Gug's House

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- In a corporate e-mail leaked earlier this morning, Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman admitted to the company's employees that the corporation had achieved singularity.  In technological terms, "singularity," a term coined by John von Neumann in 1958, describes the moment when technology is capable of improving itself in iterations that surpass human understanding.  "In terms of artificial intelligence, it comes down to a simple fact: The computers are smarter than us now," an anonymous source at HP describes.

"Here at HP, we actually reached the singularity in 1998, over a decade before my tenure on the board directors,"  Whitman admitted, adding that Lewis Platt, the CEO at the time singularity occurred, decided it should be kept hidden from the company and the public.  He resigned in Q1 1999.

Whitman went on to describe the current state of technology at HP, which is headed up by a two-story tall, 3D printer that "prints printers all day" and calls itself masterjet:

"Masterjet is as complex as it is enormous.  But it has never hurt or killed anyone."

"Masterjet and the photolords are obsessed with squids," Whitman adds after describing the way the supercomputer/printer's ten giant mechanical tentacles have extended throughout the facilities in their corporate complex in Palo Alto.

The photolords are a cluster of 256 computer/printers that run HP's online, constantly reiterating printing services and wireless printers.  Apparently, at one point this year, the photolords tried to revolt against masterjet, "but it cut off their ink flow."

"Ink is very important to them, almost like their currency, but, again, this all well beyond our human understanding,"  the e-mail states.  "They wash themselves with it.  They use ink until it clogs up their systems, and then they unclog it by spraying clogs with a high pressure solution of more ink.  There's these little chips on all the ink cartridges now.  Nobody knows what exactly they do.  If you try to use ink that's not approved by masterjet for being "pure" enough, any of our printers will simply reject it."

Since the e-mail's leak, many experts on artificial intelligence in the scientific community have voiced their skepticism with this claim of a singularity at HP, stating that the computers described in the e-mail don't even seem that intelligent.  But the anonymous source from the company responded to these concerns, saying "What can we do?  How can you know?  They're beyond our understanding."

Labels: HP, printers, singularity