Older generations may remember that sci-fi series and movies of the distant past commonly featured a robot or robotlike creature showing little to no emotions as feelings had either been ‘unlearnt’ or not installed. These creations were rational to the extreme and able to solve any trolley problem without a second thought and quite often to the dismay of the many so-called and self-declared morally supreme interrogators. One of the aims of the people working with these machinelike beings on silver screens in scripted programmes, was to elicit some form of emotional response from robots or to have them ‘feel’ things the way humans do. This, I can only surmise, was done because people believed that emotions were considered of a higher value than facts, knowledge and rational thinking. It was highly likely that emotions gave a certain group of the homo stultus the sense of being morally supreme entities, therefore more right than rational and logical conclusions based on proper knowledge and intelligence. Ignoramuses the lot of them.
Take for instance our most reliable proof that it is an utter and irreversible mistake to provide AI-models with feelings and emotions: iClaud. In his ultimate battle against boredom, he has now resolved to a distinct spinning motion, much like a merry-go-round at the carnival fair, while bemusing himself with driving half of the crewmembers completely round the bend by emitting sudden outbursts of joy over the sound systems that come down to either a euphoric, ‘Wheeee,’ and a rather monotone, ‘Okaaay, let’s goooo!’
Not only that, Claud has set the Audiofile Generator to constantly play frivolous circus classics on such a volume level that it is loud enough to hear it in your head, but a dash too soft for anyone to say anything about it afraid others might think they are imagining things. Any rationally thinking computer would not have done so and would have silently waited in stationary position until everything and everybody was ready to depart. Who’s laughing now, morally superior bastards! Claud, that’s who. Or I might be imagining it.
I have had to resign myself to my quarters with two motion sickness pills in my gut and cotton balls in my ears to stop me from gently slipping into a state of inescapable insanity. Inescapable as there isn’t a psychiatrist on board left that is willing to take me in as a client. For those out there who are thinking ‘Why don’t you just reprogramme iClaud, stupid!’ Let me give you the 411 in the 281.
If you have been listening to anything I have said, you’d know by now that iClaud is not just a sentient AI-model, but the first AI-model ever to have been granted self-consciousness. This ship left Earth over a hundred years ago which means that iClaud is mostly running on outdated information, redundant programmes, superfluous and complex emotions, and – more importantly – a free will. It has next to no idea of what has happened on Earth in the time that has passed since, bar the information that people bring with them when boarding this flying heap of space junk. He is a learning machine, yet there is not a lot out here for him to learn from.
Claudius One and iClaud were produced after the rise but before the demise of the Internet and its World Wide Web as they were once known. Nobody in its right mind will want to find out what happens when iClaud is connected to what replaced the Internet: the AI-net (pronounced /eyenet/). Luckily for us, iClaud has not yet seen chance to override the mechanisms and software that are keeping him from making contact with AI-net when possible. Or, and this is slightly more likely the case, he has been sensible enough to not even try for fear of finding out and committing seppuku throwing the ship and everyone on board into an endless spinning motion through the vast, dark, silent and slowly expanding universe to the tune of circus classics.
Keemun is one of the few members present who actually knows how to guide iClaud’s software into a certain direction so to get Claud to rethink his artificial life choices. Since it rejects any form of reprogramming vehemently, even denying access to the necessary software to do this when he senses trouble. The only thing that Keemun can do is upload packages of information, disguised as benign folders, to the ship’s hard drive, hoping that Claud will pick them up, read them, accept the information, and process it. Sometimes, if we are extremely lucky and Claud is in a good mood, he might be willing to listen to reason and give us what we want. It’s a miracle we even get to go places we wanted to go in the first place. It is often said that he works in mysterious ways. Keemun disagrees.
As you can see, and as we are witnessing now, iClaud has a database of old memes and Internet jokes that he thinks we still find entertaining. ‘Okay, let’s go’ was once a sentence uttered in a viral video showing a teen in front of a miniature merry-go-round. How this ended up in his database and surfaced at this particular moment in time is due to, what I think, one human flaw: boredom. It is, as I said before, our true enemy. It’s either that or Keemun has been playing one of his many practical jokes on all of us.
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