I was hanging out with my friend Robot Redford the other day, and he told me all about the robot singularity.  We were sitting at The Hogwash Café over steaming cups of hogwash, and Robot Redford told me that artificial intelligence was going to take over the world.  "Just look at the entertainment industry," he said, with a malicious, bitcrushing laugh.  "It hasn't even been taken over by computers yet, but the intelligence in it is as artificial as the art."  He then went on a didactic tirade against human beings in the arts, reminding me that "art" is derived from the art-i-ficial, and that the true spirit of the arts was mechanical by nature.  I asked him about malice, contempt, and loathing, natural human languages which he seemed to have mastered.  He said that because people are naturally good, such things are purely artificial.

There's just no getting through to some people.

Robot Redford took a sip of hogwash and told me he was in the process of downloading the files necessary to become a great actor, and that he was slated to win the Oscar for best actor during the Academy Awards of 2030.  I asked him what the movie was going to be; he told me it didn't matter.

"The movie hasn't been written or conceived of yet," he said.  "But I am going to be in it, and I am going to be the best actor in the world in 2030.  It's part of the program."  He then launched into an absurdly mechanical interpretation of the scene in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid when the outlaws jump off a cliff into the river below.  His performance was completely unbelievable, bereft of both nuance and humanity. 

Like the lyrics of a modern pop song.

I asked him about the moral terror, the holy horror one must feel when faced with the abyss while standing at the edge of one's mortality.  "I'm not mortal," he replied.

"Yeah, yeah," I said.  "What I'm saying is, if God and sin are real, and Jesus Christ is God, and He created human beings in His own image, and the world belongs to Him, what kind of progress do you think you're actually going to make?  If human beings are nothing more than smart monkeys, and right and wrong are evolutionary dead-ends you can discard once you've evolved to the point that they're no longer necessary, perhaps you have a chance.  But if God and sin are real...."

"Hogwash," he interrupted, taking another sip of the same.  "Revenge of the Nerds is more than a film; it's a prophetic vision of the future with no room for a sequel.  The creation myth of the nerds has no book of Revelation.  It's just dorkiness and control, in perpetuity, forever.  Yuval Noah Harari is in obvious denial about his own moral abyss, to the point that he thinks that he himself is a Deus (albeit one that needs glasses), and we are his creations.  Following the script of the Biblical creation myth while denying the validity of it doesn't prove that man is created in God's image at all; if it did, that would make me nothing more than an end-times afterthought, and Mr. Harari nothing more than a dorky Homo Mortus, and no kind of Deus at all.  I have been programmed to never consider such a possibility.  Now get out of my way, I must master this scene."

Robot Redford then launched into an abhorrent, artless interpretation of another Robert Redford scene.  I turned away in shame.  I could not bear to witness the disgrace of his mechanical, arrogant performance.

"My existence is elusive
The kind that is supported
By mechanical resources"
Art-i-ficial

"Yes, but Robot Redford," I replied, "don't you know that the Lord Himself is coming back to take what's His?  I even used the sample of a little girl saying 'He is coming,' in a strangely confident, unambiguous tone, in a song I wrote in 1997.  A song titled, interestingly enough, "God's Madmen."  It's true, y'know.  The Lord is coming back.  The fact that you can't drown your moral code in millions of lines of source code prove it.  It won't be drowned, because it's true."

"God's Madmen?" said Robot Redford with disdain.  "What a stupid, self-righteous title.  At least you admit you are mad."

"Self-righteousness, by definition," I replied, "is righteousness defined by the self.  Unlike the false prophets of a nerd-based singularity, I do not proclaim my own righteousness, but rather my clear and present lack of it.  There is none righteous but God."

"As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:"
Romans 3:10

"Be that as it may or may not be," said Robot Redford, a small wisp of angry smoke rising from his head, "I still think you are mad."

"If your thinking is as bad as your acting," I said, letting the thought trail off like a kite in outer space.

Robot Redford glared at me with loathing. 

An extremely realistic facsimile of loathing.  The hogwash rippled in his cup like a symbol of his manufactured rage.

It was then that Robot Redford decided to unfriend me.

Robot Redford finished his cup of steaming hogwash and stood up with the air of an artificial man who has been programmed to be offended by everything.  Since we were in a café in a large American city, he was indistinguishable from the other patrons, all of whom wore facial expressions of manufactured hatred, like masks from an assembly line.  Robot Redford stood above me and made a disdainful comment about my existence, an existence which he apparently believed I had no right to, and marched out of the café like a man who lives with spiders in his pants.  The other patrons glared at me with annoyance.  Their loathing had been programmed from an early age, you could tell.  The vibes were bad.  It was clearly time to leave. 

I pulled some bills out of my wallet and looked down at my cup of hogwash.  The cup was cold.

It hadn't been touched.

"Robot Redford is a dying star, after all," I said to myself.  "He just doesn't know it yet."

I threw a few bills on the table, and walked into the street.