The moment when all is lost

Pepsico, the maker of Doritos, estimates that 85% percent of U.S. gamers have consumed Doritos in the past three months.

But at the same time, nearly a third of gamers reported that other people’s crunching via microphone and headphones distracts them from playing well and impacts their performance.

To “help gamers keep the crunch to themselves,” Pepsico developed Doritos Crunch Cancellation software, which detects and silences the crunching sounds while keeping the gamer’s voice intact.

The software, which took six months to develop, used artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze more than 5,000 different crunch sounds and systematically eliminate them as possible sounds that could be transmitted to another player’s headphones.

Hundreds of years from now, when historians are trying to determine the exact point at which human beings began the process of devolution, they may point to the development of this software:

In order to accommodate a human being’s need to remain isolated and sedentary in their home and play an ultimately meaningless game on a screen while eating flavored tortilla chips, software was designed to remove the transmission of crunching sounds that caused distraction.

The descent has truly begun.