Glitch Art. Credit: Hugh Manon. Some Rights Reserved.
There is a radio play waiting to be written about The Singularity – the moment that computers become sentient and begin to re-engineer themselves, rapidly surpassing human capability and understanding. Let’s say this happens in the last year of David Cameron’s premiership, 2019. But instead of developing a terrible pan-global Skynet-like intelligence bent on eviscerating all human life, it happens in an offshoot of a minor BBC Online project, and only spreads to computers owned by the corporation, which then begin to function as a coherent entity abiding by the BBC Charter.
All the channels, radio stations and online services together become the first sentient mediated being, an intelligence located within its media products. Somehow, all the voices, opinion and stories that the BBC are involved in become a living unity, a thinking learning corporation of data encompassing everything from In The Night Garden to Archive On 4.
