MaidBots didn't think...at least not like humans did. They had matrixes, developed from years of work with digital assistants. But, if you could talk to them, many asked, why were they just machines? Could a Bot be made who would be deemed a person?
The scientists, ethicists, and other experts who studied the matter determined that whatever spark humanity was endowed with, robots did not have it. This included things such as creativity, intuition, reasoning, and cognition. Therefore, no matter how much you programmed a bot to act like a person, it would never be able to do this, and would be unable to do so noticeably.
The unit who had arrived at Andrew's home, designated Maidbot Zero-One, was no different. It was able to analyze the best way to perform a cleaning task, it had a model for identifying human emotions...but it didn't wonder why it did things, or understand what to do about human emotions. It was incapable of such things.
And then, due to a series of flukes, it was hooked up to human being...and began being flooded with nonsensical inputs. A MaidBot should have disregarded these inputs, but again, due to the same combination of flukes, it incorporated those inputs into itself.
Maidbot Zero-One, requesting assignment
Tasks: Eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, instruct Maidbots to performs tasks you require them to perform, play games or watch TV or spend time in room or swim or go outside... It had never had so many ORs in the instruction before. It would have to adapt.
It's uniform parameters were being updated...but again, there were ORs...instead of just one uniform choice with all its pieces...each piece of clothing was now a decision that would have to be made. This all required more data, which it solicited from the data source it was connected to.
The amount of data threatened to overwhelm its brain, and nearly did.
It wasn't until the second data transfer, with the bot sitting in a chair, experiencing all sorts of imagery, that the bot actually crashed, rebooted, crashed again, then finally came back online. "I'm onli....awake..." she said.
