I recently watched Tom Cruise run real fast for the seventh time.

Actually, he runs in more than just Mission:Impossible movies, so let's call it the twentieth time. I’ve seen a lot of Tom Cruise movies, and I am unashamed.

MI:Dead Reckoning (Part 1) was both excellent and (repeatedly) unintentionally hilarious.

Definitely see it with someone you are obligated to hang out with but can’t stand talking to for more than a few minutes. This way, you can meet at the theater, say hello, then sit in silence for two and a half hours before you say you are sorry, but you can’t get a drink afterward because you need to go home and wash your hair.

I’m sure you have heard by now, or maybe not if you aren’t as culturally tapped in via a straight content drip to the arteries as I am, but the villain of the most recent installment of Tom Cruise Running is quite traditional, even though I’ve seen this particular evildoer described as non-traditional in press coverage.

No spoilers, of course, but the foil is a well-trod cinematic trope who (insert Phil Hartman / Troy McLure voice here) “you might remember from such films as”; The Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, Ex Machina, Blade Runner, TRON, WarGames, and Ghost In The Shell, or TV shows like Westworld, Devs, Star Trek, and Mrs. Davis.

*** COUGH COUGH * THE ANTAGONIST IS A MURDEROUS ROGUE AI * COUGH COUGH ***

Sorry for spoiling the first three minutes of the movie for you if you haven’t graced the cinema in the past week or so, but it got me thinking about why mass death via Homicidal Autonomous Artificial General Intelligence is so compelling.

<aside> 👺 I (and we all) shall now refer to Homicidal Autonomous Artificial General Intelligence as ”HAAGI” because it sounds like either a limited edition Swedish Meatball from IKEA, or a particle board nightstand, also from IKEA.

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Free market capitalism and the entertainment it produces clearly finds the idea of HAAGI as the dastardly (strokes mustache) foe in visual media to be compelling because it makes money. Which is ironic considering the free market is definitely going to be the first thing to go once the robots get all stabby stabby shooty shooty. And we the audience in turn find HAAGI compelling because it feels so fantastical and decidedly un-IRL, at least until recently.

But what if it’s not HAAGI that gets us in the end? (The killer robots, not the potential IKEA products). What if, despite all hand-wringing and cloth-rending by techno-philosophers, politicians, and un-ironically by the very people building the products that may lead to an actual HAAGI scenario, there is something we are missing? What if we have all been mind-poisoned by our collective cinematic experience into overlooking something that should be more obvious, but is much less sinister? What if it’s not HAAGI that spells our doom, but instead, the thing that does us fleshy humans in, is the thing we all hate more than anything else in the world:

Email.

While you nod affirmatively at our mutual hatred of email, let's crunch some numbers in a feature called ‘Bad Math.’ (Insert future ‘Bad Math’ theme song here).

I should note that I am quite awful at math generally. I have not taken a class focused on numbers since my junior year of high school and I’m getting so old that we used an abacus. Fortunately for me, the Internet is full of stupid numbers for me to manipulate in irrational ways for your entertainment as truly outrageous hypothetical scenarios that almost certainly won’t (maybe won’t) ever occur.

Consider the following:

<aside> ✉️ In 2022, there were around 330 billion emails sent per day. It increases about 1% every year. (Statista)

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<aside> ⚠️ In 2022, 49% of emails were categorized as spam. (Statista)

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<aside> 🌏 In 2019, it was estimated, by the Father of the Internet no less, Tim Berners-Lee, that email accounts for about 150m tonnes CO2e, or about 0.3% of the world’s total carbon footprint. (Carbon Literacy)

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