As technology keeps on evolving, so does the humans vs machines conflict. We are witnessing the rise of A.I., the birth of parallel metaverses, computer-generated art pieces & self-driving cars. Every day, it seems like humans are becoming a little bit more obsolete; replaced by their own creations. But is this a fact, or just a misconception? If computers & machines are so great at everything, what are we still doing here?

Spoiler alert: these robots eventually get their asses kicked by good old human DNA.

Just add an egg 🥚

Technology may have taken the form of bright screens, touchpads and speaking machines, but it wasn't always like that. About 100 years ago, "powdered eggs" was one of the high-tech inventions that scaled the food industry for the masses. However, when it came to baking cake, powdered eggs didn't do so well. In 1952 Betty Crocker reduced the cake baking process to an instant cake mix, to which you just had to add water and put in the oven. However, baking a cake was considered an act of love, and just adding water was downright cheating. Love can't be cheated! Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew) identified the problem using his uncle's psychoanalysis techniques, and proposed the simplest solution: remove the powdered eggs from the mix and change the headline to "Just add an egg". In other words: just add a bit of human love to this tech! The results of this brilliant marketing solution were skyrocketing sales, and me still writing about it 70 years later.

Error = Pleasure  ♔

The big advantage of machines is their superhuman processing power. A chess grand master may calculate up to 20 moves in advance when attempting to crush their opponent's king, and this is already reaching the limits of the human brain. The chess engine Stockfish has the power to evaluate 100 million positions per second. The only player who can beat Stockfish is Deepmind's AlphaZero; also a machine. These two engines play the highest level of chess on the planet, yet have the least viewers in the chess world. Why? Their games are just boring. The exciting part about human chess, is that you get to see sexist world champion Garry Kasparov make an error against the 17-year-old prodigy Judit Polgár, and then have to cheat his way out of an embarrassing defeat! Errors make the world go round, and allow unexpected situations to happen, and this is the content that goes viral. Perfection is boring.

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