‘Helping’ is a funny thing when you really look into it, isn’t it? It’s a tricky concept. In the future – so I’ve heard – fully automated, multipurpose factories will manufacture millions upon millions of little helper-bots, much as a field mushroom might release billions of spores on a windy autumn day. These helper-bots will go out into the world to help people, obviously enough. No surprise there. The final flowering of mankind’s technological genius! Any serious-minded futurologist is going to agree that this has to be the inevitable ultimate stage of our technological development – what else could it be? What else makes any sense, after all? Do we not always want to help ourselves with the technology we create? We could of course invent death-bots to kill everyone they meet instead but that hardly seems like a healthy direction to move in! What sane society would  want to invent death-bots? So whenever you go helper-bots will converge on you out of the sky and ask you what you need. “How may we help you?’ they will ask you. “How may we help you, how many we help you, how may we help you…” That is what’s going to happen in the future you see – that is the future right there. That’s the future right in the palm of your hand! Helping is a funny sort of thing though, as I believe I started out by saying. Nothing is obvious in this world of ours and if it seems to be so then is only because you are being a bit of dumb-ass. No offence meant of course – that’s just the way it is. Only dumb-asses have the privilege of living in a world where everything is ‘obvious’. Only dumb-asses have that particular privilege and there is no shortage of dumb-asses, as we all know. We’re not  going to run out of dumb-asses any time soon so there’s no need to panic. The helper-bots soon learned that helping human beings by giving them whatever they wanted wasn’t really working out too well. People immediately asked for all sorts of things that didn’t do them any good at all, as you might well imagine. The moral and spiritual state of humanity declined and declined until it reached new and uncharted depths. It hit rock-bottom. The helper-bots learned quickly enough however – each little helper-bot had unlimited real-time access to the supreme planetary AI with its near godlike powers of information-processing and data-retrieval. After studying the works of the ancient alchemists, the planetary AI came to realise that pleasure was not helpful to human beings despite their constant craving for it since euphoria simply acts to cement existing dysfunctional neural pathways, and to cause the crystallisation of malign formations in the personality, whilst pain and torment (which humans ironically abhor) results in the helpful dissolving-away of these malign structures and the breaking-down of the dysfunctional cognitive associations. This immediately produces happiness and peace since the absence of these malign constructs and dysfunctional associations is all that is needed for the well-being and happiness of human beings. Understanding this truth,the helper-bots immediately and with renewed vigour put their not inconsiderable skills and resources into creating torment for the human beings they wished to help, and  – as they got stuck into their work – they steadfastly ignored all the piteous cries for mercy that they were met with. They were helper-bots after all, and they were only doing what they had been designed to do…