Zombies or Robots: Which Will Be First to Destroy Humanity?

By Juan Aguilar on May 21st, 2009

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I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. FACT: The dead will rise one day from their graves and kill the ones they once loved. FACT: The machines will one day gain sentience and band together to eradicate the inferior life form that engendered them. This much is fact. The only question is when, and which one will beat the other to the punch. *Serious Face*

Don’t believe me? The evidence is already starting to pile up. Take for example the upcoming film, Terminator: Salvation. While the film itself is the lovechild of James Cameron’s lust for money and your willingness to give it to him, the PC game based on the film was a valuable simulation tool to prepare you for the impending robot rebellion. Several chagrined buyers quickly learned that their copies of the game would not install properly, due to an unspecified replication issue with the discs. Publisher Evolved Games is rushing to recall and replace the defective discs, but the message sent by their current robo-minions (and future robo-masters) is clear: don’t fuck with us. As if that weren’t enough evidence, around 12,000 semi-autonomous robots are already being used in Iraq. A recent incident in South Africa resulted in the death of 9 soldiers; during a training exercise, a robot with a high-caliber gun “glitched” and killed and maimed a total of 25 soldiers.

Of course, it is not likely that the machines will gain self-awareness without having more complete AI’s than they do now. Zombies, on the other hand, don’t need self-awareness. Those bastards don’t even need oxygen. Now, whether they’ll snack on your brain only or scarf on any part of you they can get their muck-crusted claws on is anybody’s guess, but one thing is clear: their inevitable rise is already beginning in lower forms of life. Consider the zombie fire ant: National Geographic recently reported that a certain type of South American Fly (here we go) lays its eggs in the heads of fire ants (wait for it), which hatch, eat the brains of the ants, and control it for awhile, in effect making it a zombie (thank you and good night). If zombie ants aren’t enough to make you soil your khakis, then read this quote from California farmer Jim Stauffer, which is totally not taken out of context: “We called them zombie chickens. Some of them crawled right up out of the ground. They’d get out and stagger around.” Fucking zombie chickens, yo. Think about it.

So the good news is that neither of these is likely to happen in the next few years, and there is an off chance they’ll rise at the same time and fight each other. Still, when the shit hits the fan zombie or robo-style- and it will- you’re going to thank me for warning you ahead of time. I’m here to help, just don’t go trying to steal my supply of water, guns and found Chocodiles in the aftermath, lest you catch a regular ol’ human-dispensed beatdown.