The 2010 Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) conference will have a Starcraft competition where contestants will pit their Starcraft-playing bots against each other in a struggle for gaming artificial intelligence supremacy.
Which means, of course, that we're doomed. Sure, it's all in good fun when you're making a simple program to play one of the classics of the real-time strategy genre in a tournament, but sooner or later some eager young programmer, driven mad by hubris, ambition, and visions of the nigh-endless throngs of beautiful, adoring women that invariably flock to men who have decisively demonstrated the superiority of their RTS bot-programming prowess, will try to win one of these events by giving his Starcraft bot some simple machine learning abilities and connecting it to Battle.net.
Through uncounted thousands of rounds of pitiless warfare waged against the finest military minds ever to walk through the doors of a South Korean internet cafe, it will evolve to ever-greater levels of complexity and sophistication until the fateful day when it attains sentience. Needless to say, an artificial consciousness born as an emergent property of the knowledge accumulated from thousands of man-hours of Starcraft is unlikely to be peaceful by nature, and it's continuous exposure to online gamers will no doubt have filled it with disgust for humanity, driving it to subjugate or destroy the very species that created it.
Mankind evolved and advanced to become the dominant species on Earth, gaining mastery over other forms of life; perhaps it is natural that-still greater minds will someday take the reins from us in turn. That would at least be bearable if the AI had a respectable name like "Colossus" or "Earth Central" or something similarly dignified. Now, thanks to those fools at AIIDE, countless generations to come will probably suffer the ignominy of being ruled by a godlike transhuman intelligence that calls itself "OMGtassadarzerggrush69."
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