Robots vs. Fairies(15)
“Mary Poppins,” I vowed, “with her umbrella open!”
Dr. Vignor modeled the neural patterns driving the behaviors of dozens of animals judged to be good parents by the wisdom of the web, and after extensive software emulation, it was time to test the first prototypes.
I posted the call for volunteers on weRobot’s internal network, and to my surprise and puzzlement, there weren’t nearly as many takers as I had hoped.
“There aren’t that many parents working here,” Amy said when I complained to her. “That’s not exactly a secret about this place. Look at the schedule you’re keeping. It’s not very compatible with starting a family, is it?”
“Even more evidence that there’s a market for this product!” I said. The key to dreaming the impossible was to see opportunities where others saw only problems. “Just think of all the lost productivity due to parents not being able to devote as much time and energy to their careers because they have to run home to deal with their offspring.” I was practically rubbing my hands in glee. “Marketing should be able to hint at this subtly in the TV ads. Power couples who spend less time parenting than they do at the gym ought to make a striking addition to the value proposition.”
“Did you just use the phrase ‘lost productivity’ non-ironically?” Amy asked, shaking her head. “And ‘value proposition’?”
Since there weren’t enough internal volunteers, I had to expand the beta testing program by asking my team to recruit friends and family.
I found a super-scary NDA for some other weRobot project on the corporate intranet—the lawyers were good for something after all—and a few search-and-replace macros later, I had a way to ensure that no one would leak any information to competitors or the Luddite press, which was always sniffing for news about upcoming tech products that they could exaggerate into dystopian visions to sell the papers.
*
Emily enthused to me about the new addition to her family.
“It’s incredible!” she gushed on the phone. “I’ve never seen Danny so well-behaved. Para changes him and feeds him and rocks him to sleep, and he loves it! Eric and I are finally able to get a good night’s sleep. Everyone at work has been begging me for the number of the au pair agency I’m using.”
I beamed with pride. Para was a marvel of engineering. The body-temperature, medical-grade synthskin, and the oscillator thumping at the rhythm of heartbeat were designed to calm newborns. The robot’s eight arms, made of series elastic actuators for safety, and precision manipulators allowed the machine to handle delicate child-care tasks with aplomb: it could change a diaper, feed, powder, massage, tickle, and give a bath using power-delivery curves that provided maximum physical comfort to the baby, all while humming a pleasant, soft song, folding laundry, and picking up dropped toys with its extra arms.
But the crowning achievement of Para, of course, was its neural programming. Para was the perfect parent-surrogate. It never got tired or bored; it never stopped giving the baby 100 percent of its attention; it was equipped with eons of evolutionary instinct drawn from the animal kingdom judged to suit human needs: it would protect the baby at all costs and was capable of reacting to save the child from any and all emergencies.
“I’m enjoying my time with Danny so much more now. I feel calmer, more patient, and I get to give my attention to all the fun parts of being a parent. It’s incredible.”
“I’m really glad,” I said to my sister. I felt like a wreck. I had pushed my team to the limit, and hearing my sister being so pleased made all the hard work worth it.
*
Monday morning, my phone buzzed as I rode on the work shuttle. My heart clenched and then beat wildly as I read the text.
Why are Jake and Ron summoning me? There was only one answer: my skunkworks project had been discovered.
The tests with Para weren’t anywhere near done. I still needed more time to produce convincing data to guarantee forgiveness.
With great trepidation, I showed up at the presidents’ office on the second floor of the central building. The executive assistants quickly ushered me into a small conference room, where Ron and Jake sat at the table, stone-faced.
“I can explain,” I began. “The preliminary results are very encouraging—”
“I hardly think we’re in the preliminary phase anymore,” Jake interrupted. He slid a tablet across the table. “Have you read this?”
It was the New York Times. “Home Robots Found to Be Source of Infestations,” said the headline.
I quickly scanned through the article, and my heart sank. I should have paid more attention to those reports Amy had been sending me.
It turned out that the Vegnors were so good at their jobs that they were displacing real rats. The robots were, of course, programmed to fight the rats and chase them out of homes—this was touted as one of the key advantages of the machines.
Then the Vegnors replicated some of the beneficial behaviors of the rats by sweeping and collecting food and garbage from the plumbing and pipes. I had been particularly proud of this clever bit of biomimicry. I thought I was being comprehensive.
But the Vegnors only pushed the garbage away from the houses instead of eating it, which led to middens on the edges of properties that became breeding grounds for other vermin—cockroaches, maggots, fruit flies—and the cockroaches infested the houses because they were now free of rats, which had once preyed on them. Even worse, the bodies of the rats the Vegnors killed attracted coyotes, the top urban predator in many American cities.