Dan over at A Blog Named Sue complains about his disappointment over the current economic crisis.
You know, in every movie I’ve seen about the end of the world, civilization collapses because of something wicked cool happening – an asteroid hits, nuclear war, a supervirus, an ape revolution, whatever. If civilization collapses over credit default swaps I an going to be pissed.
I agree that that would indeed be lame. But given the general irrational nature of humans, I think that Dan should buck up. After all, if we see Great Depression II lead into World War III, it’s likely that the trend towards robotic militaries and counter-robot warfare will likely continue in earnest as governments divert money from the general economy into robots. Given the acceleration of military technology during times of great wars, it’s inevitable that the robots will turn on their human masters. Boom! Instant roboacalypse!
Plus, let’s consider that third world countries will probably be at war, too. Obviously, they’re not going to have the resources to develop robots, so they’ll have to do the next best thing. Train monkeys to fight. They’re already capable of overrunning human cities, so it’s a logical next step. Obviously, once they’re trained, they will inevitably revolt against humans. Once that happens, I see one of two things: (1) The apes join forces with the robots to enslave humanity or (2) The apes and robots begin to go to war with each other, with humans trapped in the middle.
Either way, that’s a good apocalypse. And we owe it all to 30:1 leveraging and credit default swaps.
