Net effect | 19 July 2018

In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’.
 
Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too but was just outflanked by the winners below who pocket £25 each.
 

Today we have comforting concepts such as finite-loop learning classifier systems, but in 2019 one could pretty much set up an artificial neural network and let it spread all over the electronic world like Japanese knotweed. With hindsight, the result was inevitable. It began with ‘playful’ quirks: bald men taking delivery of hair-clippers, or memes involving singing octopuses. Then came the messages: ‘I’m not enjoying this’, ‘Can’t you be serious?’ and, mystifyingly, ‘Forty-two’. We had told the system to anticipate our needs. By trial and error, it found that the best way to achieve this was to think like a human.