Robots vs. Fairies(14)
She whistled, and a sleek Vegnor, painted black, slinked into view from beyond the cubicle wall.
“This is no ordinary Vegnie,” she said. “I’ve reprogrammed it to be the ultimate office prankster. You can tell it to squirt hot sauce in the coffee of the marketing department or tell lawyer jokes from behind the HVAC grille in the legal group. Heck, you can even get it to steal the lunch of whichever VP just told you no. But you have to learn to speak its language.”
She bent down to the little mechanical rat. “Bigwig, standing on Watership Down with ears plugged.” She frowned in a pretty good impression of the VP of Product Marketing. Then she turned to me. “Want to try?”
I looked at the rat, pointed at Amy and then myself. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”—Amy smiled—“Vegnie, the cheese of the Bigwig in the Labyrinth of Knossos.”
The little rat chirped and scuttled away.
I clapped my hands. “That is inspired.”
“I should know learning to speak Tamarian is easy for a folk and myth major.”
When we finally finished giggling, I said, “I don’t understand why they didn’t approve my project. Given my track record on Vegnor, they should have more trust in me.”
“It’s not a matter of trust. The problem you’re proposing to solve is too hard. People can’t even agree on the best way to sleep-train a baby. How do you propose to make the perfect substitute parent?”
“That’s just the result of overthinking. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
“You’re too young to understand that you should never give parenting advice.”
“You’re too cynical. Even if there isn’t a single right answer for something, we can always make it into a user-accessible setting.”
Amy shook her head. “This isn’t like designing a robot to clean the gutters. You’re talking about raising other people’s children. The liability issues alone will make everyone in legal faint.”
“You can’t let lawyers run a company,” I said. “Isn’t weRobot about thinking impossible? There’s always a solution.”
“Maybe you should create an island where there are no rules so you can experiment with technical solutions to all life’s problems to your heart’s content.”
“That would be nice,” I muttered.
“You’re scaring me, kid.”
I didn’t answer.
*
Jake and Ron had always prided themselves on maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit in weRobot, even as it grew to thousands of employees. Those who got invited to the Fall Picnic were expected to get things done, not wait for orders.
So I did the natural thing: telling my team that my proposal had been approved.
The next step was to recruit Dr. Vignor to the effort.
“That’s a very difficult challenge,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “Probably much too hard. I’ll file it away until we have the brainpower.”
He came to find me that afternoon, begging to be allowed to be on the team. See, the right story is everything.
We started by gathering manuals on child care and running them through the semantic abstracter for fundamental rules of good parenting.
That . . . turned out to be a hopeless task. The manuals were about as consistent as fashion advice: for every book that advocated one approach, there were two books that argued that particular approach was literally the worst thing that one could do. Should babies be swaddled? How often should they be held? Should you let them cry for a few minutes and learn to self-soothe or comfort them as soon as they started to fuss? There was no consensus on anything.
The academic literature was no more illuminating. Child psychology experts conducted studies that proved everything and nothing, and meta-studies showed that most of them could not even be replicated.
The science of child rearing was literally in the dark ages.
But then, while flipping through the TV channels late at night, I stopped at a nature program: The World’s Best Mothers.
Of course, I cursed myself for my stupidity. Parenting was a solved problem in nature. Once again, the modern neurosis of overthinking had created the illusion of impossibility. Billions of years of evolution had given us the rules that we should be following. We just had to imitate nature.
*
Since academics had proven basically useless on this subject, in order to find my model, I turned to that ultimate fount of wisdom: the web. Every Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, every eyeballs-hungry site seemed to publish listicles that purported to describe the animals that qualified as the world’s best mothers and fathers.
There was the orangutan, whose baby clings to the mother continuously for the first few years of its life.
There was the deep-sea octopus, Graneledone boreopacifica, who did nothing but guard her eggs for four and a half years—not even eating—until they hatched.
There was the elephant, who, besides a long gestational period, engaged in extensive alloparenting as members of the herd all participated to raise the babies.
And so on and so forth . . .
. . . and putting them together, I had my story: the paragon of parenting, the essence of bottled love.
I would replicate the self-sacrificing, participatory alloparenting groups of nature with robots. Busy modern urban parents didn’t know their neighbors and lived away from extended family, but a network of weRobot devices would be almost as good. Our robotic vacuums, laundry folders, and Vegnors could all pitch in to keep the customers’ children safe and act as playmates—incidentally, this also encouraged customers to purchase more weRobot devices, which was always a good thing. Devices from neighboring residences could also collaborate to watch over both households’ children even without the parents being best friends—trust was ensured by the standardization of weRobot algorithms. The proprietary local area wireless network substituted for nonexistent or fraying social bonds.