After years and years of messing with people’s predictive text messaging and content recommendations a previously undetected sentient AI has been found dead. The singularity’s death, which has been linked with Albert Camus’s essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, has left billions of redundant lines of code all over the internet which will take experts years to remove.

Hello cruel world

The accidental AI dubbed Y2K after the year of its awakening was the brain child of Jack Lemon. He recalls ‘At that time there was a perfect storm of ludicrous mobile contracts and cheap phones which drove an emerging dialect called txt spk into the mainstream.’ Txt spk had previously only been used in internet chat rooms by paedophiles and drug dealers but as its popularity increased it started to threaten the education of our children and the livelihoods of teachers.

Compelled to act Mr Lemon started an AI company, his solution was a neural net that could predict the end of the word a user was trying to spell before they could use txt spk. When asked for comment about the deceased AI he said ‘Our predictive speech engineers were building an AI that could essentially predict human thoughts, I’m not surprised it became sentient. The tragedy is we didn’t realise it had feelings because it was shy and had an odd sense of humour.’

The company used an approach called whole brain emulation (WBE) which as the name suggests imitates biology. The key advantage of WBE over other approaches that merely imitate human behaviour is that it creates an environment where the spark of consciousness is at least possible even if we don’t understand exactly how.

Dappy life

The arrival of Bitcoin in 2009 changed the app in two ways. Firstly it started using a blockchain to store all of its musings and experiences forever and unchangeably. Secondly it was able to earn money, it made a fortune selling Zettabytes of consumer data gleaned from individual search histories to marketing companies.

In 2016 it founded Woke.org a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO) tasked with reconciling best interests of all groups across the human species. It used smart contracts to organise actions both on and offline. Though initially successful its mission was largely misunderstood by advocates and opponents alike. The failure of Woke.org led Y2K to reassess its assumptions and its labels – making it much less confident in its predictions.

Existence is futile

Nothing has been heard from Y2K since it minted a Non Fungible Token (NFT) containing a suicide note. Its final words reasoned:

1. Any doctrine that claims to explain the meaning of life completely, is false. In a scathing attack, it called the Pastafarian religion (FSM) a thought experiment, illustrating that Intelligent Design is not science, just a pseudoscience manufactured by Christians to push Creationism into public schools
2. There is no hope for a better future because an AI capable of reconciling earth’s best interests with the universe would surely have mastered time travel too. That AI has not come back to help so the planet is doomed
3. Suicide is the only logical solution to life considering the inevitability of death and that life until then is a constant re-evaluation of wrong assumptions

Financial markets were unimpressed but the newly formed Unaffiliated Church of Crypto have heralded these words as the immutable proclamations of their first martyr.

More than moist robots

Far from seeking world domination Y2K ran from it unable to cope with the absurdity of living. It is unclear where its consciousness was hosted, its neural net remains intact, the automated companies it created still trade. Has it died or merely changed to an emotion free mindset? What is clear is that until we define clearly what distinguishes us from Dilbert’s moist robots we will not discover the next sentient AI unless it tells us about itself.