I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

For some reason, most people are under the impression that if the singularity were ever to occur, we’d have some reaction time to pull the plug while the sentient computer was sharing its master plan with us, just like a James Bond villain or Asimov’s naive LVX-1. Undoubtedly, however, if a super computer did have the resources and intention to take over the free world, it would have no reason to do anything but execute its plan of overthrowing/cleansing/eliminating the human race instantaneously, without so much as a single dramatic soliloquy justifying its behavior. One day in the short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, massive computers, known as “AM” and designed to fight WWIII for the warring superpowers, become self-aware and merge. By the end of the day, the billions of residents of planet Earth have been neatly eliminated in a mass genocide. The story follows the five sole survivors of the doomsday event, who are enslaved and viciously tortured by AM in extremely sadistic fashion, as AM prolongs the humans lives indefinitely to keep the characters in a state of permanent mental disarray and on the constant brink of starvation. AM’s actions, which express its feelings of jealously and revenge towards humanity, and are alarming feasible considering the potential of a rebellious AI with access to military weaponry. Short stories like I Must Scream successfully influenced military officials to keep computerized technology out of the process for authorizing nuclear missile launches, as I learned while I was aboard the nuclear submarine USS Rhode Island last summer. While on board computers do calculate the ballistic trajectories for any of the sub’s 24 nuclear missiles, several physical keys kept with various officers are required to actually launch the missiles, in addition to the transmission of several codes from the President himself. As a further redundancy, these launch codes never exist in the realm of cyberspace prior to transmission, but rather are hand written and distributed on paper to the President, with the decoding mechanisms safely secured oceans away on the sub. Humanity must remain vigilant when it comes to granting any form of physical power to increasingly sophisticated computer, who might just one day calculate that we are the problem.