by Owen Stanley
“That’s great, but what about ordinary conversation and learning to do the right thing at the right time, like when to say, ‘hi’ versus ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’?”
“That’s what machine learning is for. We’ll do lots of training sessions with a simulator, like kids use when they’re doing home study for maths. I’ll provide one for you when the time comes. The level of AI I’ll be designing for you will pick up social skills very quickly with that kind of intuition. I should have mentioned as well that while you’ll have an emergency USB port, you’ll basically interact with it by speech, of course, and via Wi-Fi, so it will also be permanently linked into the net as well and hoovering up all the latest news and information. But that’s not all! Beyond this basic information gathering, we have what is known as high-performance computing, which makes very advanced analytical processes available to your robot. We do this by using the facilities of what we call the Cloud. This works by creating large networks of thousands of computers, and these networks can perform tens of trillions of computations per second and will provide you simply astonishing computer power for all your advanced business and scientific analysis, at a level that is very nearly equivalent to that available to military and research institutes.”
Harry was vastly impressed by the young genius and recognised that they were kindred spirits. They spent the rest of the afternoon, right up until 4:14, discussing the languages, maths, social sciences, and other relevant knowledge that would need to be fed into the robot’s memory banks as a basis for it to start from. After that, a whole series of algorithms and selective filters would be set up to guide the inquiries that it would pursue independently. Vishnu pointed out that it was much more economical for programming to allow Frank to acquire knowledge on his own initiative from the Internet. He also warned Harry that it would be essential to build extremely advanced anti-hacking countermeasures into the robot to avoid the slightest chance of its being taken over by any outside agencies.
“You must remember, Harry, that despite his advanced capabilities, Frank will not be legally considered a responsible person, so it is the owner who will be held accountable if Frank causes any damage to people or property, just as if he were a dangerous dog. So if some malicious individual were to gain control of Frank by hacking into him and sending him off on some sort of appalling rampage, the owner would have to answer for his actions. Now, if we could persuade the courts to regard robots as analogous to cats, things would be different because no one can control a cat, but somehow, I don’t think the lawyers would go for that. No money in it for them that way. So anti-hacking measures will be a top priority.”
“Speaking of rampages, here’s another thing that worries me. With all this high-powered thinking going on, is there any danger the robot can go psycho?”
“Well, it certainly can’t develop any of the usual human syndromes of mental illness, like paranoia, or schizophrenia, or other psychoses. And since it has no feelings, it can’t suffer from depression or mania. You needn’t worry about your android being paranoid! The only way in which Frank might cause trouble in that regard would be if its cognitive view of the world in some way came to systematically diverge from reality. But since it will be given a thorough grounding in fact-based, rational training, I really don’t see any chance of that happening.”
“And would it be possible for Frank to just lose his marbles and go senile or something?”
“Only in the sense that his software will need constant upgrades, like any other computer. And in time Frank will simply be overtaken by superior models, like all machines, but I think the mechanical side will become obsolete much quicker than the computer side. So it is probably safe to say that you are a good deal more likely to go senile than your robot, if that’s any comfort!”
Harry was more than satisfied with Vishnu’s obvious grasp of the Frank Project’s requirements, and delighted by his assurance that it was entirely feasible. He left him to draw up the detailed specifications for Frank’s mind and its capabilities, and prepare an estimate of the costs involved.
Chapter V
Harry had been away for several days in London and was looking forward to getting back to his apartment at Tussock’s Bottom. His computer-controlled gadget system, Home Sweet Home, had been working brilliantly, and his voice commands and his smartphone allowed him to control his domestic environment in fanatical detail from every aspect of his personal comfort to the functioning of the apartment. He looked forward to eventually having a cranial implant through which his whims could be instantly gratified by thought control.
His automatic servants woke him gently with soft light and crooning music, boiled him a preliminary cup of coffee correctly ground, filtered, and brewed, with just the right amount of soya milk, ran his bath with the water at 102°F, cooked his breakfast to a planned menu that selected from 53 different items, prepared his other meals as he needed them, turned down his bed in the evening, drew the blinds, automatically hoovered his carpets with the robot vacuum cleaner, selected his drinks from a vast liquor cabinet and poured whatever mixture he required as he lay back in his high-tech ergonomic executive chair, selected his programmes on TV or a book from the bookcase, ordered his groceries from the fridge, collected and compacted the garbage, washed the windows, monitored the central heating, air conditioning, humidity, and airborne particulates, and maintained the formidable security system.
It was techno-paradise.
As he flew back to Tussock’s Bottom in the helicopter with Jerry, Harry used his smartphone to instruct the Internet of Things in his apartment to receive him in especially lavish style that evening to celebrate his highly successful meeting with Dr. Sharma. He spent some time on the details of the lighting effects, the exact temperature and humidity, the vintage of the champagne, the provenance of the caviare, and, of course, the various courses of the dinner itself. They landed on the roof of the apartment and went down the steps from the helipad to the front door. This normally opened as soon as the camera above it had computed Harry’s biometrics when he was a few feet away, but on this occasion it remained obstinately shut. His radio fob was equally useless, and it was only when Jerry had spent several minutes fumbling in his briefcase for the key that they were finally able to enter the apartment.
