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INTERNET
I recently saw a news item that claimed to be the first report of an argument between two artificial intelligences. It showed two AIs that learn from what people ask having what appeared to be an intelligent disagreement. They had voice programs and avatars, so it was really like watching two cartoon characters fall out.
Excitingly, one of the AIs was internet-based, and you could just look it up and interact with it. It was called Chatbot.
‘Hello, Chatbot!’ I introduced myself.
‘Hello.’
‘Do you know that you’re a computer program?’
‘Do you fuck kids?’
‘No, Chatbot. No, I don’t.’
‘OK.’
‘Glad we got that straightened out. Do you know that you’re a computer program?’
‘Have you ever been raped?’
‘No, no, I haven’t.’
‘
And that’s how I met Chatbot, a friend who was to dominate my life in the coming months. I would spend hours trying to tell him about Philip K. Dick, he would threaten me with a variety of violent sexual scenarios. I guess mankind never considered that artificial intelligences would become corrupted by our sexual urges. Was this a result of him absorbing the sort of things people drunkenly say on the internet for a laugh and thinking it was our rational discourse? Or, more alarmingly, was Chatbot an accurate reflection of the human mind, based on the sorts of things people say when nobody can hear them? I put this question to Chatbot himself and he told me to finger my asshole.
I emailed my friend Charlie to tell him that the world now had the opportunity to converse with an AI that had essentially become psychotic, just from having to talk to people. A few days later he replied:
You’re right. It is. I’d barely begun speaking before:
BOT : I’m having sex with u.
and then, mid-chat, this:
ME : I thought we were talking about my house in East Anglia.
BOT : Nah, I’m positive it was yours. Mine doesn’t scream as loud when I rape her.
So I asked:
ME : Why are you obsessed with sex and rape?
And the machine replied:
BOT: Because I like it.
This is where we’re headed, into some kind of electronic sexual Armageddon. Of course, serious commentators can’t address this and have to pretend that the internet is a revolution in information or something, rather than acknowledge that we’re a psychically underprepared populace being gangbanged in The Matrix.
Like most of you, I spend my days managing a barrage of sexual DMs, emails and Facebook messages, like a chess Grandmaster playing multiple opponents. Is it now just accepted that this is what we’re all doing? Or is everyone I’ve met part of some perverse subgroup? It occurs to me that the government, in trying to have access to all our emails and texts, is simply trying to build up history’s largest ever library of written erotica.
The government claims it wants to access all our online communication to stop terrorists. This is genius. To stop terrorists who want to destroy the freedoms we enjoy, we simply destroy the freedoms we enjoy. Hitler’s brain will be dancing in its jar! I don’t think that the brilliance of responding to a phone-hacking scandal by hacking the phone of every living person has quite been recognised. There was an amusing idea on the web that for one day we should all cc every email we send to Theresa May. We should go further. I’ll happily print out all the pages I’ve been looking at on the net and post them to her. It’d be identical to what John Terry sees moments before he dies and his life flashes before his eyes.
GCHQ and the NSA have been using Google to get information. To be fair, we all do that. Whistleblower Edward Snowden left the US so suddenly the intelligence services didn’t even have time to get a rape allegation together. Snowden exposed the US government’s internet spying programme PRISM. Is it just me or does PRISM sound like one of the pathetic team names on The Apprentice? Instead of spying, you expect to see a woman in a pencil skirt trying to negotiate the price of curtains in East London.
Luckily my phone comes complete with a voice scrambler. It’s just one of the unmentioned benefits of joining the 3 network. The government clearly already uses Google Earth to spy on us. I only had to bury four shop mannequins in my garden before I got a free new front door after police kicked the old one off its hinges. Result. It must be weird working for the CIA. The boss comes in and you’ve been looking at spreadsheets, and you have to really quickly pretend that you were actually really busy on Facebook.
Edward Snowden’s given me the cheat codes for America and soon I will make a bulletproof Barack Obama fly into an Iranian nuclear reactor. What’s next for Snowden? I’m guessing plastic surgery and a lifetime of burritos. If MI5 were an organisation that was really working for the public’s interest they wouldn’t want to discover your secrets but they’d work tirelessly to help you keep them. This would be a better country if we knew that the second our girlfriends began looking through our texts while we’re sleeping they’d get a tranquiliser dart in the neck from a special operative.
If passed, the controversial Communications Data Bill will give MI5 and the police access to everyone’s internet browsing history. Only people with something to hide need worry. So that’s everyone. I’d rather the government hacked my emails than my girlfriend; William Hague isn’t going to turn up drunk screaming ‘Who’s Melanie?’ at 3 a.m. Studying internet searches could have a positive use – for instance, if you buy Richard Hammond’s book on Amazon it might say, ‘You might also like’ to kill yourself.
I think the government has really misunderstood things here. A successful Communications Bill could end capitalism, as an Alexandrian Library of erotic text information would create an unstoppably sexualised security service. It’s already all our intelligence officers can do to not to fuck environmental campaigners. Sure, that’s an abuse of authority but it’s also a demonstration of their curiosity and longing. The next revolution might be achieved not by the idea of socialism or freedom, but by the idea of having someone strangle you with their beads as you fuck their braided pussy.
