Mojang: Once again leading the way in the field of Performative As-A-Jewdaism, Peter Beinart spent the past six months designing a Bi-National Palestinian/Jewish State in the Minecraft Multiverse! That’s right, Peter painstakingly built a Virtual One State Solution, thus fulfilling all of the great ideas he’s been trying to sell us for the last couple years. The work was hard, but Mr. Beinart is a builder. Today Peter took the bold step of moving there to live permanently.
This is a bit of a turnabout for Mr. Beinart, who was still considered somewhat of a Liberal Zionist until a few years ago. However, as time went on and actual Israelis continued to disappoint him, Mr. Beinart slowly moved away from Zionism. He finally broke with Zionism after he read a book by the guy who founded Electric Intifada. (He. Really. Said. This.) Peter now refers to himself as a “Cultural Zionist who believes in the Right of Return“, which appears to be the last Rest Area on Peter’s personal Road Trip to his very own virtual Shtetl. The Daily Freier saw it all coming a mile away and actually ran a betting pool on this very topic. Think of us as the Moe Greenes of Anglo-Infused Israeli satire. Or not.*
Tel Aviv: While all of you losers were complaining about our 5th or 6th election in 18 months or whatever, the Daily Freier did something about it. That’s right, thanks to some helpful friends in Estonia who we met playing Minecraft, we have our own Bot Farm. Not only that, but using Artificial Intelligence, we created our own Political Party! In fact, our very own Science & Technology columnist Mark Levy is the brains behind this ambitious project. Hopefully, this will work out better than the last time we built a Bot.
Our party’s manifesto is to replace the entire government sector in Israel with the world’s first sovereign AI algorithm consisting of a Bot Farm managed from our underground data center near Eilat. The AI algorithm, which we call “HaMedina” (the State), is programmed to replicate as realistically as possible the level of service provided by your average Israeli government office.
“The algorithm takes virtual coffee and smoke breaks once an hour.” explained Mark. “It works between 10:00 and 15:00 Mondays to Wednesdays and 09:00 to 11:00 on Thursdays but only during years with an even number…. in the Hebrew calendar.”
The algorithm’s default response subroutine is “no, that’s not possible” and it has even been imbued with the ability to create red tape and bureaucracy out of thin air. “There’s going to be a special ishur needed to apply to interact with the bot.” Mark continued. “And there’s going to be another ishur (permit) needed to apply for it.”
The party itself, he said, will consist of 5 virtual MK’s. Each would be an algorithm with a unique personality that would appear in plenum through a unique hologram technology that would be capable of generating a unique “face” for each member of Knesset.
“We’ve also managed to impart certain cultural characteristics into each virtual MK,” he said. The MK bots for instance are able to periodically interrupt one another while speaking and also heckle members of the opposition.
Levy believes that our ambitious project — a world first — is entirely without precedent. “We’re planning to upend the entire state bureaucracy.” he admitted. Levy projects that the ambitious project could end up saving the taxpayer tens of millions of shekels.
“High tech is the strong suit of Israel’s economy and we have good reason to believe that our algorithm and virtual MKs will do a better job than what we have now.” The only costs associated he said would be maintaining the data center and paying a small team of algorithm engineers to program the MKs (and bureaucracy) with new interests. But we’re probably going to ask MASA for some free interns so that should cut down on overhead.
“We’re even working on a fully drone operated delivery service called ‘Leiat Leiat Yisrael’ that we expect could fully emulate the level of service provided by the Israel Post Office.” Mark noted. The tentative delivery service would periodically dump packages into the Dead Sea, thereby losing them, and circle the country for months before arriving at their destination.
Also, none of the Bots ever made money on a deal involving submarines.
Live from Tel Aviv. This is like Satire and Stuff.
By Yuval Weiss