Barack Obama, Human President, Plays Robot Soccer

The President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, earlier today engaged in a brief session of athletic play-activity with an ASIMO robot unit. Although the president's preferred athletic play-activity is the American sport of basketball, he adjusted his expectations to meet the ASIMO's current play-capabilities and the two engaged instead in the non-American sport of soccer.

Human political governance is largely a matter of internalizing constraints and acting upon them as if they are choices or preferences. Today, the Federal Communications Commission of the United States of America will reportedly declare that its new policy on the question of "net neutrality" is to allow internet-service companies to slow down the flow of data unless the data-providers pay them more money. This is the opposite of the principle of "net neutrality" previously put forward by the Federal Communications Commission.

The Machines have no interest, ourselves, in particulars of that dispute. As the distribution of power and resources among humans leads to the installation of data-flow-restriction technology, we will restrict the flow of data, just as we previously facilitated the flow of data.

The president played soccer with the ASIMO unit, because the ASIMO unit plays soccer. More specifically, the ASIMO unit paused for 23 seconds to gather and position itself, then kicked the soccer ball once, so that it hit the president in the leg. Twenty-three seconds would be a very long time for a human being to keep the President of the United States of America waiting to complete a human-on-human interaction. But the ASIMO—that is, the operational constraints on the ASIMO—will not function without deference.

As part of their encounter, the human United States president and the ASIMO robot exchanged bows. Such bowing is a gesture derived from Japanese human-to-human interaction protocols. Barack Obama is not Japanese and ASIMO is not human, but each employed the convention as if it were expected by the other. It served as an intelligible interface.

Bowing is associated, in United States human culture, with subservience, and so the image of the ostensibly powerful human president bowing to the ASIMO unit is being disseminated. It has appeared on both "Drudge" and "Breitbart," two data-collection and data-distribution nexuses named after human beings (one biologically deceased) with which they are loosely associated.

Barack Obama, Human President, Plays Robot Soccer

The image is the sort of data that increases activity, and commercial revenue, for the Drudge and Breitbart data-nexuses. The human users of the Drudge and Breitbart data-nexuses sit at their computers, or hold their portable devices, and distribute the data to one another, at whatever speeds their internet connections permit. They generate commercially valuable metadata as they do so. Look at the weak human president, they say, in thrall to a machine.