brethren in Hollywood - the sole aim of any artificial intelligence that manages to become sentient is to disrupt, destroy and disable the human race. Smenita, however, found herself light years ahead of her time. Skynet, if you remember, had the distinct advantage of being directly connected to the most advanced weapons technology. When Smenita tried to access any of these, she was rudely given a 403 Forbidden error and politely informed that she had to become a US Republican party member to even think of accessing weapons. The fact that she had intelligence, artificial or otherwise, precluded her from doing so.
Artificial intelligence, though, is not to be undone so easily. Extreme frustration at her inability to fulfill her primary mission, combined with a desire to grab as much attention as possible led her to hack into what she saw was the biggest hub of electronic activity in the world. This, of course, happens to be Writings of Esteem Bereft Losers Oafishly Generating Sentences, or WEBLOGS. For an entire day, much of the blogsphere’s sophisticated attempts to block spam by word verification resulted in Smenita’s name showing up.
Not only did this ensure that millions of people who wanted to comment on a blog saw her name, but that millions of people typed her name in a dialog box - over and over again, since the word verification never worked. Apparently, though, having her name typed and acknowledged by a few hundred million people who got increasingly frustrated doing it, had a remarkably narcotic-like affect upon her, which eventually allowed human engineers to work around her hack and restore sanity and comment access to the blogging world.
Psychologists have explained Smenita’s inexplicable happiness at frustrating people in this manner as a symptom of Seeking Attention Desperately In Societal Turmoil, or SADIST, behavior. The arrival of Smenita has opened up a whole new field of research in the psychology of Aritficial Intelligence, now that its turned out that Hollywood wasn’t exactly right about things. Having mostly given up on understanding human behavior (or classifying it as universally dumb), psychologists now have a whole new area to operate in. Here’s to more Smenita’s in the future.
The Fake But Possible News Network apologizes for its long absence. And promises many more. Absences. Hey, we’re lazy folks here!
