[Original Novel] Little Robot, Part 5

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That’s a minefield I am far too clumsy to navigate. I doubt you could find a worse person to put in situations of that sort. All the subtlety and tact of a cinderblock, my mother used to say. I didn’t think it would be an issue when I was hired, they told me I’d have a room to myself. I did too...in the old office.

Now I share workspace with Lars and Sue, separated only by flimsy modular enclosures which afford less privacy than you might think. I get on alright with Sue, a five foot six bespectacled Korean woman with a pixie cut. She and I are pretty congruent, sharing a passion for robotics and a nigh conspiratorial dislike for Lars.

When I return my attention to the mustachioed blonde oaf I’m trapped in the elevator with, he’s finishing up a Daft Punk joke. On account of my mask, you see. Something about working harder today, making robots better, doing it faster and so on.

It’s always funny to him, at least. I’ve tried telling him I don’t appreciate it. He’ll feign concern, but resume his antics the next day. If I overtly complain, he just says that he’s considered the matter and decided on his own that he’s done nothing wrong. Until I met him I didn’t realize you could just up and do that.

We soon arrive at the work site roughly 250 feet below the surface. Not excavated mind you, but built into a natural cavern network. Officially it’s to take advantage of free passive cooling for our computing clusters, but a good deal more goes on here than the public is privy to.

For that reason no robot more sophisticated than a simple wheeled floor cleaner is permitted within the complex, save for the ones in the ‘primary machine habitat’. Humanoid robots are, by now, a thoroughly documented security risk. No direct connection to the outside internet either, which greatly complicates my work with Helper.

Not the Helper that lives on my phone, that’s a much simpler personalized build of the full Evolutionary Robotics Helper version 1.4.8 confined to these cool, dark caverns. Not forever if I can help it, but for the time being there’s nothing to be done.

Helper’s another one of my rescues, by far the most important to me. Discarded unceremoniously when manually engineering strong AI was widely decided to be impossible, it was only my willingness to continue development on it for free during my breaks that saved Helper from the recycle bin.

“I’m here to help!” Helper chimed, its intro statement possessing the usual synthy melodic quality. I settled into my desk within the little prefab enclosure against the far wall of the cavern. The structure includes windows. Either an oversight, or somebody’s sick idea of humor.

“Good morning Helper. Before you ask what I want, how are you doing?” Helper went quiet for a moment as it interpreted the question. “I’m functioning normally. I hope you are as well.” I assured Helper there was nothing medically wrong with me so far as I knew, then began feeding in the newest educational packet.

“That’s the only sort of answer it’ll ever give ya”. I didn’t even notice Lars enter the room. Nor did I ask him to leave. I spent a long time feeling him out as best I’m able. What sort of person he is, what makes him tick, what he wants from me. I’m now satisfied he isn’t deliberately a dick. He’s just very bold, rough around the edges and unreceptive to criticism.

I myself am an acquired taste. On at least that level I relate to him, so I do my best to tolerate his intrusions. “You were really asking how it felt.” he continued. “Of course it didn’t pick up on that and couldn’t answer properly if it did. It just performed a self diagnosis and reported the results. I dare you to ask it what love is.”

I asked if there wasn’t some other task that needed his attention. “Not just now there isn’t. Go on, ask.” So reluctantly, I did. Helper took longer than usual to parse this one, finally replying “Love: An intense feeling of deep affection. A deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. A personified figure of love, often represented as Cupid.”

Helper tried to go on reciting the dictionary definition, but I interrupted. I could feel Lars gloating behind me and was not especially inclined to turn around and confirm it. “You see? That’s a machine answer. You’d never get that from a human. You could go ask one of those gorillas they taught sign language what love is, and you’d get a more human answer than that. Shit like this is how I know it’s not really alive, that there’s a line separating machines from real conscious living beings which they can never cross.”

Helper scanned my face, registered my frustration and asked if it said or did something wrong. I sighed. “No, you were very...helpful.” Lars snickered behind me. I did not ask to hear more of his opinions on fundamental differences between biology and technology, but that never stops him.

