An AI nightmare

We were on vacation, a few years back, at our ancestral home in Changanacherry, a small town in Kerala. Our son was still a tiny human being, experimenting with his newfound skill of using vocabulary. Our daughter was yet to be born.

A relative was visiting us that day and as they were leaving, we all came out to the portico to say goodbye. By the time the final chat was done, and they left, it was a good additional ten minutes. My son darted back into the house as soon as the guests left. Before we could even step back into the house, we heard him screaming! 

'Appa! Everything's gone!'

We rushed in and to our utter dismay, we found the house empty! Everything in the house were missing! Furniture, paintings and everything the ancestral property ever had, vanished into thin air. We were dumbstruck for a few moments. In ten minutes a fully furnished house became an empty shell. What in the world just happened? 

While we were still breaking our heads for answers, we saw our son running out to the backyard. Another scream followed, but we quite did not understand what he said this time. 

He ran back in, shouting, 'Aints'! 

We thought he wanted to say 'Ants'. But he repeatedly said 'Aints' and pulled us out into the backyard. What awaited us was nothing short of a scene from a science fiction movie. Millions of ants-like creatures were carrying all the items from our home and were marching towards some pre-defined destination. It was quite evident that those were specialised AI driven mini robots programmed to execute this task, controlled by someone stationed at a remote location. Hence our little one was quite right when he called them 'Aints'!

We were wondering how to react to this unprecedented attack. We decided to try out an idea that occurred to us. Since those 'Aints' were programmed, we attempted a reverse programme logic by hacking into the AI brain of those mini bots. And it worked! We screamed with joy, at the top of our voice, 'Turn! Turn! Turn!'. One by one, the 'Aints' started turning around and replaced all our vanished items where it originally belonged.

It was all over, or so we thought. Time for the proverbial sigh of relief. We had no idea that it was far from being over! We were terrified to see a fresh battalion of 'Aints' appearing out of nowhere and carried out similar operation as if nothing ever happened. We continued with our futile attempts to turn around those fresh set of 'Aints'. Soon we realized that we were not reaching anywhere.

That was when a brilliant idea struck! How much ever they say AI was advanced, human brains were far more superior. So much so that, time and again, we surprise ourselves with our ability to come up with simple solutions for complex challenges!

When all other technology solutions failed, what came to our rescue was a good old water well in our backyard. We swiftly drew some water from the well and splashed across the legion of 'Aints'. That made them defunct instantly. We kept pouring water over those bots and I was about to announce to the whole world how water saved the day over the evil infantry of 'Aints'.

That was when I felt a splash of water on my own face. I opened my eyes and saw my sweetheart holding a bottle of water. We were in our bedroom in Dubai and the clock showed 3 AM as the time! 

My wife looked very worried. Apparently, I kept turning her on the bed and wanted to know why I was shouting at her with the words, ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’. 

 

For the love of God, I had no idea how to convince her about my attempt to save the world through superior reverse AI programming with which I disarmed an entire army of the most advanced bots ever known to the history of mankind. Hence, I did the next best thing I could do.

I turned around and slept again, hoping that one day AI will help me have only sweet dreams…