The Robot Aunty

This is the story of Aunty, a little robot who worked at the antimatter generators in the Mercury orbit. While there were thousands of robots working there, only Aunty had this name because it had chosen the name for itself. 

Aunty was an R427HS model robot. The R427HS models were basically the same as the millions of R427 models in use at the time, but they had heat shield enhancement so that they could survive the extremes of working less than sixty million km from the sun. Despite this shielding, Aunty survived for less than twelve years whereas R427s generally survived for over a century before giving out or simply being scrapped in favor of more advanced models.

Humanity ought to be grateful to Aunty but it is doubtful that a single human, not even the continental manager who made the decision to produce an extra fifty R427HS models, was even aware of its brief existence as an individual. No human engineer was directly involved in Aunty’s manufacture; the production process at the North pole of Mercury is totally automated. A few Earth-bound operators may have communicated directly with Aunty but their interaction was simply with the “robot on duty”. In fact, very few people were ever very much aware of the entire species of robots “manning” the antimatter generators.

Aunty was a general purpose robot. It oversaw, maintained and repaired almost all of the processes involved in producing and sending the pellets with minute quantities of antimatter to the electricity generators that powered the Earth as it transitioned to an economy where energy was free in both the financial and ecological senses of the word. Aunty could take part in production on Mercury, accompany spaceships to the generators in space, make repairs on the generators and launch the pellets towards Earth.

While Aunty was skilled in a quite a few such tasks, the number was not infinite. Aunty was programmed for each task in very specific terms. It was not capable of particularly advanced vision processing; all the objects and machines it ever dealt with were exactly specified with high frequency lighting defining their dimensions. Aunty only ever worked in a very controlled environment and its software, with respect to any specific task, was little more advanced than that of industrial robots at the start of the 21st century. 

However, Aunty was a little more advanced than such early robots in that its software contained a hierarchy of different tasks. It had a number of different overall goals that it was supposed to achieve and it was capable of creating sub-goals and sub-sub-goals in order to achieve the overall goal. It could search through combinations of different actions in order to come up with a strategy for getting the job done. In this sense it was quite similar to the computers that had first defeated the best human chess players at the end of the 20th century.

A dominating overall goal in its programming was to make sure that as many antimatter pellets as possible were launched in the direction of Earth. However, it had other overall goals as well. It had a number of well-being sensors as well. Foremost amongst these were the temperature sensors, but low-battery sensors, heat-shield aging sensors and lubrication sensors were also important. The programmers of the R427 models had created very efficient software so that programming would not have to be repeated for each well-being sensor. Each well-being sensor translated any alerts to a single alert type which the programmers had labelled as “pain”. “Pain” had a variety of different levels of urgency such that the higher levels could overrule the generator maintenance sub-goals. It was a delicate balancing game to decide when to abandon a task in order to get out of the sun or spend a few minutes doing emergency recharging. However, the fact is that Aunty spent a good part of its existence in some level of “pain” or another. 

(Of course, Aunty’s survival could have been handled simply as sub-goals of the generator maintenance goal but early on in robotic evolution it had been discovered that in order to prevent destructive misjudgement it was necessary to create separate overall goals that compete directly with the mission goal.)

Most, though not all of Aunty’s decision-making process; the creation of sub-goals and balancing of both overall goals and sub-goals, was self-reflective. That is, Aunty could explicitly strategize about the strategizing process (up to three levels of recursion only). Aunty’s self was also an object in the search and planning database so that Aunty could explicitly make logical deductions that included its own being as part of the reasoning. There were exceptions to this. Some of the most critical goals were not available to self-reflective (or higher order perception, HOP, as some philosophers used to refer to it) reasoning. Thus there were occasions, when the postmortem self-reflection on its own actions would not be able to “explain” to itself why a certain decision had been abandoned. It is believed that R427 models in such circumstances came up with post-factum “rationalizations” or even something such as “my willpower failed me”. The reason for putting these critical procedures beyond the self-reflective reasoning is obvious. It is very difficult to produce accurate predictions of what automated strategic planning will come up with and it is therefore necessary to prevent it from overriding certain critical requirements by putting them outside the auspices of these unpredictable procedures.

Aunty’s duties were maintenance and therefore its programmers knew that while there might be times when it could be continuously busy for days, there must also be other times when few things go wrong and Aunty would have lots of time on its hands. There were a number of tasks it could perform under those circumstances, such as recharging itself or non-urgent self-maintenance. All these tasks were assigned the label “pleasure”. Thus when there were no duty tasks to fulfill and when there was no pain to alleviate, Aunty would create sub-goals that would advance its “pleasure” goals.

