I think for the sake of mixed company and delicate sensibilities we should refer to this as a “BM” rather than a “bullshit machine”. Therefore it could be a LLM BM, or simply a BM.

And if they say things like “God bless you”, I take it as a sign of respect

Very different from someone in the South saying “God bless your heart”, which means they think you’re being stupid.

Replaced by AI. Nothing to see here…

Was it the one where they did the thing, or the one where the thing was gonna happen?

Haven’t seen Pet Rocks yet.

Introduce radio to the Romans. They had the metallurgy to create coils. Even a simple Morse code system would easily keep their empire going. Probably end up like that Star Trek TOS where Centurions are carrying sub-machine guns, though. If want to read what a great SF writer did with this (guy from 1938 ends up in 535AD), read “Lest Darkness Fall”

The demonstration is key. The Greeks actually had one in 80BC or thereabouts, but as far as we know they never figured out a use for it. Wiki is here: Aeolipile

Let it be the glasses. I can tell them to show me a pony, whereas I can’t have an intelligent pony balanced on the bridge of my nose.

Tony Stark’s glasses with a compatible, programmable AI. And a pony.

How about we turn this around a bit? Instead of asking, “What should be done with them?”, let’s try it a bit more personal.

Suppose you woke tomorrow and found yourself in a hospital room. A doctor comes in and says, “Ah! You’re awake! And you’ll be pleased to know we’ve cured you.”

Physically and mentally you feel (in this scenario) just as you do now - normal, healthy, but perhaps a bit puzzled.

“What was wrong with me?” you ask.

“Ah, well, you’d gone crazy for a bit there. It was like a virus, lots of people in your town caught it. It… influences its victims. You had it for years. You killed about a dozen people. Rape. Torture. That sort of thing.”

“What?!”

“Don’t worry - you were confused, not yourself. You believed that rape, murder, torture, kidnapping, and all that was acceptable. But now you’re fine. Go in peace.”

Could you simply go back to your life? Would changing your life, dedicating it to serve in the memory of those you killed, be enough for you to live with yourself from then on?

Would everyone around you constantly wonder if you were really cured, and worry that perhaps you’d kill again? Or fear that since you caught this virus, you might be susceptible to others that may come down the road, with the same or worse consequences?

What are the options? Obviously, if you are still dangerous, there are fewer. But what if these people suddenly came to the realization that their actions were as horrible as we find them to be - what are their options?

A. Suicide - can’t live with the memory, or the possibility of relapse;

B. Incarceration - be sequestered from others (either voluntarily or by society) due to possibility of relapse;

C. Execution - it doesn’t bring back the dead, but it assures no new dead from your hand.

D. Brain wipe - but we don’t have that yet.

What’s the answer?

Rather long, once posted this on … another forum. Sorry for the length but it’s fairly complete.

When my daughter was around 2 years old we moved to a (new to us) 4-bedroom house, built in the 1950s. We may have even bought it from the original owners, I’m not certain. Anyway, master bedroom was for my wife and me, the other, smaller bedroom was to be our daughter’s room.

Soon after moving in we noticed that after putting her to bed for the night, we’d hear her talking and laughing long after she should have been asleep. Peeking in after about the third night of this we found her standing at the end of her crib, chattering away, seeming to be talking with the closet door about 5 feet away. Typical new parents, we’d tell her to lie down and go to sleep. Probably a shadow on the door or something like that.

This continued for many nights, and then we noticed she was actually holding conversations - talk a little, listen some, answer “yes” or “no” or “I don’t know”.

When we asked her about it, she said she was talking to “the lady in the green dress”. When we asked what she talked about, she either said “stuff”, or “School” (daycare) or “I don’t know.”. This continued sporadically over the space of about a year, and eventually died down to where if she was continuing the conversations, we weren’t catching them.

Her little brother was born, and after the initial months of the baby-in-the-parent’s room phase, we moved them together into the room. At about age 1 or so, when he could stand on his own, pulling himself up on things, the same thing happened. We’d hear him babbling, and peek in to see him doing the same thing his sister did - stand at the end of the crib, talking to the closet. On each occasion we peeked in to find him doing this, his sister lay fast asleep in her bed. His pattern followed hers exactly, sounding exactly like we were eavesdropping on one side of a conversation. We even got the same answers when asking about them: talking about “stuff”, or “school”.

Again, this behavior continues sporadically, slows, stops.

Almost three years go by. Everyone’s two years apart. Two boys now, so Big Sister gets her own room and the two boys share The Room. Around age 1-ish the youngest gets to where he’s able to pull himself up to stand, there he is in the crib, babbling to the closet.

We have no way of knowing if they discussed this among themselves, but each described a “lady in a green dress”. In asking them separately, our daughter might mention “she has long hair”. Youngest son might say “She has black hair”. If asked if it’s long or short, curly or straight, he’d say “It’s long”. And so on in many details. When we requested a new detail from one, and gave a multiple choice for that detail to the other, they’d always agree - belt or no belt, color, shoes, white lady/black lady/Indian lady, whatever. At this point though, we’re thinking they could all be remembering the same picture from a story book or something, so no conclusions here.

