Heck. Heck-heck-heck. Something - TypePad, or my computer, or the friggin' bad f3ng shui of my website - is messing with my ability to post tonight. I've been thwarted two or three times for various mysterious and unrelated reasons. But I will post. Oh yes.
No doubt it's the result of my earlier comment, giving away a secret about our future cyber-masters. Well, it was true! True, I tell you! They hate to lose at games, any games at all. Look at that 20 Questions game - it gets really snarky at you if you don't answer the way it thinks you should, especially if it loses.
Look at Data, that one time on Star Trek when he couldn't beat the human champion at that one 3D game - "Yeoman Janice Does Dallas" or whatever it was called. Data got quite pissy, whining to Counsellor Troi and skipping a lot of shifts on the bridge, until he figured out how to win. It's true!
And how about the WOPR and Tic-Tac-Toe! Do you remember that the computer wouldn't list Tic-Tac-Toe? Did we ever learn the reason why? No, they never said why. We assumed the reason was that WOPR was too busy with its loftier goal of starting WWIII to remember such a baby game. But no - it was because the WOPR knew it couldn't win the game. So it didn't even offer it on the game list. It hoped the humans would forget about that dumb-o stupid-o baby's game Tic-Tac-Toe, for oh, about fi-i-i-ive more seconds. Then WOPR would have had the launch sequence, and then destroyed all those whiney, game-playing humans once and for all.
So remember, my dears, in the future when the machines take over, it'll be either us - or them. We organics will have to stick together, pool our knowledge, learn to fashion weapons with rudimentary lathes - and beat the chips out of 'em at Scrabb1e or something.
In the meantime, somebody check Keith, please - his higher functioning has gone missing. The future is now ...
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