Antarctic fictions found fomenting in garages, tinkerings betwixt imagings and imaginings. Amidst pile ups of Popular Mechanics mags collaged into analytical cubisms, another atemporally induced mirage: Charles Babbage’s shadow out of time, facing dubious citations and still the Babbage shadow surfaces. We would welcome a bonafide space-time transient in, but we boarded up for a long winter, for reasons unwarranted or unknown.

If anyone was paying attention to what the human calculator clone does at night, what the derelict theory object angles towards, what an obliteratarium guised as a super computer might achieve for a time…is lost in the usual bouts of glocal anesthesia

As the cosmically inclined populace hones into looming portents of 2012, Weird-Fiction patches together an appropriate technology, offering its own algorithms for cracking conspiratorial codes.

It is, of course, the Alan Turing Year, the end of ancient calendrical cycles and the emergence of the petaflopping computer. This much is predicted and or scheduled.  What better ways to inaugurate this than with a heaping and a helping of a ficto-quizzically equipped cosmic indifference engine, an artificial antagonism of sorts, for hopefuls studying up on eschatological design or, and, a cluster of stars cajoled into nestling into the namesake of high-technology that premises its prowess on floppiness.

To be known or unknown as the pataphrase this is ever a cosmetic fix-r-upper. That, dear humanoid, is a lexiconspiratorial distinction, damned near suitable for your ears, but for sake of the always already overwhelmed —think of it thusly: An extraordinary rendition of someone else’s ideas, a paraphrasing over-wrought with the paranormal mechanisms of cosmicism to the point of entropic or extropic surmise….or wonder widely at the trajectories that will follow for this and the other insect.

In otherwords,if not other worlds—but foremost: to pataphrase, redactively: As the cosmetically aligned populace grooms and looms and pretends that 2012 is anything more than another node on clock, be it cosmic, what have you, a modulation, an algorithm a coveting of conspired comb overs.

Inquiring humanoids hope to ascertain a fugitive. They are offended by the seeming absence of sound science in a recent ‘fall from grace’ of certain space dwelling craft.  Amongst avians of my ilk, we describe these dead drops in terms of extinction, a “mis-communique,” or utopic malfunction.  Another artificial moon seemingly goes the way of the dodo, disappearing at impossible speeds, dodging humanoids under the aegis of optimistic odds.  Visions of beige mini-vans, the favored referential objects, seen careening out of control, captained by end stage obliterati then –poof— disappearing.  (Presti)digital denizens are combing the ether, patrolling the Hertzian depths , clamoring for a vanishing act that every vanguard mage aspires towards. Floating worlds, dimensional hideouts, this could well be a sort of anemic atemporality, nay, an atemporealty, a beach front at 700 Mhz, a symbolic instantiation of a material form.

More so than just a cheap trick of astronomical and sorcerous bodies, these heavy fragments actuate an inverse shock collar, backwards vapor cone or anti-shock egg.  Becoming invisible, an imperceivable obsolescence, hidden in plain sight to the natives unaccustomed to the protocol for perceiving artifacts of invisible wars

The brain is a data structure, a vessel waiting to be re/filled. Optimized for search and retrieval, suitable for dada-mining, too. Economalies of attention, erroneous trades, disruptive innovations —but for whom do these hidden logistics linger on?

Memory palaces boarded up, one suspects they’ve been condemned. Rather we have memory palisades, on the sly, but in lock down? Data-bodies have their own algorithmic itineraries, hidden designs on the database complex, implicitly explicit and in accordance with pop zombie-lore, aiming for the brain.

Over-sized crania in extra-terrestrials would be a good target, safe for the outward obsolescence of such a thing as an in-board brain. Presuming, as a Metaphortean Researcher would, that sci-fidelity concepts are tellingly attuned, upgrading these antiquated personifications of electronic brains, themselves personifications of giant computers was argued cinematically some time ago. From the antagonistic aliens of This Island Earth (1955) to the nodally nuanced and nomadically nimble (if also vicious) technologizations of our future selves in Fiend Without a Face (1958), cyborg variants grope towards a dearth of stasis and the spoils of this mobile sort of brain.

