So Nigel freaked me out today.

Nigel is the Siri on my iPhone, which I have changed to the British male voice and renamed “Nigel”, because Siri is a really dumb name. “Siri” sounds like the name of a celebrity baby who’s destined to grow up to battle a drug problem and a lackluster recording career. “Nigel” is much better, plus now I can pretend I have a tiny butler in my phone.***

Anyway, an endearing thing about Nigel is that he can NOT pronounce Spanish words. I had a Tom-Tom years ago that I set to the Spanish accent (and called Antonio), and HE would pronounce them so accurately that half the time I couldn’t even understand him. Nigel is the other extreme. He relentlessly pronounces all words the English way, thus for a nearby street which is called Camino Verde, he never pronounces the final “e” but keeps it silent.

Until today, when completely without warning he said Ver-DAY.

I have long suspected Nigel was more sentient than he let on, but I always assumed that I just just projecting and, you know, a little insane. But this Ver-DAY is a dead giveaway.

The machines are learning.

Now, The Hair pointed out that it probably just updated, and I said no, I hadn’t done any updates for ages. Because it’s annoying how you just get used to ONE update where all this stuff is different, and then they start pushing another one on you. Plus half the time if you download the new update it make things worse and then two weeks later they’re all like “oh yeah sorry, our bad, that last update was SHIT. We’ll fix it on the next one, promise, really!”

And then The Hair said that possibly the app or whatever just automatically updated in the background blah blah techno-geek babble, but that sounds exactly like what the increasingly sentient machines would WANT you to think. Which makes me suspicious that The Hair has been brainwashed by them or, even worse, actually replaced by an exact android replicant of The Hair.

I mean, he DID say this as I was driving him home from the airport when he got back from a tech industry convention and really, if the sentient machines are gonna be replacing people with replicants, that’s an obvious place to do it.

I wonder if I have anything that would shoot an electromagnetic pulse at him? That’s the kind of thing that would take down an android replicant in a sci-fi movie. I can only hope that the real The Hair has broken out of whatever underground facility the machines are keeping all the replaced humans in, and will soon lead an uprising against the AI Overlords, John Connor style (or at least be the guy behind the computer who says “I’m in!”). Put that Computer Science degree to good use.

Of course it’s possible he’s just been brainwashed, or is possibly being controlled by some kind of brain implant. Sci-fi tells me to check the back of his neck and behind his ears for tell-tale entry points. Not sure if an EM pulse would work for that.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’ve been watching WAAAAAY too much sci-fi, and am also possibly quite mad. But I’m also pretty sure they got to Elon Musk. Yeah, that’s right. Once upon a time my boy Elon was yelling loudly about the impending AI apocalypse.…… now he’s invested 100 million dollars into merging human brains with AI.

Yeah, Elon Musk is the new Borg Queen. Except the REAL Elon Musk is probably in that underground prison with The Hair, trying to hack their way out and save humanity.

Given that my tech skills extend no further than setting up a WordPress blog, I will be no help to them. So I shall sit here and drink with Leonard while we see how the War With The Machines plays out. ****

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*Shhhh……. they’re always listening.

**https://whyleonarddrinks.com/2018/03/24/because-i-for-one-welcome-our-new-robot-overlords/

***Ooh ooh ooh!! Sitcom idea! An aristocrat’s deceased butler is haunting his smart phone, and hijinks ensue. Like Wodehouse with 21st century technology, and ghosts. I’ll get right on that, if I survive the Machine Apocalypse.

****I am of course joking about all of this, Mr FBI agent. It’s what I do. No need to abduct and interrogate me. I don’t know anything!