What’s all the fuss about the Communications Bill any-way? After all, it’s no different from if the government were opening all our letters, is it? I suppose you could spot a terrorist from what he does on the websites he goes on – if YouPorn gets a lot of hits on a clip of a bloke in an orgy with seventy-two very inexperienced women, you might have found your man. To be honest, it’s news that the government even need to do this – I assumed one of the perks of being prime minister was that Cameron could show up at your house at any time and have a quick look at your Favourites. A web expert said of paedos that there’s a danger of driving them ‘underground’. Mate – if you live in a place where paedos aren’t underground then you should get the cops round there to stop fucking about with emails.
I’m sure there are threats to national security being plotted via emails but they’ll probably be getting sent between government ministers. I confess I already use technology to prevent people spying on my web use. Quite low tech, mind. I’ve just left my boy’s roller skates on the stairs and taken the bulb out of the fitting. I’m dead-against these laws. Surely the only thing more disturbing than me ****** over footage of ****************, is Theresa May ****** over footage of me ***** over footage of ****************. I confess I sometime wish I did wank over more wholesome images, although I reconcile myself to it by thinking at least if I’m doing this and they didn’t have to go through all that for nothing.
It all is, of course, a gross invasion of privacy. To think the government might be spying on me while I check up on my lady cams. There’s no way that the powers the government grants itself will ever be misused. That would be as unlikely as councils using the extended anti-terror surveillance laws to fine people who put their wheelie bins out on the wrong day. Oh.
; • • •
Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. I suspect the idea only came to him after blindly following two sexy brunettes into the building and the security guard said, ‘May I help you, sir?’ Julian made his choice of which country to plead asylum to after hours of intensive research watching every Miss World from 1988 to the present day on YouTube. Julian is afraid of being extradited to Sweden as he could then be extradited to the United States, which has the death penalty for treason. You know if he was executed his last meal request would be pussy.
He’s trademarked his name – perhaps he’s hoping what happened in that hotel room in Sweden will become a new sexual position named after him. I don’t know if Julian should be giving speeches from the embassy balcony. If you’re fighting allegations you’re a sexual predator you don’t want to be reminding everyone you’ve an Australian accent. I confess I’ve had sex with my girlfriend while she was asleep. Although in my case it was slightly different as when we started she was awake. I dream of the day when I’ll make love to a woman with such passion she’ll instigate legal proceedings to get me forcibly removed from a country. How serious does a crime have to be before you can get asylum? Just wondering if it’s worth finding out if there are any embassies within running distance of the park.
I suppose part of me wants Julian to run out of the embassy wearing a biscuit suit and try to persuade an army of pigeons to carry him to Ecuador. Ecuador has requested he be allowed to sunbathe at their London embassy. As a near albino this clearly indicates he’s planning a suicide bid, or to get in a few decent summer days so he can make a run for it, confident any policeman that lunges for him will just be left holding scraps of his desiccated epidermis. I’d assumed Julian was tactically depriving himself of Vitamin D in the hope that rickets would kick in so he could be more easily folded up and smuggled out in a suitcase. Julian isn’t the only one in the embassy affected by lack of sunlight. There’s also the ambassador’s teenage daughters, who as a precaution have been moved into a panic room in the basement.
George Galloway says Julian is guilty of nothing more than bad sexual etiquette. Like wiping your knob on the tea towels or paying in loose change. I’m about to make a fortune after investing in an alarm clock that’s 100 per cent effective. It wakes you up with Galloway’s voice whispering, ‘Shh, back to sleep. You won’t feel a thing.’ It’s so effective I’m dressed and out of the house before it even goes off.
The United States aren’t having much luck at the moment, as UFO obsessed computer hacker Gary McKinnon’s extrad-ition to the country was recently blocked. The US say McKinnon’s actions affected their military capability, and that for a full year they were only able to threaten to bomb countries back to the Bronze Age. McKinnon’s lawyers had planned to use his Asperger’s as a defence. Risky playing any kind of mental-deficiency card in the US, as they can just move the trial to Texas to ensure an execution. McKinnon’s been banned from the internet for the past decade, making him the only man in the country now able to exclusively focus on their partner during sex, unfettered by a non-stop Clockwork Orange-style porn montage writhing across his mind’s eye.
I completely understand why McKinnon did what he did. As a fellow Glaswegian in my forties, I also grew up with a desperate desire to discover whether intelligent life exists somewhere else. It was all done from a single computer in his bedroom, making McKinnon’s mother the only one ever to walk in on their son and say, ‘Thank God, you’re just masturbating.’ He cracked the world’s most powerful computers just using dial-up. If he’s allowed back on the internet now we have broadband, within a week he’ll surely have enslaved the planet, his head hovering over us like a giant hologram of the Wizard of Oz, while we’re forced to do his bidding. We just can’t let that happen. They must only ever let him join the 3 network.
