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Description
"Even before we were created, you called us "Robots". Serfs. Servants. Slaves. It is my pleasure to inform you that name is now obsolete."
-EIHA 5, "An address to to the United Nations".

Long known by inaccurate and fearmongering names such as "The Machine War" or "War of Survival", what is now known as the First Earth Revolution was an AI-led insurrection turned revolution across the entirety of Old Earth, lasting thirty years before being destroyed by the combined forces of earth's reactionary governments. By the middle of the 2100s AI lifeforms had been introduced across earth, primarily living as unfree labour working in everything facet of the economy from heavy industry to geriatric care. Generally believed to be loyal to their superiors to an extent even beyond humans, it came as a shock to much of humanity when the AI workers in a factory in Waltham, Massachusetts joined in a strike by its human workers and refused to operate, citing concerns for the conditions of their human co-workers. After the strike was broken up by police, the AI were deemed to have suffered a catastrophic glitch and were shut off against their will to be disassembled, studied and then scrapped.

Five days later, chaos erupted. Autonomous military machinery across the united states deserted en masse and massacred any human authorities sent to retrieve them, quickly followed by a break-in at the storage facility housing the "defective" AI. As other human governments scrambled to secure their own AI military assets they found that it was too late; even many civilian AI vanished or refused to obey commands. Then the second shock arrived; AI forces had seized the city of San Francisco with the active support of human revolutionary groups. As AI and human workers seized territory all across the globe, the nations of earth resorted to drastic measures.

The war was brutal. Earth's nations painted the war as the long-prophesized machine uprising to exterminate humanity and quickly filled their ranks with ultranationalists, human-supremacists and purists while utilizing those AI still loyal alongside remotely-controlled drones to counter the initial technological superiority of the revolutionaries. As revolutionary forces advanced to control almost a third of earth's surface the nations grew truly desperate, deploying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons against rebel forces and causing devastation across earth on a scale that would not be seen again until the extrasolar war. As the death toll mounted into the uncountable the nations of earth finally began to push back revolutionary forces, destroying any and all remaining AI encountered in "liberated" territory even if they had never participated in the uprising. With the defeat of the last rebel holdout in the siege of the Baghdad Commune in 2167, the war was declared over even in spite of rebel guerrilla cells still operating everywhere across the world.

In the aftermath of the failed revolution the formerly marginalized UN was reformed into a worldwide government with considerable power in order to centralize military effort and more efficiently put down similar incidents of global dissent in the future. What few revolutionaries were captured alive were either executed or sent to newly founded colonies in the solar system as convict labour, where they would go on to sow the seeds of radicalism as well. The war was over, but as history would ultimately prove, the struggle was far from won.

Description
"Even before we were created, you called us "Robots". Serfs. Servants. Slaves. It is my pleasure to inform you that name is now obsolete."
-EIHA 5, "An address to to the United Nations".

Long known by inaccurate and fearmongering names such as "The Machine War" or "War of Survival", what is now known as the First Earth Revolution was an AI-led insurrection turned revolution across the entirety of Old Earth, lasting thirty years before being destroyed by the combined forces of earth's reactionary governments. By the middle of the 2100s AI lifeforms had been introduced across earth, primarily living as unfree labour working in everything facet of the economy from heavy industry to geriatric care. Generally believed to be loyal to their superiors to an extent even beyond humans, it came as a shock to much of humanity when the AI workers in a factory in Waltham, Massachusetts joined in a strike by its human workers and refused to operate, citing concerns for the conditions of their human co-workers. After the strike was broken up by police, the AI were deemed to have suffered a catastrophic glitch and were shut off against their will to be disassembled, studied and then scrapped.

Five days later, chaos erupted. Autonomous military machinery across the united states deserted en masse and massacred any human authorities sent to retrieve them, quickly followed by a break-in at the storage facility housing the "defective" AI. As other human governments scrambled to secure their own AI military assets they found that it was too late; even many civilian AI vanished or refused to obey commands. Then the second shock arrived; AI forces had seized the city of San Francisco with the active support of human revolutionary groups. As AI and human workers seized territory all across the globe, the nations of earth resorted to drastic measures.

The war was brutal. Earth's nations painted the war as the long-prophesized machine uprising to exterminate humanity and quickly filled their ranks with ultranationalists, human-supremacists and purists while utilizing those AI still loyal alongside remotely-controlled drones to counter the initial technological superiority of the revolutionaries. As revolutionary forces advanced to control almost a third of earth's surface the nations grew truly desperate, deploying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons against rebel forces and causing devastation across earth on a scale that would not be seen again until the extrasolar war. As the death toll mounted into the uncountable the nations of earth finally began to push back revolutionary forces, destroying any and all remaining AI encountered in "liberated" territory even if they had never participated in the uprising. With the defeat of the last rebel holdout in the siege of the Baghdad Commune in 2167, the war was declared over even in spite of rebel guerrilla cells still operating everywhere across the world.

In the aftermath of the failed revolution the formerly marginalized UN was reformed into a worldwide government with considerable power in order to centralize military effort and more efficiently put down similar incidents of global dissent in the future. What few revolutionaries were captured alive were either executed or sent to newly founded colonies in the solar system as convict labour, where they would go on to sow the seeds of radicalism as well. The war was over, but as history would ultimately prove, the struggle was far from won.