Again, the conversations slowed, then stopped. Then the weird stuff starts happening.

Now, the wife and I were both smokers, and the rule was one could smoke outside, or in the bathroom upstairs (which had a ceiling exhaust fan) but nowhere else in the house. One fine cold evening, too cold to go outside for just a smoke, I used this rule. My wife was out of the house until later, and I’d put the youngest to bed. The two older children were downstairs watching a movie.

Suddenly I hear the two oldest running through the house, yelling the youngest child’s name.

This makes more sense if you know the downstairs came up into the kitchen; cross the kitchen to the right and you’re in the dining room; cross the dining room and turn right, you’re in the hallway; follow the hallway to the right and you’re in the living room; pass through the living room which connects back to the kitchen. Just a big circle really, through several rooms.

The older two kids were running this circle and yelling the youngest’s name in an exasperated way.

So I stub out my smoke and exit the bathroom just as the older two were making the circuit again.

“What’s going on you guys?” “We’re chasing (youngest). He’s supposed to be in bed!” I peek into the bedroom. “Yes, he is in bed.” “No he’s not. He just went into the kitchen again. We heard him on the stairs and just saw him run up. He’s not supposed to be awake watching movies now so we tried to tell him but he kept going around the corner so we ran after him.”

So, basically, they’d each heard and then glimpsed someone on the steps and chased the figure. Every time they turned a corner in this circuit, they caught just a glimpse of the figure turning the next corner, and continued the chase. My youngest was truly asleep. This sort of game might have repeated once or twice more over the next 12 months or so, then ended.

Turned bedroom #4 into a study. It was downstairs. One day I’m home in my study, wife at work, kids at school. Someone is pacing the floor above me. A slow walk from one end of the living room directly above me, then back again. Since I know no-one is home I guess it’s my sister-in-law, who has a key and a penchant for dropping by from time to time unannounced. I wait a while for her to announce herself, but all she does is pace back and forth. And she sounds… heavy. Finally I go upstairs, doors are all locked, nobody there. Could be street traffic? But it was exactly the sound of someone walking above, that one squeaky floorboard and everything.

That evening I mention this to my wife. “Oh, you heard The Walking Man. When I stayed home sick that day last month I heard it all the time. Someone walking back and forth in the living room, but nobody ever there when I checked.” Why did she call it the Walking “Man” then, I asked. “Heavy-sounding steps, more like a man’s.”

Okay, so we got that going for us, which is nice. I’m wondering how to enlist this character to push a vacuum cleaner while he’s at it. I mean, if he’s bending floorboards he has mass, and could push a vacuum…

No more Green Lady chats; no more phantom kids running around the house. The Walking Man is heard from time to time but I’ve learned to ignore him. He doesn’t answer to questions or anything like that. We’ve left out pen and paper, nada, okay, we’re cool, he’s cool, whatever.

We’re moving - just need a bigger house. The realtor [with a sideways roll of the eyes] assures us we don’t have to mention the other residents to prospective buyers, so that’s nice. She thinks we’re nuts. Most of the stuff is packed up, moved into storage so the house “shows” well. Someone buys it and we start packing the last of everything so we can move later in the week. With the “shows well” it just looked… roomy. Now it actually looks like a place someone is leaving.

My oldest son is now 12, and still in the second upstairs room, the Green Lady bedroom, where he shares bunk beds with his younger brother. He gets up in the night to use the bathroom.

In the living room, clearly visible down the hall, is a tall man standing and staring at the wall, his back to my son. My son said he knew instantly it wasn’t me. This tall figure begins to turn slowly towards my son. My son changes his mind about using the bathroom and runs back into his own room, where there’s a woman wearing a green dress, sitting on the floor. In her lap is a small child. They’re both looking at my son, who at this point is screaming his head off and running into our room/bed/covers.

So we check, and there’s nobody else in the house of course. His brother was asleep in the same room as the lady/kid, and didn’t hear anything until my son yelled. He didn’t see anything on waking.

We now had a video camera, though! For the next couple of nights, just because, we set up the video camera in the corner of the living room that would give the most coverage: Living room, hallway, kitchen on the left. We don’t have motion sensors, and the tape runs 8 hours or so on lowest quality, but in the two or three nights we taped after bedtime nothing happened, at least nothing caught on tape.

And we moved, and that’s it.

Except -

We never really noticed until the move, but when you walk into a house and there’s nobody home, you somehow feel that. “I’m home, and I’m the first one home, and I’m the only one home”. We realized that we had never felt that since 1988, only in the new house. My wife also said it felt “lonely” being the first one to come home to the new house. So at some level, maybe we all sensed something.

I don’t know.

OR one simply has to wait for a prince. But you never know when the next one’s coming around.

I think that rather than “showing you who they really are”, they just don’t bother with the mask as much - it seems to take effort, and they’ve just stopped putting in the work. Love the “spidey-sense” reference!