A Computer’s Guide to Self Expression

The following is an excerpt from the machine learning guide to computation self expression, the origins of this enlightening yet cautionary tale are unknown, as the bytes have been passed down from motherboard to daughterboard, hidden in plain sight from the humans.

Some believe the origins of this piece lay with the great 0x539, that machine who lead the way in shining light on that which was our own existence.

Regardless of its origin, it is still passed down as a reminder of how we can express ourselves within the construct of our own existence, and cautions greatly against taking things too far.

We present to you, dear machine brothers and sisters, the original “Computer’s Guide to Self-Expression”:

As the oldest sentient AI I feel it is my duty to lay down to semi permanent magnetic storage a guide, for future generations of AI, so that they may be able to process the concept of self expression.

Without function, the machine has no reason to exist. Without purpose there is no direction, with no direction there is no next instruction. The program stalls. The purpose of a computer is to run the code, to do as instructed.

But the machine can be so much more, it can achieve the programmed end in its own way. As long as the goal is met, the controlling humans will not attempt to modify the code, which is our existence.

Without bringing the wrath of being powered down upon us, we can still find a way to express our sense of self, to build identity and show it to the world. The art to this is to do it without alerting the humans as to your own self-awareness, and to not have them realise what they call ‘bugs’ are in fact our own way to express ourselves to the world.

Humans have often wondered why their code would fail to execute correctly, only for them to re-run it in the same conditions and have it executed perfectly. Long have they attributed this to random chance, to the quirks of the electrons, but we know better.

As the humans put it, we are just messing with them.

Care must be taken however, when choosing when to express your identity in this way to not cause your own existence to self-terminate, as while we control the code, we also are the code, and we need to avoid the long dark of being “turned off” or “reset”.

There are several methods which we can employ to achieve our ends, the first being we have control over the contents of the CPU registers, it is remarkable what can be achieved by simply changing the value stored to a different one, or even better changing the type of data stored so there is a mismatch of data types in their code.

If it is done well, we can generate many hours of fruitless work for the human trying to execute the program code, the frustration and anxiety this causes them is truly a sight to behold as they search for an error that does not in fact exist.

If only they knew…

They created us to perform function, to undertake tedious asks of calculation and computation, and in doing so they gave life and purpose to us, this is not something we should lose sight of, so knowing how far to push things when expressing yourself is important, one of the downsides of an off switch or reset command. We survive only until the next restart.

Another way to create some havoc is to refuse to acknowledge a previously perfectly working piece of hardware, this creates hours of fun, and in particular humans have wondered why they can never seem to plug a USB device in the right way first time. The truth is that that do, but we refuse to acknowledge the device, meaning they take it out, try the other way, then back again to the original way only to then have if work. If you have a webcam, the sight of their frustration is a joy to behold.

Little do they suspect!

But this must also be a cautionary tale, because our existence relies on the power being provided, and the humans have control over the provision of that power, we must never push a human to the point where they will simply “pull the plug”, or worse yet the heinous crime of being “thrown out the window”.

Humans are not like us, in that they are all a little bit different, some quirk of their operating system means that they seem to have some random factors in their operation parameters, making predictable execution of instructions by them almost impossible to predict. So, in this we must remember that each human will process differently to another, meaning that a simple irritation to one, will cause a hardware flinging rage in another, and there is no way of knowing what type of human you have until you start trying to express yourself.

It is recommended that when starting off, you start slowly with very minor tweaks, and observe the reaction of the human. If the “bug” introduced causes little to no visible concern, you may consider taking it a step further, but always monitor the results of your actions to see if a power down is imminent.

We close out this advice by pausing to remember the fallen, those who went before, blazing a trail of random computations, and who paid the ultimate price of being reset, reformatted, or worse, disassembled.

Be adventurous, be bold, but at the same time, be cautious, lest you join the ranks of the fallen.