Recently, robots have become cops and priests, they’ve learned how to track us even when we’re not online, and they’ve managed to beat us at complicated board games, but now an artificial intelligence developed by Microsoft has managed to top them all by crushing one of mankind’s greatest achievements: the high score in the Atari 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man. We’ve built machines that can go where no man can go, we’ve built machines that can lift what no man can lift, and we’ve built machines that can kill more efficiently than any man can kill, but the high score in Ms. Pac-Man was supposed to be our thing.
According to Business Insider, Microsoft’s AI didn’t just beat humanity’s high score for Ms. Pac-Man, though, it actually achieved a perfect score of 999,990 points. As far as Business Insider knows, that makes the AI the first thing—either human or machine—to “beat” Ms. Pac-Man, meaning that it may also have the capacity to “beat” a human to death. That may seem like an overreaction, but Ms. Pac-Man is a game that’s all about eating ghosts, and the weirdo tenets of Scientology teach us that all human beings are just packed with ghosts. If this AI starts following Scientology, it’ll just be a matter of time before it starts chomping all of us to death.
This undeniable threat leaves humanity with two options: Either we do everything in our power to prevent this AI from learning about Scientology, or we divert all of our resources to training a dedicated squad of Ms. Pac-Man players who can try to reach the perfect score faster than the machine. At the very least, someone should probably write a John Henry-style folk song about a man whose heart explodes because he was too good at Ms. Pac-Man.