With a month to go before the end of 2020, the year has reached its logical conclusion: The general public can now recruit rapper Ice-T to fool robots for the purposes of protection and entertainment.

A company called RoboKiller answers calls from scammers and telemarketers — then the system starts playing lines of recorded dialogue in an effort to trick the marketers or scammers into thinking they’re speaking to a real person. For the first time, the company has signed up a celebrity to read the bogus babble.

RoboKiller claims that its system has managed to keep operators on the phone for up to a half-hour.

The main point is to waste time that nefarious callers would otherwise spend scamming others. But a side benefit is that it lets users listen back to the recordings — so they can entertain themselves by listening to a disembodied Ice-T chitchatting with unsuspecting con artists. This is exactly the type of distracting amusement we need right now.