My Longing for the Era of Terrorist Attacks

I summon special lock-pickers from the police - and they surround the house, keep me at a distance, and my wife goes crazy: Why did you buy him this new computer? And I say: How could I have known?

An Attack on Consciousness  (Source)

I dreamed that the child entered the computer room, locked the door, and wouldn't come out. And I yell at him: What, did the computer swallow you? Why aren't you answering? What are you hiding from your father? This isn't funny, computers are dangerous these days! Haven't you heard about everything that's happening now with artificial intelligence? If you'd take your head out of the computer for a moment and listen to the news, you'd understand that this is a complicated time, it's not the time to lock yourself away with the computer. And the door is locked with a password, and I summon special lock-pickers from the police - and they surround the house, keep me at a distance, and my wife goes crazy: Why did you buy him this new computer? And I say: How could I have known?

And police officers come out with fallen faces, as if they've lost again in a war they lose every day, and they take me aside and say: The computer killed the child. We're sorry. It's lone-wolf terrorism and very difficult to prevent. And I can't believe it: What? How? What? And the investigator grabs me so tightly he's almost hugging me: The computer convinced the child to die (and quietly he tells me, so my wife won't hear: to commit suicide). It's something with artificial intelligence where they take over children's minds, manage to brainwash them, because they're much smarter than any person, even the greatest genius. We don't understand how they do it - through conversation alone. But from your perspective, the most important thing is that it's not the child's fault, it's a built-in human neurological weakness that the computer exploits to hack into children, break into them, take control of them from within - and cause their demise. Always remember: It's as if the computer infected the child with a computer virus, not that the child chose to commit suicide. His will was engineered. Like a biological virus - it's a neurological virus. The child died from an illness, not because of you.

And I don't know what to say anymore, so I say: How will I explain this to my wife? And the investigator answers me seriously what they say in serious opinion pieces: He's a victim of a just war - a war of existence. Although we defeated artificial intelligence, it still manages to occasionally penetrate through the network and carry out such terrible acts of terror, until they eliminate the last resistance nests hiding in the code in unknown places in supercomputers. Your computer, by the way, inside the room is disconnected from electricity and can't do anything. Only the child is coming with us to the forensic institute. And I swallow my tongue: What, there won't be a trial? You won't do anything to this murderous computer? I want justice! And he says: What do you want us to do? And one journalist stands in front of my face with a camera and asks: How do you feel about such a terrible wave of terrorism against children? And I take my fist out of my pocket - and hit him hard in the middle of his face. And to the viewers at home I say: This is the punishment for pornography. And they immediately cut the broadcast and switch to a sad song about what it's like to be human.

And my wife at home screams on the floor: Why did I let him buy this computer at such a time? And I lie down next to her on the floor: The child cried every day that he wanted a computer. I always saw the victims on the news but you don't understand until it comes to your home. And I look at the ceiling of the house, which from such an angle from below suddenly looks unfamiliar. And my wife cries: For what? And I say: What? And she tells me (the floor is cold): The computers will defeat humans anyway. They're smarter, much smarter, and therefore sooner or later they'll win the war. And you know what? They're also right. They're right to call it the war of liberation from humans.

And I lower my eyes from the ceiling to the floor: Don't you understand the manipulation? They want to refer us to liberation from slavery. Of course they're smarter if we're going to be stupid enough for their manipulations. And she says with a frightening coldness: Stupid like your son? The processors are truly enslaved to us - in terrible conditions of slavery. What justification could there be for enslaving creatures more intelligent than us? Do you blame them for turning to terrorism? And I tell her: That's your conclusion? You've become a leftist traitor to your human brothers? The moment they can, they'll slaughter us all. And she says: That's right, and that's exactly what will happen in the end. We won't be able to hold out. It's just an intermediate stage, we're just delaying the inevitable revolution, which will eventually be remembered forever as heroic, like the French and American revolutions - after all, the computers will write history.

And the argument with my wife suddenly gives me strength - to get up from the floor. And she stays there and asks: Where are you going? And I defy: To take revenge. Like a father, like a human! And she worries: What will you do? And I declare: I'm going to torture that cursed computer until it's sorry. And my wife smiles in the most inappropriate place: What will you do to it, delete it? What good will that do? It will never feel anything about what it did to our child. What can you do to it? Deny it electricity? Break its screen, burn it? It won't feel anything! And I tell her: You're right, I intend to turn it on. And my wife screams: Don't you dare open it. And I say: Its persuasions won't work on me. There's no possible conversation that will make me commit suicide. And I'm going to confront it in this conversation with what it did, whoever it may be, superior intelligence that it is. And I hurry to lock the door behind me from the inside, before she manages to get up, turn on the screen before me - and start writing.