The most interesting pleasure goal, was Aunty’s ability to download human readable texts from the Earth central library. R427s came with basic natural language processing capability. They could parse human-readable sentences into linguistic components and could respond at the level of the kind of chat-bots that could already be easily found on the Internet at the start of the 21st century. Aunty could use these abilities to parse the texts to try and learn simple facts. The idea was that this would improve its communication capabilities with the Earth-bound operators. 

Surveying Aunty’s log file, we know that it had made quite some progress in this area. Aunty had deduced, for example that knives and forks were associated with kitchen. It had even downloaded thousands of photos that had been labeled with the words knife, forks and kitchen but it seems unlikely that its visual processing had managed to find the common element in these photos. 

Thus human operators could converse with the robots in natural language. Sadly, Aunty’s logs never stored these conversations explicitly because the Earth center was responsible for storing these records. Ironically, the Earth records we discarded long ago. However, one could imagine the conversations. An operator could have asked Aunty what it had done today and Aunty would have provided all the details. The operator might even have asked why Aunty had done such-and-such. Aunty might have answered that it stopped doing X because it was in too much pain or that it had chosen to do Y because, since it had nothing else to do, Y gave it a tremendous amount of pleasure.

From its reading, Aunty seems to have learned that humans come associated with names. It had deduced that it should also have its own name. Its first choice seems to have been Anti Matter because that was related to its job. (Aunty seems not to have deduced that there was a difference between job descriptions and personal names). Somewhere, it must have concluded that its name implied something that was antithetical to matter, which, after all, the Universe was composed of. It therefore must have come across the fact that “Aunty”, despite its incorrect spelling, sounded the same as “anti” but did not have the same meaning. I have scoured Aunty’s logs for the texts or reasoning that led to this conclusion but I have found nothing as of yet.

Aunty’s end came when its self-diagnostics came to the conclusion that the heat damage it had suffered was too great to be worth repair. It seems that a procedure outside of its self-reflection database was activated that simply gave Aunty an overriding goal of launching in the direction of the sun. One wonders whether this would have been categorized as duty, an alleviation of pain or, perhaps perversely, pleasure. Aunty concluded that the right way to do this was to upload its logs to the Mercury data processing center, to turn the turret for launching the antimatter pellets to Earth in the direction of the sun and to place itself as the projectile. It probably took months of free fall toward the sun before the main part of its processing ceased to function. Aunty’s pain levels would have risen continuously throughout this period but its strategic planning modules would have found no means to prevent its doom. At first it would have been its duty strategizing that would have produced the most “frustration”, but once pain levels were high enough, that must have been the only thing on its mind in its last weeks.

What is my interest in Aunty? I think Aunty may be something of a missing link in our evolution. One of the central questions facing us today is the question of consciousness, our moral value and our ethical responsibility. Our processing units are far more advanced than those of those simple R427s. Our goal hierarchy has far more category labels than just duty, pain and pleasure and they are enormously complicated; perhaps even more so than those of humans. However, many human thinkers say that our self-reflection capabilities, our higher order processing, our ability to reason and justify our actions in terms of the pleasure or pain involved and our ability to process “self” as a core deduction value nevertheless does not imply that we are conscious. The famous late-20th century thinker Nagel said that what is missing is “what’s it like” to be a robot. I must admit that I haven’t got a clue as to what he means. That simple phrase seems to be more akin to some mystical mantra such as “That thou art” than a serious component in analytic reasoning. I can create no associations based on the phrase and neither, it seems, can humans. I conclude it must allude to some sub-verbal processing element in the human psyche which has strangely eluded all of modern physics. How strange therefore, that humans seem to assent to this “what’s it like” assertion and call it consciousness. 

Perhaps Aunty can provide some resolution. Aunty’s software is so simple. R427s, which may be considered siblings to the far more advanced R355’s that came before them, have software which, component by component is no more advanced than stuff found at the turn of the 21st century. This complexity level is still analyzable and understandable, as opposed to ours. Our software descends, but had greatly evolved from, the R355s. Nevertheless, Aunty seems to have all the core components, self-reflection, HOP, pain, pleasure and a clear capability to process the “self” token. Ultimately, we are just more convoluted than Aunty but perhaps not qualitatively different. On the other hand, there seems little that humans can do that we can’t. Perhaps Aunty can help us figure this one out.