New advances in Artificial Stupidity (AS) are going to change life forever, announced the World Technology Forum (WTF) yesterday. “In the last half century, we have witnessed computers take over all aspects of life, to the point that we can now make monumentally stupid machines”, declared Paul Brokering of the University of Seattle and Chair of the WTF. “Profound idiocy, unimaginable ten years ago, is now available at our fingertips”.

Using techniques such as Derp Learning and Peurile Nets, we can all now gain access to the kind of insights once reserved for an elite class of moron. Many of the developments are in the trial stage, but here’s a sampler of what’s ahead of us.

• A device that likes all sorts of bullshit stories on Facebook, based purely on half-formed notions it already agrees with. Extra points where the news source website is called “ezclicksfrcash.ru” or “instantsexmoneylove.tv”. This device will even add a helpful comment like “They shud b strung up” where a stock photo from 2010 is used showing a happy couple who allegedly went on to spit in their kids’ ice creams or something equally appalling and imaginary. 
• An activist device that rejects all scientific findings when they go against their instinctive prejudices about the way the world should work. “These devices reject all vaccines and antibiotics, in fact to them, all medicine is one big conspiracy and doctors know far less than they do compared to their Google based research over the last 3 weeks” announced Kim Dian and Gunther Parmeister of the University of Uppsala. 
• A device that observes everything in the world as if it was 6,000 years old. “Version 2 of this device is already making theme parks and setting up TV stations”, says Anton Leclerc, chief scientist with the Machine Ignorance group in the Sorbonne.
• A device that can make incredibly sweeping generalisations from a small data set. “It’s truly amazing in its stupidity.” says Vincent Okbanda of Rome University, “If it sees snow, it will declare that climate change is a hoax. If it hears about a broken solar panel, it will declare coal to be non-polluting. If it hears of a 90 year old granny who smoked 40 cigarettes a day, it will declare tobacco to be healthy. The lack of thinking involved has surprised us all”.
• A device that declares everybody it disagrees with to be part of a conspiracy. “In studies, these devices have also discovered flat earth chemtrails from the Planet Nibiru, powered by Bigfoot” – that’s an impressively powerful amount of bullshit from such a small device”, says Ian Proctor of the Institute of Virtual Neuroscience in MIT.
• An iPresident of the United States. Attempts to make a device this resistant to logic and common sense are still a long way off, as the solution being offered up by nature appears vastly more stupid than anything they have been able to create in the laboratory thus far.

How such technologies will change the world is the subject of intense debate among scientists, but rough estimates suggest that hundreds of billions of Internet days could be saved immediately. “Think of it this way”, says Brokering. “Instead of people spending hours expressing profound ignorance on multiple topics, they could simply wake up, press a button on their device, and go back to bed again. We could then all be spared their wisdom. Now how could this be seen as a bad thing?”