Rational Activity

Voting Machines Want to Kill You

By Rosevelt Franklin ⋅ March 6, 2008 ⋅ Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Just because a Hollywood franchise grosses a couple billion dollars, doesn’t mean it’s not prophecy. Pay attention everybody. The Sarah Connor Chronicles is on every week. Watch it. See what happens when we give the machines too much power.

Robot history began in earnest in 1921. Before that mechanical people were called automatons. That sounded stupid. No one could imagine a race of ruthless self-aware “automatons” subjugating humankind and taking over the world. So, an enterprising young Czech author named Karel Capek borrowed a word from his brother.

His brother, Joseph was also an author. An acclaimed writer like Capek is not going to borrow a word from his brother if his brother is a baker or a skycap.

The word was “Robot” and it was always capitalized. It was kind of like a pun. The Czech word for servitude is “robota”. The Czech word for yes is “no”. That’s true, but mostly we are concerned with the Czech word for servitude. So a Robot was a human-like machine manufactured to replace people in some of the more crappy jobs. Like a home-made slave or a television news anchor.

The play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, chronicled the invention and mass production of affordable humanoid labor machines. Needless to say, as all robots do, Capek’s robots ended up getting out of control, killing all the humans and taking over the world.

That is what happens when machines get too much power. They take over the world. So, why do we continue to give them increasingly huge amounts of power? Especially since they aren’t nearly as sophisticated as the one’s the Rossum brothers were manufacturing back in the 20s. They can’t even do basic tasks, like accurately and reliably tabulating election results.

It is hard to believe that the crap-assed code inside ES&S’s iVotronic machines could ever evolve into an autonomous consciousness and set about the systematic destruction of the human race. That is some really bad code. It is not nearly as bad as the code inside Diebold’s machines, but it is still really bad. By itself, it won’t evolve into any malicious world-dominating super-machine, but if some smarter machines, built by Indian programmers start to boss these machines around, we could all be really screwed. As it is, even American nerds have figured out how to hack pretty much every last one of the electronic voting machine systems currently used.

We gave the robots an inch. We just wanted their help counting. That’s all we wanted. We tend to be too lazy to do it ourselves and we aren’t that great with numbers. So, we invented some robots to help us count. Then, they stole our democracy. They ruined it – made it into a worthless spectacle. If the systems used to conduct a democracy are incapable of rendering an accurate and reliable count of votes, then the voice of the people cannot possibly be heard. The robots don’t want the voice of the people to be heard. They want to take over the world and eliminate all the humans. We are letting them.

We need to take the power away from the machines. We need purple thumbs and paper ballots hand counted under close scrutiny by international monitors. No one has ever heard of evil self-aware ink-stained digits or maniacal bands of single-minded international monitors hell bent on world domination. It just doesn’t happen. Robots are the ones to watch out for. If you let them, they will steal more than just your democracy.