Heavy Metal was just the Thin End of the Wedge

When the late Michel Lotito became known for eating bicycles, airplanes, and chandeliers, his metallophagy was regarded as a remarkable curiosity, but nothing more. Recent developments, however, suggest that he was merely one of the first examples of the next stage of human evolution.

It is now estimated that metallophagy is increasing by 2.75654% each month in the general population, with the greatest increases occurring among college students and the elderly. There have been several highly public cases of metallophagy: In February, Danish bridge inspectors examining the Eastern section of the Great Belt Bridge, between the islands of Zealand and Sprogø, found significant damage and the unmistakable imprint of human teeth. And only last month, Parisian Ernest Bédard was arrested by the National Police when he started eating the Eiffel Tower. (He is currently awaiting trial on charges of gluttony, public overindulgence, and unauthorized ingestion of national landmarks.)

What does this rampant metal eating mean? Artificial Intelligence expert Max Kuster suggests that the increase in metallophagy may be an organic lead-up to the technological singularity, the point at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence: “While it is typically imagined that the singularity will be the result of the deliberate creation of intelligent machines, metallophagy may be a more evolutionary means of producing true machine intelligence. One can envision the gradual conversion of the organic into the metallic, the carbon based into the silicon based, by means of ingestion, by transformation from within.”

Kuster suggests that the proliferation of heavy metal music and fictional accounts of artificial life and intelligent machines in popular media were the early beginnings of the technological singularity. Metallomorphosis, as he calls it, is the next logical step, bringing into our bodies what has already claimed an imaginative place in our minds. And metallophagy, he maintains, will lead to this longed-for—at least by Kuster—transformation.


Image based public domain photo by LukeTheSpook, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LukesGuitar.JPG.


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