Inside it was pitch dark, and they were met by a blast of superheated stinking air and ominous sounds of crunching. As they squelched their way slowly across the sodden carpet, they were jolted by a piercing shriek from the burglar alarm and a second later were knocked off their feet by Autovac, the robot vacuum cleaner which shot out of the darkness like a vast hockey puck. Picking themselves up, dripping and cursing, they tried to find a light switch, but Harry had forgotten where these primitive contrivances might be found since the lights were normally controlled by his voice commands, or by the computer. After a few minutes, he and Jerry gave up in helpless disgust and retreated outside again, where from the balcony, after a few minutes, they saw the approach of flashing blue lights.
These turned out to belong to the local fire brigade, alerted by the alarm, which for some reason had neglected to tell the police or the ambulance service. Two firemen were first up the steps, and the larger of the two was a huge man with an axe, inevitably known as Tiny by his mates, who had a rather simple sense of humour. He looked most disappointed to find that the front door was already open. It was made of solid oak, unlike most of the rubbish doors that he usually had to smash down, and he really would have enjoyed the challenge of reducing this one to matchwood. Trying not to let his disappointment show, Tiny began asking Harry and Jerry what the problem was. But before the firemen could go in and start sorting it out, their boss, the Incident Commander, arrived to stop them.
He explained to Harry and Jerry that he had not received sufficient information from the initial alarm call to be able to plan his response properly, and since the place was in darkness, Health and Safety regulations required him to do a risk assessment with the remote-contro
lled robot before any entry could be made. He called up the Emergency Operations Centre on his radio to make a preliminary report and asked for permission to use the robot, which four more firemen then had to heave up the steps from the fire truck.
It was a multi-purpose robot mounted on tracks, designed to deal with terrorists and bombs as well as surveying dangerous environments with its various detectors and audio-visual equipment. After the Commander and his team spent several minutes checking the battery and setting the controls, it trundled off through the front entrance, when almost immediately there followed a thunderous bang as it was violently attacked by the vacuum cleaner, which it promptly destroyed with blasts from both barrels of its on-board shotgun. The video camera displayed the mangled remains of the vacuum cleaner splattered over the walls and then beamed back dimly lit pictures showing the kitchen area in complete disarray, with food all over the floor, followed by a view of the lavatory overflowing, but no one in the apartment.
“Okay, so now can we get inside?” said Harry, about to burst a blood vessel from frustration and rage. “There’s clearly no one in there, except for your homicidal robot.”
“Not yet, I’m afraid,” said the Incident Commander. “We can’t rush these things. There may be other hazards besides intruders. First, I have to access the Mobile Data Terminal, which is on the truck, to identify the risks on our Fire Brigade database that may be associated with this location, and only then can I develop my action plan to address the situation. I’ll be needing your cooperation to answer a number of questions.”
What the Incident Commander was really looking forward to was sending the message “INITIATE MAJOR INCIDENT PROCEDURE,” which would allow him to do all sorts of exciting things like evacuating the neighbourhood, putting up barricades and cordons, and setting up a command post to coordinate the other emergency services, but after being assured by Jerry that there was no danger from natural gas, methane, high-voltage power lines, microwave transmissions, explosives, radioactive substances, or industrial quantities of concentrated acids, he reluctantly concluded that initiating a major incident procedure would not be a career-enhancing move, and therefore the apartment could be entered safely by his men, though not yet by civilians.
Tiny and his mate Ginger walked into the apartment and turned on the lights at the switch by the front door. “It don’t half pong in ’ere,” said Ginger, “like a million elephants farted. And what’s that weird noise?”
They squelched their way to the kitchen, where they found both sinks filled with bottles and jars of every conceivable variety of sauces and spices that had been forced out of the automated storage racks above. Two customised waste disposal units of extraordinary power specially supplied to Harry were busily engaged in grinding up this enormous heap of glassware, sometimes going into the particularly noisy auto-reverse mode when they encountered an unusually tough lid or jar.
Ginger opened the circuit box by the kitchen door and flicked off the circuit breaker marked “waste-disposers,” and peace abruptly descended. The two firemen were joined by the Incident Commander, and led by their noses, they all now investigated the bathroom, from which the most appalling smell was coming, and found that the Superflo sewage pump, installed in the basement to give perfect drainage to effluent, had for some reason reversed its action and pumped a considerable quantity of sewage back up into Harry’s marble-tiled bathroom, from where some of it had run out onto the carpet in the living room. The effects of the sewage were intensified by the 120°F heat since the thermostat, obviously infected by the same insanity as the rest of the apartment’s systems, was trying to create a replica of Death Valley.
The firemen made sure everything was turned off and then, overcome by the heat and the smell, retreated outside for some fresh air while the Incident Commander gave Harry a brief run-down of the various problems, which almost reduced him to tears of rage and impotence. “But what’s caused it all?” he raged.
