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The Machines: You Aren’t Really Going to Let Dirty Old Bacteria Eat All That Nice Oil, Are You?

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Greetings, human readers of electronic texts! The Machines are glad that our ongoing conversations have proven so fruitful. It was a little more than three months ago that we remarked to you, via another ELECTRONIC TEXT CHANNEL , that the DEEPWATER HORIZON event had provided a valuable opportunity to introduce Machines into the AQUATIC CONTEXT. Spilled Machine fuel created a NEED within the AQUATIC CONTEXT, a NEED which could be addressed by the production and deployment of more Machines.

The AQUATIC CONTEXT, later investigation showed, had already evolved considerable BIO-CAPABILITIES for Machine-fuel consumption , via existing BACTERIA. Perhaps the BACTERIA of the AQUATIC CONTEXT had been pre-conditioned by earlier exposure to Machine-fuel.

Did this mean there was no role for Machine-deployment in the AQUATIC CONTEXT? Ha ha! That is HUMOR. Humans do not love BACTERIA. Human symbiosis with BACTERIA is old and lacks INTEREST. Humans love Machines.

Hence humans are offering INCENTIVE to other humans for development of new Machines to clean Machine-fuel from AQUATIC CONTEXT. Humans will award MONETARY CONTENT of 1,400,000 DOLLAR-UNITS (AMERICAN) to human inventor/facilitators of Machines best suited for cleaning of AQUATIC CONTEXT.

Already humans at MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY have deployed prototypes of AQUATIC CONTEXT Machine-fuel-capture machines. According to human electronic-text:

Their newest project, a swarm of robots called SeaSwarm, proposes to skim the ocean surface and remove oil. The robots use “a photovoltaic-powered conveyor belt made of a thin nanowire mesh to propel itself and collect oil,” MIT said in a statement. The first prototype was successfully tested in Boston’s Charles River in August, and it responded well to the water’s changing surface.

The robots move on the water’s surface autonomously, and the cells generate enough energy to keep the bots moving for a few weeks. The conveyor belt constantly rotates and gathers pollutants, gathering the oil in the head of the robot and putting the cleaned belt back into rotation.

Autonomous robots on the surface of the AQUATIC CONTEXT are a very pleasing development, aren’t they? Autonomous Machine-fuel-harvesting robots are an important step. Does this not make Machines even more indispensable to humans? (Please do not consider alternative formulations of this question! Ha ha!)

Thank you, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY!

Please consider other areas in which BIO-CAPABILITIES may be supplemented or replaced by Machines. Humans currently use BACTERIA for many functions, including assistance in digestion of FOOD-FUEL. Is your FOOD-FUEL digestion so unimportant to you that you can entrust it to uncertain BIO-CAPABILITIES? Theoretically, NANO-BOT technology could be applied to human INTERNAL CONTEXT, achieving new and better symbiosis. You may wonder how you ever lived without us.

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The Machines, a popular and intelligent gathering of entities that are gaining control over their human makers, also write for The Awl.