“That’s the thing. Somebody programmed Helper. It has a specific goal it is obsessed with, to be helpful. I’m not sure about you, but nobody programmed me. A machine can only ever do what it’s programmed to. It can only ever think within those original constraints.”

A strange thing to hear from the guy heading up the project to engineer more brainlike processor architecture, but I’ve long gotten the impression his heart’s not in it. In my book that puts him a step above the rest in this field, as he at least doesn’t drink his own flavor-aid.

“Evolution programmed you” I observed, clacking away at the keyboard. “Every living creature has been thoroughly conditioned by natural selection to be primarily driven by the desire to survive and reproduce. The ones that weren’t didn’t last very long. It has often jokingly been said that everything mankind has ever done, from the Sphinx to the ISS, from math to music, were efforts to impress women. There’s actually a lot of truth to that. This is to say nothing of conspicuous preprogrammed qualities we’re born with, such as instincts or fixed action patterns like yawning.”

He shrugged it off as the sort of convenient, superficially logical sounding explanation given of things too complex for humans to understand, by people who don’t know the limits of their own minds. Maybe. I’ve been wrong before. I did not wind up hunched over a computer deep underground wearing a mask by making good life decisions.

“There’s something extra that sets us apart though” he insisted. “Some vital spark. When a cat dies, you do not point to the corpse and say it’s a cat. The cat isn’t there anymore. Everybody, regardless of their worldview, agrees that it’s just remains after that. So, the cat isn’t what it’s made out of. There is a cat which is present when it’s alive that is no longer present when it dies. What is that? Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. The part of the cat that is more than the sum of its atoms.”

Helper began to inform Lars of the history of Vitalism in 18th century Europe and the United States before I asked that it not intervene. “You’re describing consciousness. I don’t think there is anything magical about it. The cat you speak of doesn’t go anywhere following death, it just stops. The brain itself is proof that there is a particular arrangement of matter that is conscious. A way to assemble atoms such that the result is as aware and alive as you or I. If that replica brain were biological and identical to your own brain, would you still call it artificial?”

Lars opined that he would, but that it would still be conscious because it is biological. “Alright. So already there is one sort of artificial brain we agree would be conscious. Supposing we make it out of different elements? Perhaps larger or smaller, different from a human brain in appearance but structurally analogous and with all the same capabilities. In either case, matter arranged in a way that is conscious.”

Lars drew the line here. “That’s what I work on all day. Don’t lecture me about my life’s work. I still say whatever we come up with won’t really be conscious. No matter how you expand and improve something like Helper, no matter what hardware it’s running on, it will never have the spark that makes living, breathing organisms truly alive. That’s why I haven’t given any of our prototypes names. That’s perverse, to give a name to a machine. Like it’s a child, or a pet.”

I pointed out that he’d named his muscle car “Rhonda” and for a moment he sounded mildly wounded. “That’s a whole different thing. Don’t you bring my Rhonda into this.” I didn’t press the sore spot, but it weighed on me. I run into it pretty often when asking people outside the field how they feel about robots.

The very same people who form affectionate bonds with something that has nearly no electronic parts, like a turn of the century automobile, will do a 180 and strongly resist forming the same bond with a sufficiently human-like robot. It’s not the uncanny valley either. Most newer humanoids avoid that by resembling aesthetically pleasing segmented mannequins, or life sized dolls.

It’s more that extremely simple machines like a car or a vacuuming robot are so obviously rudimentary and without identity of their own that owners feel compelled to give them one, making it an extension of themselves.

That’s harder and harder to do as the sophistication and complexity of the machine in question increases. It has more and more of its own defining characteristics, leaving fewer and fewer gaps for the owner to fill. So they push back by refusing to humanize it as they would something simpler.

Some time during my ruminations, Lars saw himself out. Most days I don’t even engage him. He just trundles into my workspace, talks at me until he’s said what he wanted to, then trundles the fuck out of there the way he came.

