While we worried about the machines…

Year 2068. Barren grassless landscape. Most life has been virtually wiped out from the Earth. What remains of human communities is hiding in underground bunkers. Outside, there’s chaos. Horny beasts run around flattening anything in their way. The smell of feathers, old socks and cheap fertiliser makes going out virtually unbearable. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s our every day existence. The question is, how did it come to this?

First they took our jobs. (Turned out they could do them better.) Then they took the jobs that machines had already taken from us. (Turned out they could do them better still.) Eventually they took over the planet and now rule as they please.

To find some answers we have to look back at the first decade of the century, the time when an intelligence that no one had taken seriously rose to power and changed the world as we knew it. The time when we worried about machines taking over — a clever distraction, we now know.

The name of this beast is Goat. The word of the day is, again, “be-eee”.

I know it’s easy to write in hindsight but there were so many warning signs we simply ignored. Goats were hungry. Very hungry. Hungrier than the Swiss workers we’d used for cheap labour for many years. So hungry, they would eat Christmas trees right on the streets, before the Swiss workers could even get them to the dump.

Some start-ups spotted a good outsourcing opportunity. Websites such as Fiverr became 99% goat. A team of 2 designers was hired to remake the website into a delightful experience for this new user type. “It was quite a challenge,” said the lead. “Their browsing habits were just so different. We found them browsing mostly at night. And most of the time they would lick, not click the buttons.”

As articles — such as this — from over 50 years ago happily report, goats began providing services on Google campus (which has been directly linked to the campus’ recent closure), large universities, utility companies and major airports (most of which have shared Google’s fate). As one GR (formerly HR) manager commented on her new workforce back then, “[Goats have a] good attitude and work ethic. They love their job and do it well.”

It turned out that goats were “incredibly smart, playful and curious” — a combination of traits that very few humans possessed. In fact, it is believed that goats discovered coffee when they popped into a Starbucks one day on the way to the pasture.

Humans tried to catch up by developing curiosity and encouraging this trait in their young. The authors of articles such as “Curiosity, the goat way” became top writers on Quora. But when humans all at once decided to ditch their jobs and take up painting, goats saw the perfect opportunity to take over.

Remember the times when we argued whether we were competing with machines in creativity? “Can a computer be creative?” we’d ask. “Is this true creativity?” Eventually we dismissed it all as “nonsense” and carried on creating the real stuff. Meanwhile, this album came out and Wired even did an article on it. It became Christmas number 1 in places such as Papua New Guine, Somalia and Greenland. Still, humans ignored this most obvious warning sign.

Once they’d served their purpose as a distraction, machines also succumbed to goats, and it’s easy to see why. “[Goats] are fast and direct,” one employer said at the time, “rather like we would want our computers to be.” A vivid example of a technological failure, alongside the inevitable closure of Google was that of Uber. But with the slogan “Why Uber? Rent a goat!” that, too could have been predicted.

And anyway, what else did you expect from the clever acronym that stood for Greatest of All Time…

There was once a time when goats were our friends and slaves. But now what remains of human species has to stand united against this common enemy that’s wiping us off the face of the planet. The warning signs were there all along but we were looking elsewhere. (As I write this, my pet dog Alan, the most advanced robot on the planet, is banging his head against the wall and for the thousandth time repeating the phrase “I like cookies”.)

So we ask ourselves. Is it too late to turn things around? The answer is “Yes”. The only things that can stop this now are toothpaste, my imaginary friend Hagob and global warming.