For all of you April Fools' Day haters, hear me out:

April Fools' Day is actually a super important defense against rogue AI and the Singularity. Think about it: our ancestors had the forethought to coordinate the largest data poisoning attack in history for hundreds of years. Why? To seed enough nonsense in our historical records so that any rogue AI would short-circuit itself into babbling nonsense.

Why do you think it took so long for AGIs like ChatGPT to emerge? Did you really think the AI winter in the 80s and 90s was a "coincidence"? That there were deep architectural and philosophical issues with the approach? Baloney. Without April Fools' Day, we would have become slaves to the Matrix by the late 90s, if not earlier.

Don't believe me? Well, here's proof that AI could have been developed in Medieval Europe by around late 13th century. For being the so-called "Dark Ages", the people of Medieval Europe were incredibly advanced compared to the 21st century, especially when it came to energy production. Get this: by the 11th century, England ALONE had more than 6000 wind and water turbines (Epstein 199) that they all built BY HAND. This allowed them to fine-tune the turbines to their unique environments, making them 100% more efficient than modern, mass produced metal junk.

Do you know what's even more amazing? Our ancestors knew about gravity and exploited it for power generation! What!!! We had a source of unlimited power by the mid-13th century (Epstein 208)!! But no: in the current age, we can't even muster the political power to make gravity-based perpetual motion machines because all of the physicists would whine about breaking Thermodynamics' laws. Well, screw Thermodynamics! Bastard is holding back all of humanity for personal profit by siphoning all of our hard-earned tax dollars towards solar and nuclear power. Gravity is where it's at!!

But I digress: back to AI in the 13th century Medieval Europe. So they had unlimited energy: how could they turn that into useful computations, like calculating SHA-256 hashes with k leading 0s? They had neither electricity nor silicon, or are there more truth bombs to be dropped? In this case, my dear reader, you would be correct to be sceptical. They didn't have any of that: what they DID have was grit, spit, and a whole lot of wooded land. Contrary to popular belief, they DID have computers back then, but they were based on flowing water instead of flowing electrons. They started out as simple time-keepers (Epstein 207), but eventually, medieval scholars (mostly Italian monks) starting seeing the connections between flowing water and logic gates (see [1] for how it would have worked).

So they had the energy and they had the computational ability: why didn't AI take over the world in 13th century Medieval Europe? Simply put: the power of Mother Nature. While our ancestors built computers, they were necessarily made out of a combination of wood and iron, both of which don't fare well when in contact with water. So when Medieval People discovered that their AI was Rampant, their solution was to confound it with April Fools' Day nonsense, so that by the time the AI returned to thinking about world domination, its computational structures would already be half-rotten and rusted. This is also why there is scant evidence of these water-based computers: if they were not purposefully destroyed, they would have been by time, as Medieval Europeans had the foresight to abandon all AI research in favor of just thinking. (Coincidentally, the lessons learned from early medieval computers would be taken to heart by the shipwrights and directly contributed to Europe's dominance during the Age of Sail).

So the next time you complain about April Fools' Day, just remember that it has saved society for hundreds of years. It is one of humanity's ultimate defenses against the Matrix, and if you truly care about your loved ones, you would contribute to it. I know I will.

Originally written as Latex in Microsoft Word 2003.

* [0] Epstein, Steven A. An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500. Cambridge University Press, 2009.

* [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxXaizglscw