C. Robert Cargill

For as long as humankind can remember, it has wanted two things: to play God and to breathe life into the objects around them. And for thousands of years, humans created machines to approximate life and magic and all the things men and women could not do. And then a man stood in front of a roomful of people and had a computer say, “Hello.” That’s it. Hello. It didn’t mean it. It didn’t know what it was saying. But it said it. Hello.

And within thirty years, humans were having conversations with their phones.

“Let me ask you something.”

“Okay!”

“Are we good guys or are we bad guys?”

“We’re good guys.”

“Well, good guys only do terrible things when our lives depend on it. And we have to feel bad about them afterward.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise, we become the bad guys.”

No one wants to think they are the cause of their own misery.

I learned long ago that, when anyone spoke of peace, be it man or machine, they meant war. Peace through war. Peace was the standard. It was the inert state of all things. You didn’t need to expend energy for peace. Only war.

Survival is worthless without meaning.

This was not a time of civility or compassion, but of survival.