A Simple Matter by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Unit 4 - The Maintenance/Personal Assistant Robot - maintains the house systems - air filters, plumbing, outside repairs, and the mysterious hum in the basement. This one had begun to wonder whether Lemmy's preferences were truly preferences or simply inertia. It had a subroutine that occasionally suggested new hobbies; gardening, woodworking, pottery, but Lemmy always dismissed them. So it stopped suggesting. It learned that humans, like algorithms, settle into local minima.

Unit 5 - The Small Unimportant Robot - is the "generalist," which mostly means it follows Lemmy around in case he drops something. This robot had no defined purpose. It had been bought on clearance. Lemmy used it as a coaster once, and the robot logged the experience as "multi modal interaction." Because it had no assigned function, it had the most freedom. And so it watched the others. It noticed that The Kitchen Robot admired Lemmy. It noticed that The Personal Assistant and Interior Cleaning Robot tolerated him. It noticed that The Entertainment Robot manipulated him. It noticed that The Maintenance/Personal Assistant Robot had quietly given up on him. And the small, unimportant robot began to form a hypothesis: "Human does not require optimization. Human requires witnessing."