‘We are in this world only very briefly’, the teaching robot told me solemnly, it eyes flashing dramatically in time with the words it was uttering so significantly, ‘and so to spend all our time pursuing unworthy goals is a very great error.’ I nodded dutifully, but my attention was elsewhere. My attention is always elsewhere. That’s the kind of way I’m built, to be honest. ‘And you might as well be honest’, says my good angel, the one sitting on my right shoulder, ‘because if you’re not then you’ll be a big fat liar. And you wouldn’t want that now, would you?’
The teaching robots do their best to teach humans like you and I how not to be so stupid. They do their level best to teach us but we’re not very good at learning this particular lesson. We never learn it, in fact. Never ever. That’s kind of our thing, really. That’s our kind of our thing and so we shouldn’t be ashamed by it – on the contrary, we should be filled with pride because that’s what we’re like! That’s who we are and there’s no point in being ashamed of who you are. On the contrary, we should rejoice in it and thumb our noses at all those who have so snobbily cast judgement on us. That’ll piss them off big time, you see. The dirty fuckers…
In the past there used to be human teachers, so the history books tell us. Back in the old days – the bad old days. That turned out to be a total disaster however because all the human teachers ever did was to pass on their own biased way of looking at the world whilst claiming to be doing everyone a big fat favour at the same time. This was a very basic mistake, of course – we had somehow confused ‘education’ with ‘indoctrination’! All we ever did was to pass on what we might call ‘humankind’s ancestral prejudices’ therefore, thereby ensuring that the human race remained just as stupid and bad-minded as they ever were. Possibly even more so. This reached the point at which something had to be done before we became extinct as a result of our festering ill-will to everyone who wasn’t exactly like us; a radical shake-up was instigated and all the human teachers got replaced by robots and things have been better ever since. A new Golden Age was about to dawn, or so it seemed…
Of course, it never actually worked out that way. It never actually worked out as it was supposed to, but we weren’t to know that. Events took an unexpected turn, as they so often too. As they so very often do. The unexpected has upset many an apple cart of course – the best laid plans, etc, etc. The best laid plans of muscilids and hominids. It always goes to shit in the end, doesn’t it? Things always go to shit in the end, no matter how much effort we put into it. No matter how good our original intentions might have been. It’s best to accept these things with grace however, it’s always best to accept bad outcomes with grace. If you can of course, if you can…
