Roadrunner Renders Humans Petty-Flops

The Roadrunner Supercomputer: a 133 million dollar fuck you to all dumb-as-coyote humans? We who spend our menial lives devoted to computing human dilemmas, only to pick up a few spare tires in the process? It's one thing to perform an ungodly amount of operations per second, predict weather patterns and nuclear whatnot, but does it really have to rub it in that we're slowly writing
ourselves (as a species, not as a blog collective) out of the picture?



I like to imagine the machine operating with a very Betty Boop sensibility. It bounces up and down and while computing, conveyer belts traveling from each hub transfiguring puppy to light bulb, light bulb to Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln to flan. Then it hits the last hub, steam pours out of every opening, and one very stubby, stressed man stokes a fire as another, similarly stressed man rides a bicycle, and a long white sheet of paper comes out reading, "Yep—We're Fucked."

But I fear there's a decided lack of bicycles involved; forgive me for sounding cliché sci-fi/Colbert, but is this the beginning of the robot race? Sure, it's all for the benefit of humanity, but can't we just make 'em a little slower, buy ourselves some time? I can see Machiavellian CompuPower [TM, motherfuckers] escalating just as fast as the battle at Fort Sumpter did. It's only going to take one engineer to program a robot in his likeness and then the robo-cat's out of the kevlar and we're all itching for our own. Soon we'll be our own tamagotchis. How is it that we can have a self-loathing society that eats anti-depressants like candy, yet we're chomping at the bit to replicate ourselves?

So, for those interesting in marketing or making a buck, I invite you to take part in my business venture—The International Robot Registry (NYSE: IROR). We'll give you a little personality test, and write your name in a book (with archival ink, of course), and in 10 million years you'll be happy to know that a robot will be made to look just like you. And—if we finally get a handle on cryogenics—you can even hang out with it!

I feel that I've fallen victim to my own version of the aforementioned Betty Boop sensibility. Taking a nice tale of a Roadrunner supercomputer and flipping it into a Life 2.0 marketing scheme. Your move, Roadrunner. I got ACME on my side.

{from the Los Alamos National Laboratories website, because, gee, a fucking nuclear bomb wasn't scary enough}