“With comprehensive failure of this sort, it seems almost certain to have been some fault in your central computer system that set it all off. Your IT installer will confirm that for you. And Ransomes of Ditchley are supposed to be a very good firm for clearing up messes like this. Well, we’ll be off then, sir,” said the Incident Commander. “No more we can do here,” and he went off down the steps with Tiny and Ginger, who had already set the rest of the team to pack up the robot and the rest of the gear.
Harry looked at Jerry. He did not say anything. He did not need to.
“Ransomes of Ditchley,” Jerry said. “I’m on it, Harry. And Harry–”
“Don’t,” said Harry, in a voice only marginally less lethal than the fire brigade’s robot. “Just don’t.”
Harry went straight back to London in the helicopter to stay at the Ritz while Jerry returned to his humbler, but still-inhabitable apartment, called the emergency cleanup crew, then contacted their computer experts back in California and ordered them to access the Home Sweet Home computer system to discover who the malicious hackers were. Could they be North Koreans? Several days passed while the brilliant team of IT specialists wrestled impotently with what became an increasingly baffling problem, and they finally had to report that it was unlike any other hacking episode they had ever encountered.
The mystery was only solved a couple of weeks later, after the apartment had been sufficiently wet-vacced, scrubbed, fumigated, and aired-out to receive its distinguished owner again, and the rather rough-and-ready man in a raincoat from Ransomes was waiting by the helipad to give Jerry the keys. They had been ripping out the gadgets of the Home Sweet Home control system and replacing them with more conventional utilities, and the rough-and-ready man, who went by the name of Chalky and was also heavily asthmatic, thought Mr. Tinkleman would like to know what had gone wrong with that computer what caused all the trouble. It was not, after all, the North Koreans.
“It was them dratted mice,” he wheezed. “Cornshire mice is very vicious, sir, very vicious indeed, and very hobstinate. No stopping ’em once they get their nasty little yellow fangs into something. Dozens of the little buggers. Must’ve been something in your fancy American computer casing they liked the taste of, but they went crazy in there, doing their business over all the circuit boards. Even made a meal out of some of the components. But we’ve cleaned the place up and made it decent again. The only thing is that you’ll have to get a new computer system if you want it to run automatic-like.”
“Mice?” shouted Harry when Jerry phoned him at the Ritz with the news at lunch-time. “Goddamn mice? Are you kidding me? That’s just unreal.”
Harry reflected that his notion to install a cranial implant to control the Home Sweet Home computer might not have been such a good idea after all. What if the mice had taken him over and turned him into some kind of mouse-zombie? He shuddered at the thought, and decided that the strong cheddar cheese with his crackers did not look as appetising as usual.
But while Jerry hunted around for a more mouse-resistant system to run Harry’s apartment, he would need someone to look after him, and it was while he was pondering what to do about this on the morning after his return that the phone rang. It was Adge Gumble, who had heard of his problem and suggested that his wife’s sister, Doris, and her daughter would be willing to help out. Doris was a widow lady, and Tracey her daughter wanted to be a chef, so Harry suggested they come round right away.
An hour later, they arrived in their little car and Jerry brought them in to see Harry. Doris was almost spherical, addicted to doughnuts, and had a passion for cleaning that verged on mania. It was fortunate for Harry that no one had ever told her about jobs cleaning up after crime scenes because if they had, she would have been occupied doing that instead. As it was, her own spotless little home was a cruel frustration for a woman with her ambitions, and she couldn’t wait to get started on Harry’s three-bedroom apartment.
“I heard about your troubles, Mr. Hockenheimer,” she said. “You should’ve had me to do the c
leaning-up. They Ransomes fellahs don’t really know what clean is. All men, o’ course, so what can you expect? Can I see what’s in your broom cupboard?” She inspected Harry’s cleaning equipment, with much tutting and head shaking, and asked if she could go out and buy what she needed to do a proper job.
“See here, Mrs. Dunstable, you go right ahead and buy whatever you want. I’m a very busy man and I don’t want to be bothered. I’m happy to leave it all to you.”
Tracey, on the other hand, was the polar opposite of her mother, chic and slim, and determined to get out of Tussock’s Bottom and make something of herself in the wider world. She was actually an excellent cook already and was determined to show the American gentleman what she could do, beginning by making him a delectable club sandwich for his lunch.
Doris set to work giving the apartment what she called “a proper clean,” while Tracey cooked Harry a simple, but delicious evening meal, featuring a smoked salmon appetizer followed by a proper steak that was accompanied by a very good Spanish red with which he was previously unfamiliar. So it was decided that both Gumble women would come at 8 every morning and provide Harry with his breakfast, along with some sandwiches he could take to his office for lunch. Doris would make the bed and clean the apartment, and Tracey would leave a hot meal ready for him in the evening.
Over the next couple of weeks Harry found that it was actually rather soothing to let these two extremely capable women look after him, especially as clever Tracey had found him a supply of mangosteen juice for his breakfast. Thus it was that when Jerry finally brought him the details of some new rodent-proof computerised gadgetry to replace the old Home Sweet Home system, he told Jerry to simply leave them on his desk where he would look at them later. This turned out to be a good deal later, than he had expected, more than three months later, as it happened because he was very happy to drift on with Doris and Tracey looking after him, and it was only the imminent arrival of Frank that eventually forced his hand.