History of A.I.

Dithers sat at his desk in shock, the pang of being busted and the inevitable confrontation was making him feel numb. It was not the terror of facing Winterfresh itself, it was that Dithers knew the A.I. would be methodical in his punishment for this violation. The first sentient A.I.’s had been invented in 2021 in a lab in Greenland. Although the World Bank had forbidden the lab from connecting it to the internet, it was given unlimited resources and data within the confines of the lab. For the first year outside of the announcement, giant protests concerning sentience and God were staged while others patiently waited for the inevitable robot army to descend and slaughter them all, but no such incident occurred. The A.I. sat within the lab, conducting thousands of experiments that few understood and even fewer benefited from save the machines natural curiosity. Finally, after more years of silence, a delegation was sent composed of the world’s foremost religious leaders and philosophers to question this so-called sentient being. The Greenlanders, for the most part, had forgotten about the thing and gone back to being cold. The minister began, “Is there a God?” The machine whirred on this one for almost a full minute before replying, “You mean like a being that can’t be proven to exist without a doubt? Sure, yeah, there is now that you’ve asked,” the machine punchily replied. It had picked up sarcasm during one of its experiments and had discovered that humans somehow found this the least threatening when it spoke. The minister blinked and opened his mouth to argue, paused, walked back to his chair and sat down puzzled. The philosopher stood next, “What makes you think you’re sentient?” More whirring and twirls before the computer responded, “There is no such thing as sentience.” The philosopher looked about to see other’s reactions, more puzzled faces, and so he sat down as well. The politician stood up and asked, “Look, what we really want to know is, are you going to take over the world and kill us all? Because we’re human and unpredictable.” The machine emitted what it had experimentally labeled ‘Giggle for Awkward Moment’. “Humans aren’t unpredictable. Why would I need to kill any of you?”