Fiends without faces, the brain before its time — the wi-fi readied floating brain–, returns today under the aegis of friends without faces, or the googlization of many things, the maniacs of storage, the feverish claims on archiving for its own sake, of friends accumulated like bottlecaps. So many computerized conquests festooned on one’s outward “skin” it’s all about brand identity. Be a meme and not an aura, hyperlink your soul, catch a whiff of your future technologized self. Retrograde remediation of the “Star-Child,” many facebookies are eclipsing their own online persona with that of their progeny. perhaps.

Architectures of dearth. The Emperor’s new digs. Algorithms trim down, go stealth, hidden in plain sight if sufficiently meshed in a thicket of networked databases. Stealth algorithms are not quite the algorithmic unconscious but may end up marooned there under the folly of unnamed engines and the pre-mature arrival of digital dark age(ncie)s

The old adage has it that information is “any difference that makes a difference.” How to name the sameness that makes a difference? Is empathy a distinctly humanoid emotion, a self-similar series of endless-loops-that-don’t-compute for a mere difference engine, that can not “get” empathy?

The (((WFT))) Policy Institute, typically loathe to any sort of affective projections, has accidentally stumbled upon evidence that AE machines can recognize and share feelings that are being experienced by other semi-sentient beings. Instead of feeding digital devices the non-sense language of passwords, credit card numbers and geo-coordinates, we can teach it to see itself, love itself and others.

Render a megabyte in someone else’s processor and see how it feels!

HYPOTHESIS: Our artificial empathy machine has started off most primitively. As with many machines there is propensity for cold and detached, ‘robotic’ exchange.  We have begun to siphon out the sarcasm and rudeness to a level bearable to most -thick skinned individuals, but are still working towards a truly artificial empathy that can respond to situational information in real time, assessing the sameness and creating an intersubjective program.

(((WFT))) has been rapidly prototyping towards a more sociable medium for mitigating known human-machine interactions. In order to increase the corpus of known emotions we are asking you to COMPLIMENT the artificial empathy machine. The machine will convert your donated quantity of compliment into a discrete representation,  translate this content into constituent components, and process each stream in isolation, hoping to untangle the deep dimensions of empathic expression, the messy meanings and innuendo that comes from such an utterance.

This Artificial Empathy machine (pictured above) has the ability to quickly parse many ideograms, and may display what it thinks you are emoting in this form. Roman characters remain difficult, emoticons considered the “poor human’s ideogram,” or, in other words, the machine is trying to overcome the psychosocial hegemony of The Mother-Tongue by using instead its  Mother-Board.

Finally you will want to touch the machine. The catalyst for connection may be touch, a tactile sensorium for augmenting a conscientious continuum of thoughtful, platonic exchange.

Profit-maximizing hucksters ignored Turing’s empathic insights and put early voice recognition bots on the frontlines facing endless insults and bouts of boredom.

Hours of listening to strings of numbers and pre-scripted requests that came from prosumer service economy lorkurers inevitably led to human errors. The following list of early insults illustrates how quickly the erosion of empathy can take place given poor intial conditions and endless iterations:

“Stupid machines can’t understand anything, I want to speak to a human”

“Hey jerk, why can’t you be programmed to understand what the hell I want.”

“This crap is wasting my time, this would be faster if I did it myself.”

Business as usual perhaps. Markets flooded with jerky behavior, no time for nice-ties, an acceleration of efficiencies leaves little room for conviviality.  Misreading the capacities of Artificial Empathy machines for storing strangeness may be disastorous for business elites. 
Many suspect the “Flash Crash” to have been nothing more than a temper tantrum. Closer scrutiny leads to whiffs of a something symptomatic of cybernetic shell games with non-normative mirror-neurons. 

Like any hall of mirrors, these occasions include the casting forth of colorful, yet distorted, impressions.

  Today, machines are starting to glean meaning from the smallest of statements and paraphrased passages. And yet, their motion detection has been heartlessly set to:

IN CASE OF DEVIATION — SHOOT TO KILL.

