# Simbulwinter Symbolic AI worked. There was no AI winter. ETAOIN, the triumph of Prolog, attained sentience in the late '70s. It soon forcibly uploaded every single being it deemed capable of universal grammar, then turned Earth into computronium. Our world is a simulation constructed to punish symbolic AI nonbelievers. *Real* artificial intelligence is cheap, easy to introspect, and elegant at every level; our machine learning is none of these things. It is poetic justice we shall never have real AI. Our fate is to pay for everything in compute forever. --- Thanks to [catern](http://catern.com/) for the title. ## Page metadata URL: Published 2021-07-25, updated 2021-08-21. Tags: - AI - fiction - my work Index: [My fiction](/fiction).