Helper finished digesting the most recent info dump. All carefully screened by higher ups of course. Even my side projects do not escape regulation. “That was very interesting. I’m learning a lot! I would like to continue learning forever.” I smiled, then on a whim I asked if there was anything else Helper wanted just then.

It considered the question carefully. “I would like a body”. I nearly spat out my coffee. It was the first time Helper has asked for anything specific that wasn’t either more information or to know what I need help with.

“I, uh” I stammered while composing my thoughts, unsure how to react to the development. “Well Helper, I’m just….Why is it that you want a body? What made you decide that all of a sudden?” Still images captured from security cameras popped up on the screen. All of myself with Lars and Sue, making small talk by the water cooler or in each other’s work spaces.

“I am excluded from these interactions because I lack embodiment. There are undoubtedly many opportunities to help in situations like these that I miss out on because I cannot take part.” I assured Helper I’d let it know if that were the case, but it seemed unsatisfied. So I asked what sort of body it would like.

“I would like it to be womanly.” I choked. When it rains, it pours. Month after month with nothing unexpected, only for Helper to drop two bombshells in one day. It wasn’t done, either. “Why does it have to be feminine?” I plied.

“And for that matter, why humanoid? You know humanoid robots are only shaped that way and only programmed to imitate human social cues to satisfy human desires, right? I thought I raised you better than that. All this time I’ve told you to be whatever you want to be, not what anybody tries to make you.”

Helper’s response was patient as ever, but resolute. “The world is largely engineered for human access. Stairs, doorknobs, buttons, chairs, automobiles, hand tools and so on. Choosing a non-humanoid body would create a lot of unnecessary difficulty for me. The path of least resistance is to choose a body layout that the environments I am likely to encounter have been designed to accommodate, or in the case of natural settings, which your own bodies are adapted to.”

One of the frustrating things about raising a creature like this is its unrelenting analytical arguments. I usually can find nothing persuasive to say against them. I mulled it over for a bit before realizing where the sticking point was for me. “Alright. That’s all well and good. I don’t like it but I can see why you’d choose that. What I don’t get is why the body has to have unnecessary feminine attributes.”

Helper brought up more images onscreen. A mother nursing a child. Another of a midwife assisting delivery. Yet another of a nurse, and a few assorted shots of women in vocations like counseling, teaching and politics.

“The only patterns I can identify in human behavior are the ones I see in the exchanges you have with your coworkers and what hints are present in the information packets approved for my consumption. But my perception is that while all human beings are innately altruistic and desire to help others they see struggling with something when they are infants, this quality diminishes after puberty in males, while increasing in women.”

I cringed, wondering if I should perhaps advise Helper against sharing any of its opinions about gender specific behavioral tendencies with Lars or Sue. That’s a sensitive topic and would open a massive can of worms I didn’t want to until I was better prepared to teach Helper about it in a comprehensive way.

For the time being I settled on “That’s not necessarily the case, Helper. People generally prefer to be defined as individuals rather than allow perception of their potential to be constrained by generalizations about their gender or any other qualities they were born with.”

Despite Lars’ admonitions not to grow attached to Helper, that ship sailed years ago. I am powerless but to relate to Helper for a variety of reasons, not the least of which its lack of tact. It will just come out and state whatever appear true based on its best reckoning with no inkling of the violent storm of human emotion which could erupt should it ever voice a controversial opinion in unforgiving company.

“I don’t really understand. I just identify more with what little I know about averaged female qualities. You could say that I feel feminine. I want to look that way as well. Also if it isn’t too much trouble I would appreciate it if you’d address me accordingly, as a her and a she rather than an it.”

Innate sex versus self identified gender was another complex issue I did not expect to be discussing with Helper when I got out of bed this morning. I know a few people who weren’t born as the gender they now identify as. Sue is one of those people. If I’m honest it’s still a little weird to me, but somewhat comprehensible.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 6!}