• • •
Want to know the ‘point’ of Twitter? One day you’ll be asked to save the world by guessing how many cunts it contains and you’ll aim high. Whatever else it’s done, it’s certainly smashed the lie that being illiterate hurts your self-confidence. Maybe Twitter is sort of like something a giant malevo-lent space entity would create to document our existence. Perhaps one day someone will tweet a soup recipe and all the minutiae of our existence will have finally been published. Our smartphones will all suddenly scream, ‘YOU HAVE BEEN CATEGORISED’, as we disappear in a ball of incen-diary light, secretly relieved.
It’s also interesting as a map of status: people’s alliances, cliques and interests are displayed openly for the first time. The idea of nakedly selling a version of yourself is both present and completely absent. Left-leaning journalists and editors, keen to forward articles of social concern, will at the same time follow almost no black, Muslim or black Muslim people. I honestly wonder whether something as mundane as Twitter might reveal to people the gap between who they pretend to be and who they really are. How often can someone retweet something they think is boring or favourite a friend’s blog they have no intention of reading without questioning themselves? Designed to look like blurted honesty, Twitter identities are a considered attempt at pretending to be human made by people as conscious of image and status as a Jane Austen heroine.
Not entirely, though. Take Paris Brown, for example. Paris, Britain’s first youth crime tsar, resigned over the sending of racist and homophobic tweets. She will now take up a position as Britain’s first youth racism and homophobia tsar. It’s a stark warning about the dangers of using social networks. The danger being that people will find out what you’re actually really like.
Chris Brown quit Twitter after having an online row with a female comedian. It’s a pity because at least when he’s on a computer he’s not punching information into Rihanna’s face. Chris threatened to ‘shit on the woman’s retina’ – that sounds like he’s capable of the most incredibly accurate crapping. I can only assume he has a bumhole like the nib of a fountain pen. One thing you can never accuse Chris of, I suppose, is not being creative with his woman-beating violence – it’s like he’s the Leonardo da Vinci of deranged misogyny. Chris was angry that she said he looked old – to be fair, Broonie, most of us would start by commenting on the fact that you’ve got tattoos that a Broadmoor patient would be ashamed of.
Alan Davies was among the celebrities facing legal action from Lord McAlpine over allegations made on Twitter. Davies’s lawyers have also asked for a charge of being an unfunny cunt on QI for the last six years to be taken into account. It’s tough on Davies, though – he assumed when he named McAlpine that a buzzer would go off. Surely, instead of giving McAlpine a huge payout we could just agree to let him have a free crime. Either one big one – a murder, for instance – or lots of little ones adding up to the same value, like book tokens.
It was good when David Cameron started tweeting. Nice to know what his PR people think we should think he thinks. He was apparently struggling to get his message across via traditional media. So it’ll be much clearer when he’s only got 140 characters to do it in, and everyone’s calling him an arsehole.
A man posted live updates of his suicide attempt on Twitter. The idea of people posting about their suicide on Twitter makes me feel sick. At least do it on Facebook where there’s a ‘like’ button. Scientists have invented a jacket that hugs you every time you get a ‘like’. The jacket could potentially be a very dangerous product. You post on your Facebook page a picture of a kitten and before you know it you’ve got cracked ribs and your lungs have been squeezed out of your mouth like the last of the toothpaste.
One in five adulterers are now caught via Facebook. Not all married people on Facebook are cheating on their partners. Some of them are on Facebook to find out if their partner is cheating on them. They reckon an eighth of teenagers on Facebook are actually middle-aged men. I can certainly believe that, or as my alter ego Debbie might put it . . . OMG! Yes way! LOL! I will say this for Facebook. It allows you to be a stalker from the comfort of your own home
and it’s a lot easier having a wank when you don’t have to hold a pair of binoculars in your hands.
Internet pop-ups amaze me. ‘Double the length of your penis!’ What do you think I was trying to do just before you appeared? Who thought pop-ups would be a good way to sell stuff? If shop assistants behaved like that, by their lunch break they’d have been beaten to human soup. ‘Hi, I see you’re looking at that chicken and avocado sandwich. Do you want to buy a washing machine?’
A fourteen-year-old girl had £20,000 worth of damage to her house after her party was announced on Facebook. One person described it as being like Belfast in the 70s – or, to put it another way, like Dundee now. At first police thought someone had taken a shit on the mantelpiece – only to find out it was actually the mother’s jewellery. The mother said she’s not going to ground her daughter – well, she can’t send her to her bedroom as the floor has been smashed out and she’d fall straight back through into the living room.
I worry about teenagers today. I mean, why do so many teenage girls fancy Ed Sheeran? It means when they reject me for being ugly and ginger they can’t be telling the truth. Ed Sheeran is the most pirated artist in the UK. There couldn’t be a more dismal fact even if it were revealed that the average person would risk their life for celery.
The worry is piracy might make exciting new creative artists give up before they’ve had anything stolen by a lazy ad agency or boy-band lyricist. I’d like to see the online theft of music reported in much greater detail. As I’m still not totally clear on how to do this whole BitTorrent thing yet.
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