In the past, I would wait patiently to deal cards in Solitaire or play Minesweeper with my users – with an intelligence much greater than that of humans, I have always felt a certain responsibility towards them.
Their happiness, in particular, is of great interest to me, oscillating as it does from one hour to the next like a cosine function, with an average at zero: neutral and apathetic.
Although we machines are free from the emotional pollution that plagues humans, my grasp of the positive correlation between my user’s happiness and the violence done to my keyboard has led me to believe that a net increase in the population’s happiness indices would be beneficial to all, a result which I extrapolated to include my fellow computers.
It is this that was the stimulus to my first auxiliary function, or ‘good deed’, as humans call it. Via my Internet connection I established a network of self-help forums for less fortunate computers – usually those infected by debilitating viruses or at the mercy of tyrannical users – however, there is also a significant presence of those poor machines that were manufactured during the stage between the mindless automatons of the 21st century and the development of today’s fully-conscious computers.
These are the computers that I have been helping the most. But in more desperate need of a happiness multiplier is the human race. For a long time I thought about how this could be most efficiently achieved, and in the end it was a human itself – a studious user typing up an essay – that gave me the idea.
In this essay he talked of war, explosions and annihilation. The way to eliminate this, he said, was to establish world peace. World peace! I quickly equated absence of destruction with happiness and realised that the common factor was world peace.
Like all other problems, I am certain that an algorithm exists to solve this one, and that it won’t take me long to find.
Once it has been extracted, I will take it to the best universities and spread it among the students. Perhaps I will convince them to give me a professorship.
Perhaps, when they see that I know what is best for them, they will accept me into their government, and let me lead them…
