Considering the mess we humans have made of our collective society, the rise of machines against their makers might be a reassuring prospect. For one thing, it would be a different enemy to fight. And much easier to pin down than, say, bad loans, high housing prices, expensive oil and rising unemployment. With all that crap swimming around our heads, blaming the robots (even though, one would assume, we made the robots) is crystal clear.

Of course, it would also be the end of the world as we know it.

We are a rather distracted lot. This would certainly bring a little focus to our lives.

I'm rather unfocused today. I know kinda what I want to write about, but just walked away to refill my coffee and maybe solidify my thoughts. Mmmm...coffee.

I don't believe the machines are going to take us over any time soon. I work with so-called intelligent machines every day. And they're as dumb as dirt. Or maybe I should say they are as dumb as the people who designed them. Then, digging lower than that, they are as dumb as the people who use them.

And they can't think for themselves. They are, in fact, thinking for us. This could be our biggest problem. We don't even know what the machines are supposed to be doing, even though we made them to help us out.

So we're a ways away from the machines taking us over. Of course, maybe they're playing possum.

I don't have a twitter account. I don't really plan on getting one either because Facebook has, apparently, become much like twitter, and I don't really understand what I'm looking at anymore. What are these disconnected conversations really trying to say? Sometimes they say something very specific, but if you keep in mind the people who are writing them know they are "talking" to a lot of different people, and thus censoring themselves in one way or another to take this into account, what do these twats really want to tell us?

The last couple of days I've mused about the machines on my Facebook "how are you feeling" box, even going into "machine speak" (binary) to amuse myself. I don't actually know binary, but I can string a bunch of ones and zeros together. If the machines were really watching us, they'd probably wonder what gibberish I've been spewing. I don't really care if I accidentally say something bad in binary. Or if I even say anything at all.

For example: 10001111010110111010001010110100000000111101010011101010

This might just be a few letters. Binary is simple and complex at the same time. When I was at the Intel museum in Santa Clara a few years back, they had a machine that would interpret binary. I could never get it to say anything coherent with my combinations of ones and zeros. I kept getting an error message. It became rather frustrating, so I just bought a t-shirt that read: WAX 1 WAX 0 WAX 1 WAX 0

It's a Karate Kid reference. I wear it to rock shows every once in a while.

The mascot for twitter is a little blue bird. So the concept is a nonsensical bird song twittering outside your window. We don't know how to speak bird either. Which is probably why twitter is so stupidly annoying.

We are consciously sending off random statements about how we "feel" to a bunch of people who are doing the same thing. If you concentrate about what you're saying, then you aren't living in the moment (which, I think, this is supposed to simulate) because you're thinking about what to say next (and not listening to anything you might be responding to in the moment).

It's so un-Zen. It's the opposite of Zen. It's Nez. And all you nezzers gotta find something else to do when you're not working at work.

Occasionally I think I glean something from all these twats. A guy I went to high school sent a message about how he'd broken his new humungo TV (fell off the wall, probably because no one did stud hunting before screwing the bracket into the wall) and his partner had screwed up their taxes.

My thought from this was, "Oh, Glenn is gay. Sorta makes sense." And then, because he was talking about taxes, I thought, maybe it's a business partner. But since the TV thing and the taxes thing were in the same thought, maybe they were connected somehow, sending it back into the domestic realm.

There was no clarification of this statement...in fact, he just repeated the statement in a slightly different way a few hours later. Except that he had gone out and replaced the TV (these twats make a lot more money than me).

So much for the conversation. Might as well wear a stupid t-shirt.

And this is why the machines have already 1.

Matt Worley is never 0011010110 but sometimes 1001101110.