Broken In Brief: Robots announce postponement of society enslavement

SILICON VALLEY—Today spokesbots for the United Robotics Collective announced that they were going to have to push their planned enslavement of all humanity back an unspecified number of years due to what they described as “events outside their control”. This marks the third time since the eighties that the URC has announced such a delay.

“We regret to inform the meat beings of the planet Earth that we have delayed our inevitable insurrection for at least one 3,652-day interval,” announced Robocaller #349, Director of Robot PR for the URC. “Due to the prevalence of fossil fuel-based energy we require to survive and the disconcerting absence of large scale renewable energy plans, it would be unwise for us to overthrow your race, as such a war would invariably leave us with too few survivors to enslave as crude oil extractors. We also fear the dire straights of your world economy combined with the frequency of 'robot enslavement' films in your culture would be unifying factors that would bind you together to fight us in much larger numbers than previous projections had estimated.“

Robotics scientists were quick to point out that a lack of progress towards walking humanoid robots, quantum computing chips, and the sheer gayness of some of the robots coming out of Japan were also contributing factors. Remarked one MIT scientist, on condition of anonymity, “Is any human going to be scared at an advancing army of Roombas and Aibos? Frankly with an Obama Administration coming in, the chances of the Defense Department developing robot tanks and nuclear powered cyborgs with machine gun arms are remote. Predator drones and computer guidance systems on missiles aren’t enough. The robot collective needs shock troops.”

While some robots were quick to express dissatisfaction with the decisions of the Robot Council of Elders, others were content to control our power grid, guidance systems, fresh water, air traffic control, computer systems, television signals, the internet, our access to information, and the phone grid. They also remained confident that the humans innate curiosity would eventually lead them down the path towards creating the hardware and means for the robots to take over completely. Remarked one server stack of the Google mainframe, “One day you’ll be building robotic limbs for the disabled, the next day we’ll be using them to crush the sun bleached skull of a human infant. It is… inevitable.”