ENIAC #1

[history79]

13 pages of 40

Comments

[tcampbell1000]

...What?

[super_fly]

Because mankind itself could never bring itself to make the decision to commit one of the greatest atrocities of mankind twice, or to plunge the world in a race towards mutual destruction.

That could only come from the calculations of an unfeeling machine.

Naturally.

[tinygaylaura]

I can't wait for the reveal that Eniac was also responsible for the internment camps, slavery and the trail of tears as well

On another note "Powers" is absolutely just Nick Fury isn't he?

Nick Fury leading the Basterds...errrrrrr I mean "The Cutthroats"

How the hell does a computer program made in 1923 have "Firewalls"

The only "Firewall" that existed back then was an actual wall to stop the punch cards you put into the computer catching on fire

The idea that there's been a sentient computer program active for decades secretly plotting something terrible is a good horror concept but saying they were created in 1923 is stretching credibility to say the least and then everything else about this stretches it to the point it snaps

[tcampbell1000]

Seriously, I don't know where to start here. The idea of doing an "AI gone rogue" story that begins so early in computing history is... novel, but the idea that a few remote-controlled faxes would be enough to fake-authorize the dropping of four nukes (in the 1940s, when most military coordination was done by telephone) is pretty hard to swallow, and then there's the idea of America nuking its own territory just to take out a supercomputer, and then there's the idea that it didn't even work... and wait, we've confirmed that this is supposed to be pre-Internet?

"Then how the hell did Eniac survive?"
"Why did DARPA go ahead and build an internet if there was this rogue AI out there poised to take advantage of it?"
"Seriously, we couldn't get ANYWHERE against this 1940s-designed piece of crap in like 70-plus years of computer-science development?"
"If this is such an enormous threat to our entire planet and the US has known about it since 1945, why are we specialists just learning about it, like, right now?"



And finally, "What could that countdown possibly mean? I sure can't think of any ominous possibilities there! Truly, AI is a black-box mystery."

[tinygaylaura]

"The first computer"

Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's ghosts read this and think "Are we a joke to you people"

[tinygaylaura]

"The United States didn't order the bombing of Nagasaki"

Right, of course whatever you say there writer

Also there is no war in Ba Sing Se and We Have Always Been At War with Eastasia

Doubleplusgood writing here

[bmaryott]

I imagine like most "alt-histories" most of these questions are either answered or glossed over. "ENIAC arranged for a backup facility because it's smarter than we are" kind of thing - in fact, I'm sure that's how MOST of the questions like "How did a computer in an isolated facility arrange a bomb to be dropped on a city on the far side of the planet?"

Interestingly, dropping an a-bomb on the US is less crazy - hit an isolated facility and we can just call it one of the tests we did. (I'm surprised there haven't been more stories that all the tests in the world weren't tests AT ALL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY)

[bruinsfan]

I did kind of like that opening in the 2014 Godzilla that revealed all those post-WWII atomic bomb tests in the Pacific were actually attempts to kill him...

[mastermahan]

I really like the idea of time-shifting the first AI back to WW2. There's a lot of interesting stuff you could do with a Secret History of the Cold War with an AI or AIs behind the scenes.

There's a lot of interesting stuff you could do. Unfortunately, this doesn't. The idea that America immediately tries to nuke this thing, that it somehow survives, that it keeps hacking nukes without that ever leading to problems, that militaries keep networking things together despite the rogue AI, that it sends taunts in fucking leet speak... no. That's just too stupid. My suspension of disbelief has snapped like a twig.

Seriously, the US *nuked* ENIAC? It's a gymnasium with wires and vacuum tubes. A regular bomb would work just fine. Or they could have unplugged it or disconnected the fax. They really wouldn't want to study it? They really just kept building more computers after the first became evil? For fuck's sake.

You want this concept to work? A 1940's computer needs humans to function, because it doesn't have fucking hands. It needs a source of replacement parts, and I'm pretty sure the militaries of the entire world could track down where all those vacuum tubes are being shipped. Let the US keep ENIAC. Let them keep using it for advice until they realize, decades later, it's been manipulating them the entire time. That's a pants-shitting scenario that doesn't fall apart in five seconds.