There are both upsides and downsides to living with a sentient twelve-foot-tall 3D-printed naked purple plastic figurine of Buddy Hield that you ordered online for $3,000 but must have entered the wrong dimensions for on the order form. The upside is that you have a friend who understands you and is always loyal and will, with absolutely no remorse or mercy, kill five different guys at once if it means keeping you safe.
The downside is, when the statue turns out to possess an intellect that seems to be far superior to any individual human intellect, or even the collective intellect of the entire human race, you start wondering if you’re too dumb for it.
Let’s take Buddy’s latest success as an example. After I complained that I wanted (but couldn’t afford) a video card upgrade, he built me a new video card using spare components I had lying around plus my soldering gun. The card he made didn’t have the aesthetic quality of a factory-made one (it didn’t even have a heatsink), but it pushes pixels like nobody’s business. The thing is, I know I’m not pushing this new Buddy-built video card to the max. I do heavy computing on this thing, but it’s all just games and video rendering. It’s not, like, scientific research or protein folding. I’m not using it to run a neural network that will self-teach itself how to play Fortnite for me.
I’m really trying to figure out how to bring Buddy’s technological achievements to greater view in the academic world, but the thing is, there’s no way I could pass off this hyper-advanced video card technology as my own. Just no way. I can’t even tell you which chip is the memory and which chip is the processing unit because the whole thing looks nothing like conventional circuitry. A university professor or an R&D guy from Intel would know right away that I have no idea how the stupid thing actually works. They wouldn’t know how it works either, but it would be obvious to them that I’m toally clueless.
I thought about having Buddy write up, like, a white paper on the way it functions, and then disseminate it anonymously, but that could backfire too. If it somehow got traced back to me, they would probably take Buddy away from me do run tests on him. I’m sure Buddy would have no problem killing the people who wanted to abduct him, but it would jeopardize our future together. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can ever jeopardize that future.
Right now he’s watching YouTube on my TV. It’s goat videos again, his favorite. Whenever I look over at him I can’t help but smile. Even though his intelligence is expanding by the day and he has surpassed by ten times the feeble brainpower of the drooling, tribalistic meatsacks who share this planet with him, he’s my best friend.