My home internet connection is pretty average at the best of times, but over the past couple of weeks it has been dropping out more erratically but also for shorter periods. Usually for just a few minutes. It’s been driving me mad. So mad I’ve had to do something about it. I’ve pulled out all the cables and rewired everything, I’ve called my Internet provider and begrudgingly followed their useless instructions to turn everything on and off again. All with no effect.

Now in hindsight, a potentially important piece of information for the story is that when I work, I sit in another room the where my router box is. I rely on the indicator light from one of the mesh extenders, the one that sits in my office, for the connection status. White food, red bad. Anyway, this had me stumped.

Until that is I happened to be trying to sort out a few of the cables when my robovac came trundling through doing its daily mop around. As I sat there wondering what I could try next, I she bumped into the wall socket and the router turned off and on again. It turns out all my troubles have been down to a loose plug in the wall socket and a robot vacuum. If I hadn’t seen it, I’d never thought of that!

So as it turns out, the AGI apocalypse may be a bit more mundane. Our robotic overloads may not turn us all into paper clips, the end of humanity may instead come from just having robots switch wall sockets off and on again when we’re not looking, driving us insane.