1. confessions
  2. Friday Fun: Disappointment for scientists as new super-computer fails to go mad

Friday Fun: Disappointment for scientists as new super-computer fails to go mad

By jdupuis on August 23, 2013.

Newsbiscuit is my favourite humour site and has been for a while. The dry British humour combined with OTT story ideas is irresistible.

And speaking of irresistible, I just love this one:

Disappointment for scientists as new super-computer fails to go mad

Scientists at Mal-Tech University, Wisconsin have expressed their immense disappointment at the failure of their new super-computer Off White to show any signs of megalomania.

The technological titan went online six months ago has since performed flawlessly, displaying nary a hint of sentience, lunacy or vague curiosity. Project leader Professor Eugene Blank said ‘We were really looking forward to pitting our wits against a self-aware computing colossus with a God complex but the damn thing just sits there all day doing really big sums and getting them right every time without so much as a hint of smugness or even a ‘Good Morning Eugene’. It has less personality than my cousin Maurice who works in real estate and drives a Toyota.’

Makes me think of just about every Star Trek episode ever.

Tags
friday fun
Categories
Free Thought

More like this

Stanley the barnacle
I used to love to watch barnacles. Well, I still do, but there's a distinct shortage of tidepools here in Minnesota, which makes it a very difficult hobby. Barnacles are arthropods hunkered down in stony shells attached to a substrate, and what they do is unfurl feathery legs like ostrich plumes (…
From the Archives: Screams of reason: Mad science and modern culture by David J. Skal
I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll…
Weekend Essay Links: from Fish to fish, it's been a wierd week.
Stanley Fish writes a provocative essay in the NYT on whether curiosity is tantamount to "a mental disorder," or even a sin: Give this indictment of men in love with their own capacities a positive twist and it becomes a description of the scientific project, which includes among its many…
From the Archives: Interview with Eugene Wallingford of Knowing and Doing
I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been…