Reinventing the cyber-fried egg

A fried egg made by supercomputers is being developed. Trillions are being invested, and the brightest brains of our generation are being wracked with it. Because for mankind, it looks like it’s going to be easier to produce artificial fried eggs than the old-fashioned ones. Or I don’t know why.

Is there anything more supreme in creation than a good fried egg from a free-range hen? Fried in virgin olive oil and a good loaf of bread for dipping?

To produce eggs we can either; 1. plant olive trees and raise chickens or 2. build supercomputers, employ scientists and pay for human farms — known as “turk factories” of “annotators” in developing countries for algorithm training. They are sort of vocational centres for “intelligent” machines. Yes, there are already a lot of humans training machines…

Both options lead to the production of what we know today as a fried egg. With the former, the result is already familiar and sublime. We also have that egg-producing supercomputer that is not called Cray or Deep Blue, it is called a hen and is much more ecological and cheaper.

With the second option, the experience doesn’t even come close, but they say that the texture is beginning to resemble it and that even these computerised hens are capable of beating the best players in the world at games like Chess or Go.

The most seasoned futurists say that there is a time in the future known as “the fried egg singularity” where these eggs will begin to replace the eggs from flesh and blood hens and, that the hens themselves will be replaced by their cybernetic counterparts.

What people don’t quite understand is why so much effort is put into creating something artificially to replace something we have in abundance naturally. Where is the logic?

Is there a shortage of chickens? With as many pressing problems as we have, why are we investing in developing “machines” that pretend to emulate others that already exist which are vastly superior to the state of the art artificial ones being developed?

Yes, you got it, I’m not talking about fried eggs but about neurons and intelligence in this metaphorical story. - a drawn neuron always seemed to me to be a kind of fried egg - and not chickens either, but human beings.

Are artificial intelligence and robots replacing humans?

No.

And yes.

They are replacing a type of human being engendered a couple of centuries ago in the heat of the first industrial revolution and baptised in popular culture by Kraftwerk as “The Man Machine”.

We continue from here in the next episode.