A new Easter egg was recently discovered on Google.com that pokes fun at the idea of a robot revolution leading to the destruction of mankind.<\/p>\n
In a nod to both the Terminator franchise and the robots.txt file that plays an important role for search engines like Google, there is now a file called Loosely following the Robots Exclusion Standard, Google\u2019s Taking a look at the last modified date returned from the GET request indicates that the killer-robots.txt file has been on Google\u2019s servers since at least 1 July 2014.<\/p>\n There has been much speculation on why this Easter egg has appeared on Google, but one can\u2019t help but wonder if it wasn’t a combination of events that led to the joke.<\/p>\n Firstly, as one commenter on Hacker News pointed out, 2014 marks the 20 year anniversary of the Robots Exclusion Standard.<\/p>\n But why Terminators and The idea of human-made artificial intelligence (AI) eradicating our species has been brought\u00a0up a number of times this year.<\/p>\n Not only in pop culture, but by great minds such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk.<\/p>\n Following the release of the film Transcendence (which starred Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman), Hawking co-authored an article for the UK Independent in which he asked if we\u2019re taking AI seriously enough<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSuccess in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history,\u201d the article argued. \u201cUnfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.\u201d<\/p>\n In a hilarious interview with John Oliver for the comedian\u2019s HBO show in a segment entitled \u201cGreat Minds: People Who Think Good\u201d, Hawking explained his statement.<\/p>\n \u201cArtificial intelligence could be a real danger in the not too distant future. It could design improvements to itself and outsmart us all,\u201d Hawking said.<\/p>\n The remainder of Oliver\u2019s questioning descends into funny banter which is better watched than read.<\/p>\nkiller-robots.txt<\/code> on the root Google domain.<\/p>\nkiller-robots.txt<\/code> file \u201cdisallows\u201d robots called T\u2013800 and T\u20131000 from targeting Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, using links to their Google+ profiles.<\/p>\n\n
$ telnet google.com 80\r\nTrying 74.125.233.68...\r\nConnected to google.com.\r\nEscape character is '^]'.\r\nGET \/killer-robots.txt HTTP\/1.1\r\n\r\nHTTP\/1.1 200 OK\r\nVary: Accept-Encoding\r\nContent-Type: text\/plain\r\nLast-Modified: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 22:03:05 GMT\r\nDate: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 09:00:31 GMT\r\nExpires: Tue, 08 Jul 2014 09:00:31 GMT\r\nCache-Control: private, max-age=0\r\nX-Content-Type-Options: nosniff\r\nServer: sffe\r\nX-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block\r\nAlternate-Protocol: 80:quic\r\nTransfer-Encoding: chunked\r\n\r\n52\r\nUser-Agent: T-1000\r\nUser-Agent: T-800\r\nDisallow: \/+LarryPage\r\nDisallow: \/+SergeyBrin<\/pre>\n<\/blockquote>\n
killer-robots.txt<\/code>?<\/p>\nTranscendence, Hawking, and Musk<\/h3>\n