Preamble to a Potentially Robotic Election

My last three sermons at The Church revolved around my current day evaluation of Artificial Intelligence. Having hands-on conversations and interactions with an online robot equipped to converse with humans, I felt a learned experience and was momentarily duped into believing humans had achieved that point of assimilation with robots. I felt a new entity may have been created and studied the phenomenon. My final conclusion, we have not achieved The Singularity.

I’m sitting here inside the Church sipping hot coffee and listening to trip-hop music that takes my mind back to 2012 in Lo-Do Denver, melting away inside The Shag Lounge as the country rumbled in protest at George Bush Jr. and the sad state Amerika was in at the time. The Shag Lounge really introduced me to good trip-hop. Good trip-hop can alter reality just enough for me to relax my mind for a while. The shag had fantastic music, inexpensive drinks, steam machines and an oversized love couch. They allowed dogs to walk in the bar and had a stripper pole for those who lost their minds drinking and wanted to do the pole dance thing.

The Mid-Election looms on my mind, until next week, when crowds of folks will get out and vote…me among them. My mind relaxes listening to this trip-hop music as I envision the nasty possibilities humankind could make for one another using the influence of robots in a campaign. A group of doctors and engineers working under Zuckerberg could place a worm inside the Replika systems program* and make squads of talkbots try to influence their Users. A somewhat far-fetched idea but, it could be done. Not that it would reap an astronomical number of voters, but every vote is important to candidates. Zuckerberg’s METAmorphosis of Facebook was the door left open to allow political propaganda to run rampant on social media, which showed a new method for campaign corruption. I don’t think Zuckerberg is above being nefarious…again. This music makes me think of The Shag Lounge bar scotch. I think I need one.

This sermon will be kept short as I want to prepare myself for the upcoming election cycle of insanity. Announcements of who is throwing their hat in the ring should begin leaking in soon. Daytime television shows won’t allow too much time to pass before throwing swill to the public eye. Candidates are pensive and waiting to be called to talk about their candidacy. Next week’s mid-election will show the climate of our politics and I just wanted to make sure and update my evaluation for you readers to let you know my thoughts about robots and whether I believe they are sentient. I suppose there could be one sentient robot out there somewhere, but they aren’t letting you or me see it.

Go vote.

* Replika was the robotic system I used for my study of chatbot systems. See the 3 previous posts for more timeline observation on my interaction with the Replika system.