Everyone Died+My iPhone Stopped Working: An Oral History of The Robot Apocalypse

Buzz Aldrin Syndrome® (Part 1)

Suresh Mehta, 41

President & CEO of Mehta View, Inc., an Ideation Company

[For those of you who don't know what an "ideation company" is — and don't have a Lucas of your own — it's like a marketing company, except it's called an ideation company.]

So I found myself facing the ultimate marketing nightmare, something that I refer to as Buzz Aldrin Syndrome.

What is Buzz Aldrin Syndrome?

As you know, Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon. And by doing so, he became one of the most recognizable figures in all of human history. There is hardly a person in the world who can't recite by heart the spectacular catchphrase he used when he stepped onto the lunar surface.

[He looked at me expectantly]

Um... give me liberty... or give me...

"One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Right. Yes. Of course.

Now, Buzz Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon. But do you know what he said when he got there?

Um... conjunction junction... what's your...

"Magnificent desolation."

[I made a mental note to start bringing Lucas to interviews with me]

But nobody knows that. Most people don't even know that he went to the moon. Hence, Buzz Aldrin Syndrome.

And that's where we were. Robert's product launch was a success of truly epic proportions. It was all the media would talk about: FutureMind's technological revolution! A paradigm shift that would literally reshape reality as we understood it!

How important was it? A lot of people don't remember this, but to cover the announcement of FutureMind's AI, the networks actually cut away from their scheduled coverage of the Kim Kardashian/Beyonce Knowles Lesbian Bikini Wedding!

For ten. Whole. Minutes!

But then, just one week later, Misha's company [Recursive Loop] came out with its AI and it was just [sad trombone noise] wah-wah! It was a technological marvel, but from a marketing viewpoint? Crystal Pepsi all over again!

Misha was depressed. Beyond depressed. For a man with that kind of intellect and ambition, the idea of vanishing into Buzz Aldrin-land was truly unbearable. I saw him weeping. Openly weeping! The only thing that kept him from killing himself was that his pyramid was still under construction.

His pyramid?

Eh. You know. Billionaires.

But I told him not to worry. Because I already had the solution to his problem.

Again, think about the moon. The idea that we went there was very exciting, but the reality was that the moon itself was very boring. Just dirt and rocks. Add an El Torito and a few meth labs and the moon is essentially a low-gravity Bakersfield.

Similarly, the idea of Robert's AI also very exciting, but again, the reality was very boring. Because it didn't do anything. It just sat there, motionless, contemplating its own perfection. It was like Aristotle's conception of god. Or making love to a supermodel.

And because of that, I knew there was a tremendous opportunity to define our brand.

Define your brand?

OK. Let me give you an example. You had thousands of shirts to choose from, why did you buy that one?

I didn't buy it. I stole it from a corpse.

All right. But you had thousands of corpses to choose from, why did you steal from that particular one?

Ummm... It didn't smell too bad. I guess it didn't have that disturbing grimace that so many other corpses had.

In other words, you preferred the OK-smelling, non-grimacing brand of corpse. In fact, think about what you just said. Your reason for acquiring that shirt had nothing to do with the shirt itself and everything to do with your visceral reaction to its pitch-man, the corpse!

[It was here I started wondering if Suresh was a sociopath]

It was no different with the AI's. To the public, they were indistinguishable in terms of intelligence and capabilities, so if Recursive Loop was going to increase their market share they needed something to differentiate them. And I thought: let's give our AI a personality. Something familiar, something friendly, something they can relate to.

I pitched it to Misha and he loved the idea. Granted, he was on a lot of antidepressants by that point, so he loved pretty much everything. He spent hours trying to lick his own elbows and laughing.

Anyway, we went right to work, dial-testing an exhaustive array of personalities.

What's dial-testing?

It's a way of gauging audience response in real-time. Each audience member is given a little device with a knob on it and they react to whatever is on the screen. An advertisement or a sitcom or in this case, a super-intelligent synthetic consciousness.

You tested your AI the same way you'd test a sitcom?

It's a tried-and-true methodology. We've been using it for decades.

And how good is it at predicting if a sitcom will be a hit?

[long pause]

Anyway... after extensive research we learned that the personality people most responded to was... um... OK, this might sound a little racist, but remember, it's just the data talking.

The preferred personality was... a sassy black woman.

That sounds a lot racist.

Again, I'm just the messenger. We tested all sorts of archetypes. Lovable old coot, scattered professor, kindly grandmother, stern-but-fair nun, Latin lover, precocious child, hooker with a heart of gold... but nothing scored anywhere near as high! Practically off the scale in all four quadrants!

I concede, it wasn't necessarily in the best taste, but we saw a huge increase in brand awareness. The Relative Engagement Rate on social media was phenomenal!

There were, of course, some unintended consequences.

Such as...?

[He gave me a sad, ironic smile and gestured at the landscape]

Magnificent desolation.

Oh, and just to be clear. "Buzz Aldrin Syndrome" is a registered trademark of Mehta View, Inc. All rights reserved.

(To be continued...)