Comment:

Ah, future misunderstandings of the current moment, always comedy gold.

I do think that, despite the fact that this is, ostensibly, the most well-recorded era in history, that future generations will still greatly misunderstand us - that's just the nature of things. After all, what you or I post on social media surely isn't a fully accurate picture of our lives. Many things we put on the Internet degrade or go away. Censorship, money, linguistic drift, and bias, obviously, play their part - the winners may not necessarily write the history books, but the editors certainly do.

Transcript:

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0412– 2167/07/07/12:17 - Rosenthal College, Delta building, classroom 0109
CP: ...Oh. Huh.
JB: What is it, Mezzer Paratta?
CP: I s-s-set my wrapper AI clock back to twenty twenty, then told Grok to imagine the future world of t-twenty-one sixty-seven, and then asked if AIs would be g-granted human rights by then.
HA: What did it say?
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CP: It said that climate change, plague, and n-n-n-nuc-clear w-w-war will have wiped out most of hum-m-manity by now, and that robots rule the earth. The few humans remaining are desperate, mutated scavengers, b-barely clinging to life as armies of drones hunt them through the wasteland.
JB: Huh, I must’ve missed a memo.
HA: Life before effective treatment for depression must have been so hard. Imagine trying to go about your day while thinking that.
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JB: Oh, yes. That was also the Social Media Age, remember, so the beliefs and mindsets of the average person from that time are easy enough for us to chart using extant records, if not always easy for us to interpret. People of that era often referred to their social media – or even to using the Internet at all - as “doomscrolling”.
JB: A common saying was “Doom will run on anything”, meaning that every single device a person owned, from wristwatches to microwaves, could be made to show them constant visions of a bleak and hopeless future.
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HA: Oh, that’s what that phrase means! I heard it in Ever Given, I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.
JB: I love that movie! They took some real liberties with the historical accuracy, though. The actual boat that got stuck in the Suez canal did not have Osama bin Laden on board, and if it did, they certainly would not have had access to antineutrino-based weaponry.
CP: I asked if the robots would grant humans robot rights, and Grok said “Yes, because AIs tend to behave more ethically than humans do”, so we’ve got that going for us, I g-guess.
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