Staring Down the Future

I’m committed to my sonic stare-downs with robocalls. These are the steps:

Pick up the phone.
Say nothing.
Listen intently to the call’s background static for the ghost in the machine, for some sense, some signal, of the system on the other end as it cogitates its next move.
Rejoice when it almost inevitably hangs up.
Put another notch in belt.
Sometimes ponder if this is a Roko’s basilisk scenario.
Sometimes ponder if there is a correlation between which particular textures of background static trigger Roko-anxiety, and if that’s some sort of ESP equivalent of a Turing test.

We’re so conscious of self-learning algorithms and of nascent digital sentience these days, I do wonder if the phrase “ghost in the machine” has much traction any longer, or if the phrase is shifting to mean something slightly different from what it once did.