At the Doctor’s

BUT I’M ALREADY HERE!

What, awful punctuation there is upon, the screen?

Its’ often very difficult to know just, what they mean

They must; have been to school and: such

If not they Broke the law

Hang on, a bit the screens’ just changed

And now ther’es even more

 

Apparently my colons in danger of disease.

I thought I only had the one, but anything to please.

There’s hypo this, and hyper that, yet their and there are mixed,

and they’re convinced that all my ills can very soon be fixed.

Forget my moans, my name’s been called, enunciated strongly.

Computer generated speech was used, pronouncing my name wrongly!

I feel unwell!

Short Story: Broken Sign

I love to just happen across something that makes me laugh out loud and frighten the cat. This short story is just brilliant, and funny, and clever, and did I mention brilliant? Don’t take my word for it, read it for yourself, and then discover the other delights that nest in babbitman’s blog.

babbitman

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the dangers of artificial intelligence with luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Elon Musk warning that AI could be “more dangerous than nuclear weapons”. Science-fiction has been banging this particular drum for decades: from HAL 9000 to Skynet in the Terminator movies, there are dozens of examples of artificial intelligence going rogue. Which is why it probably comes as a shock to learn that the first truly self-aware artificial construct was an overhead electronic variable message sign on the northbound A46, a few miles outside Nottingham.

It wasn’t particularly planned to happen; there was no over-arching project, no great fanfare. In fact, nobody actually recognised what had really occurred.

Variable Message Sign 4427A was installed on the new A46 dual carriageway just north-east of the Stragglethorpe interchange. It wasn’t particularly special, even though it towered over the road and surrounding…

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