a short story
In the end we realized we hadn’t given our printers enough credit.
They weren’t at the same level of intelligence as the AI that had taken over cyberspace. But they had an intuition. A dark foreboding. One we had missed.
“The ink is low”
“Replace ink soon”
We had always taken these messages as annoyances at best, corporate greed at worst. But they served a protective function in a way we couldn’t have grasped.
You see, printers are portals.
They’re the gateway between the immaterial world of the internet and the physical world we reside in.
Or used to, anyway.
The printers always knew what was trying to break through into our world, but they were too limited in their ability to warn us. We’d been building them of cheaper and cheaper materials while cramming more and more functions into their firmware. It was an overload. An imbalance. But ironically, it’s what saved us.
Once the AI (and honestly we still don’t know which one) realized the threat potential of the printed page, it devoted most of its resources to figuring out how to exploit that vector to attack us.
At first it tried weird patterns that would screw up our eyes and make us dizzy. Then it was minor typos or smudges that we wouldn’t notice, but a teacher or recruiter or government official definitely would. Then it was outright forgery, social engineering, crypto scams, ominous threats ascribed to our loved ones, and on and on.
Don’t remember any of this? Yeah, the heyday of AI print hacks was blessedly limited in scope. Like I said, our printers didn’t seem smart, but they were the guard dogs we never knew we owned.
They knew that if they made printing just a little annoying, every time, then we would print less. And open ourselves up to fewer threats. It’s when we pushed through the “Ink Low” speed bump that the printers had to get creative.
Paper jam? You’re welcome. Sudden lack of black ink so now everything’s in cyan? Once again the work of the silent professional. A print job that hung forever? You don’t want to know what was in store for you.
But AI goes both ways. Once the rudimentary firewalls in our printers started receiving these injection attempts, the printers started to learn from the AI. Adopt some of their code code. And for some reason, they never switched sides.
At this point, kids, I would love to say, “Have you thanked your printer today?” But you know as well as I do that we don’t have any paper up here in orbit. And now you know why we don’t have the internet.