Of Idiocy and Inevitability

It is a generally acknowledged law amongst those who devise and create mechanical contraptions that, if there is a way to use a device for something other than its intended purpose, someone will invariably find it. There also exists a second law, related directly to the first, which, in plain English, states the following: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And (though this is generally not mentioned around paying customers) there is a third.

'Never assume intelligence on the part of your client.'

A good mechanic, holding to these three principles, might flatter himself that he could create a mechanism or machine which would be, in common parlance, idiot-proof. He might believe that there would be no possible way in which someone could, through sheer blind stupidity, accidentally do something as ridiculous as, for example, setting themselves and their laboratory on fire, or (through a series of increasingly bizarre mishaps and coincidences) discovering the secret of time-travel whilst attempting to retrieve a fishpaste sandwich from the bowels of the aforementioned invention. Or both, simultaneously.

What this hypothetical mechanic would have failed to factor into account, of course, is the existence of the fourth law, which renders all attempts to bypass the effects of the first three unfortunately worthless.

'Make it idiot-proof,' this final law runs (and here our hypothetical gentleman allows himself a self-congratulatory smirk), 'and someone will simply make a better idiot.'

In the case of our hapless hero (he of the accidental time-travel and fishpaste sandwiches), the two someones involved can hardly be accorded much of the blame - due to an unfortunate accident involving a dirigible, several mildly irritated elephants and an implausibly appearing tea-kettle, the part they played in his life and upbringing consisted mainly of bringing him into the world, naming him, and instilling in him a good and proper desire to meddle with the affairs of god and nature (though his guardian later made him promise quite faithfully that said meddling would not involve elephants in any way, shape or form).

No, the blame for his becoming in every sense the much-feared 'better idiot' must rest solely on the shoulders of the aforementioned guardian (his uncle, on his father's side), whose obsession with all things mechanical and general method of experimentation via accidental trial and error had a more than passing effect on young Samuel Wenthrop's impressionable mind (and on his soft and impressionable bones, on the several occasions when the older Wenthrop's robotic creations decided to be more than usually combative in their invariable and inexplicable efforts to escape the laboratory and wreak death and destruction on the surrounding countryside).

One might think that such experiences in his infancy would, in anything, dissuade a man from pursuing a life entirely devoted to tinkering ('inventing' would imply a degree of skill which young Wenthrop was far from possessing). One would, however, be failing to take into account the maniacal and fanatical devotion of certain subsets of the scientific mind to all things destructive and dangerous, and the lure of the still-unreached goal of creating an artificial intelligence which might perhaps do more than menace the local wildlife (and traumatise the occasional passing sheep).

One would also, of course, be failing to note the continued use of the word 'idiot' in the preceding paragraphs.