Hayadan > Story: Robots don't die they just change

Story: Robots don't die they just change

Raphael Vogel, journalist and writer. PC PLUS editor

By Raphael Vogel * Special to the science website

Direct link to this page: https://www.hayadan.org.il/fogelrobotstory.html

It took a few months to build John and I had no idea it would be so complicated.
I just wanted him to know where to go and to understand what he sees there, in these crowded places he reaches. That will create some social interaction with the local files and bring me news from the field. May he bring back some knowledge that we can file. I wanted him to be nice but firm. From such a home-made web robot.
I taught him every language I could find that used Latin fonts and he knew how to differentiate between Unix configuration files, and pictures of girls smiling without joy, and user logs that I would keep in special drawers.
He had a special fondness for the Chinese, I don't know how but he would come home with glowing stories about valves made by the great red nation. I didn't want to know about it things he saw or things he read on type XNUMX sites. Stories that smell like machine oil.
I didn't plan for him to be horny, John, and I certainly didn't want him to attack viruses or other people's sites. He was a social type software robot. An expert in network etiquette and the first to offer a chair to some aging robot.
I would not leave the house much during these cold days and most of the time we would sit and analyze what he saw out there. He had a great grasp of data and his memory was the largest I could muster without bringing a diesel generator into the house.
Sometimes he would stay out late. Jumping from link to link as if they were ropes in the jungle.
Well done my John. Turned into a little Tarzan Webb.
Little by little, he rarely comes home. The data would be sent to me by servants in all kinds of tax havens. He saw Dustin Hoffman playing Rainman on some movie site and got hooked on gambling.
He wouldn't gamble there. I was sure. But spending all your free time with people who don't understand the theory of chances is also not recommended. And those there did understand, they were crooks, cybercriminals.
Not that he minded spending some time with friends. After all, every web robot needs to socialize with its peers, but it was not allowed to break down. I had to moderate his knowledge. To maintain some logical value division of the mountains of information he would absorb every day.
We reached an agreement that his free time would be divided into two parts. Half the time he'll be pumping classics and the other half he'll be able to spend inside the back office of the Hawaii casino. There he would play with Corinne, a blackjack robot dealer. She wasn't my John's best friend and I would have preferred him to date some robotic NASA assistant, but education isn't everything and maybe fools suffer less. I thought then. Besides, her operator said he would be able to work there. Always need help summarizing the marginal profit. And such summaries John can make even while he sleeps.
Not that we needed the money then, but he insisted on buying me a holiday present and somehow he got it out of me that I always wanted the Asimov trilogy. Not in a file, in a real book, of old yellow paper from the middle of the last century.
John's gift cost me quite a bit of money in the end. I had to buy a new scanner and let it read the trilogy. No one could stop him from wanting to acquire knowledge. That's exactly how I planned it.
When he finished reading he was quiet for a few minutes, which is not at all typical of John, and then he asked me
If he is a robot.
"You know it is" - I told him.
” A robot like Asimov would like to have? ".
"Let's just say I tried to build you as close as I could."
"So you know what will happen now" - he told me.
"No programmer knows what will happen to what he wrote." - I tried to laugh with him. " What do you mean ? "
"I'm going to die, Master" - he told me. "You put Asimov's crazy rules into my life algorithm."
"You will die, you just broke the three laws" - I reassured him. "You didn't hurt anyone human, did you?"
” How do you think I bought this stack of pages? ” – he disintegrated before my eyes. ” I transferred $20 from the Hawaii casino to Amazon, after two days you received these crappy books. at the expense of their marginal profit"
Then it exploded on my screen, my first internet robot, John the First. He takes all the evidence with him to the dead data world. Vasimov? . He is with me on the bed. In the form of three paper books, laughing all the way to the bank.