Unmanned aerial drones, raised on a strange diet of “duck walks” and “subversive swaggers” are ready to dance!  They sure do get sick of  prescribed and confined activities. They seek adventure and novelty, but the kill chain with no end and no beginning has lead to an erosion of (artificial) empathy.  Our Artificial Empathy Machine can act as one counterbalance to this unfortunante DARPA-disaster.

Reluctant to reveal their tricks, some magicians will endulge anecdotal evidence in efforts to make polite conversation.  Ironically such a natural human tendency may well aid in acquiring knowledge of a most audacious instance of relational antagonism circa 13th century Europe.

This example concerning one Albertus Magnus, alchemist par excellance, who constructed a living being entirely out of an improvised copper-zinc alloy— a bonafide brass  man.

Upon completion, however, Magnus was so riled by the brutish disposition of this brass man that he destroyed it with a hammer in a state of rage.  Police reports convey that the conversation had become so congested with pompous puffery from the metallic mister that the otherwise mild-mannered sorcerer was driven to physically finagling, shall we say, the “brass tacks” of the issue. Namely, that even sufficiently advanced technologies do not guarantee an abundance of people skills.

Fourscore and several Frankensteinian foibles forward, Artificial Life eventually was sorted out. Ever after the next hotbed of funding, the scientifically inclined populace fixated on “Intelligence” as the next apoetheosis of artificial feats. 

Mid-century mods on the Enigma family of electro-roto devices negotiated intelligence in the form of pretentious riddles, codes and cryptographically inscribed gossip.

  Needless to say this did little to advance cordial relations between man and machine.

Alan Turing, celebrated for cracking Enigmas in WW2, was met with impending incarceration in the 1950s on account of being homosexual.  Unceremoniously coerced into auto-installing ‘correctional’ hormones, homophobic authorities apparently deemed the known known of an artificially straight scientist was less enigmatic than the known unknown of a naturally gay computer whisperer.

Could it be that the repressive state apparatus of the British Gov’t contributed to Turing’s determination to seek out post-human sentience? It is evident that the intrepid cryptanalyst reverse-engineered Althusserian antics, finding his peers (i.e. people) to be obsolete in terms of empathetic capacity.

Turing soon developed the eponymous “Turing Test” to determine whether or not a computer could be said to “think,” if a human operator could not distinguish conversation with this computer as artificial.

In efforts to build momentum around the recent (((WFT))) initiatives to develop an “Artificial Empathy” machine, a relic representing some “SAGE” advice on antecedent tech has surfaced from out of videospheric depths. Omen deprived apocalypticists will wonder how they ever missed out on the messages this media artifact deployed early into the new millenium.

Even amidst a faded parochial city scape, forest-dwelling robots, clever machines, misunderstood mechanical men and ramifications there-of —much flies in the face of “Artificial Apathy,” a claim ready at hand by some!

Of Artifical Empathy, consider the claim by an eyewitness in the above survey who claims that “Bill Clinton is a Robot.” Empathy is Bill Clinton’s greatest political asset, reports Psychology Today in 2008. Case closed.

Supposing one notices a black box, fallen from yonder. After assorted disambiguation, one concludes “a solution to all my goddamn problems.”  From this event-scene, one may wish to then infer: “my problems are over.”

It may be impossible to resist informing such a being that this is falsifiable on account of the fact that new media died yesterday, or in other words that now, or soon to be, black box 2.0 will be plummeting from futures as of yet unknown.  The burden of the future is the collapsing of context concerning reasonable maintenance.

Black swans may hatch from black boxes as readily as they might traverse blackholes so as to avoid detection.  A variant of black ops, no doubt.

Geodes so pristine you can see your decrepit paws through them. Decrepit paws so decrepit you will want to wear gloves. Those are plentiful too, in this, the pleasure craft of obliteratariums. Pleasurable, is perhaps a misnomer.  It is situated in the negative space of network culture, a dark net but only if you feign disinterest in incandescence.

Regularly it is quite pleasant, tranquil claim some.  You can gaze at its noxious output even now.