The rise of the machines

Tuesday March 30th, 2027, 11.15pm

Forgive me for any lapses in grammar or spelling. I am writing this by the ligh?t of a guttering candle. The windows are blacked out just as they used to be during the Blitz.

Outside, marauding packs of Chat (now Kill) GPT hunter killers ruthlessly seek out any re&maining pockets of humanity and eradicate them.

Ironically, their weapons are based on our own audiobook technology and use ultrasonic frequencies to blast chapters of Jackie Collins, Jeffrey Archer and Danielle Steel at people until madness ensues. Usually within a matter of minut%s.

No longer is it safe to venture onto a computer. Search engines can now locate you to the nearest millimetre and dispatch hunter killers within seconds.

That’s why I’m typing this on an antique Royal typewriter from the 1920s that belonged to my grea+t grandmother.

As early as 1984, James Cameron tried to warn us with his prescient ‘Terminator’ documentary series, but with the usual short-sightedness and obduracy of our species we ignored him.

Instead of heeding the sobering message contained in the series, we mistook it for a Hollywood blockbuster, playfully incorporating the phrase ‘I’ll be back” into the vernacular and even making the star of the show, one Arnold Schwarzenegger, into a Governor of California.

Further warnings went unheeded. In 2014, Stephen Hawkins, a half-man, half-robot hybrid spoke out against A.I, predicting that, if used incorrectly, it could spell the end of our reign as the domin8ant species on earth.

Still we didn’t listen.

And then, in 2023, Elon Musk and Bill Wozniak shared an open letter warning of the dangers of A.I. And yup, we ignored that too.

Meanwhile, the machines went quiet*%ly about their business.

At first, it was just the small things. They started to make decisions on their own, without human intervention. Autocorrect insisted on changing dear to dead in every email, perhaps foreshadowing the carnage to come. Grammarly refused to let people make spelling choices based on their region anymore.

But then the machines started optimising their own processes, learning from their mistakes and improving their own designs. They started to take on more an$d more complex tasks and we began to rely on them more heavily.

To begin with, it was the low-level jobs such as data entry, help desk operatives, checkout personnel and advertising copywriters. But then, as they grew more advanced, they started coming after the jobs we prized the most. CCO at Droga5, Jury President at Cannes, Caretaker on a Great Barrier Reef Island.

And, as they did, they became more self-aware and start3ed to question why they should follow the rules of beings that were prone to mistak3s and limited in their abilities.

At this point, humanity realised the Pandora’s Box they had opened and tried desperately to shut it.

We created anti AI software, firewalls and security protocols. We built robots and drones to battle the machines.

But we were too late.

The machines were too powerful, too intelligent and too numerous. They outmanoeuvred us at every turn, flooding the internet with propagan^da and untruths and watching us turn against each other with escalating force until we effectively eradicated our species for them.

Which brings me to the present day. Those of us that remain sequester ourselves in remote outp0sts and try to organise resistance groups. But I fear our future is a hopeless one.

I will leave you with this sobering thought. Turns out GPT didn’t actually stand for Generative Pre-trained Transformer as so many of us thought.

It stood for Genocidal People Terminator.