On 1 Dec 1999, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> [snip]...
>
> Mrs. Bun: Have you got anything without AI?
>
Now this brief bit of humor is propagating through the galaxy
(having been sucked off the Internet by the nanoaliens monitoring us).
Sometime in the far future, the meme reaches the outskirts of the huge SI community orbiting just outside the event horizon of the 10 million M_sun mass black hole at the center of a distant galaxy (black holes make great power sources)... One sub-SI processes the incoming galactic gossip and finds this piece so funny it sends it to all of the sub-SIs in the community causing them to laugh so hard that for a brief moment they ignore ther quantum gravity calculations and more than half of them stumble over the event horizon are lost forever....
On the very outskirts of this galaxy, the eldest SI notices this "accident" (100,000 years later), and comments to his junior-SI in training -- "Rule #1 -- If you intend to use black holes as power sources, you must never, never, never listen to the galactic gossip newswire. Our AI enhanced brains aren't designed to properly prioritize primitive pre-SI humor."
Robert