Robots vs. Fairies

by Dominik Parisien

  It was the ultimate opportunity for a labor-saving device. What if the drudgery of parenting—the midnight feedings, the diaper changes, the perpetual and endless cleaning and picking up and laundry runs, the tantrums, the sicknesses, the monitoring and measuring mandated by pediatricians, the meting out of discipline and punishment—all could be taken care of by a perfect nanny, leaving parents only the joy of true quality time with their offspring?

  * * *

  “You’ve been reading that e-mail for ten minutes,” Amy said. “That’s never a good sign.”

  I had read the e-mail so many times that the words no longer made sense. But really, all the verbiage on the screen could be reduced to a single word.

  “They said no.”

  To her credit, Amy said nothing. She went away and came back a few minutes later with a mug of tea and set it down on my desk. I picked it up, comforted by the warmth.

  “I brought you a gift, too,” she said. “I was going to give it to you when Vegnor launched, but it took longer to get ready than I anticipated—typical engineering scheduling, you know. Figure you could use a bit of cheering up.”

  She whistled, and a sleek Vegnor, painted black, slinked into view from beyond the cubicle wall.

  “This is no ordinary Vegnie,” she said. “I’ve reprogrammed it to be the ultimate office prankster. You can tell it to squirt hot sauce in the coffee of the marketing department or tell lawyer jokes from behind the HVAC grille in the legal group. Heck, you can even get it to steal the lunch of whichever VP just told you no. But you have to learn to speak its language.”

  She bent down to the little mechanical rat. “Bigwig, standing on Watership Down with ears plugged.” She frowned in a pretty good impression of the VP of Product Marketing. Then she turned to me. “Want to try?”

  I looked at the rat, pointed at Amy and then myself. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”—Amy smiled—“Vegnie, the cheese of the Bigwig in the Labyrinth of Knossos.”

  The little rat chirped and scuttled away.

  I clapped my hands. “That is inspired.”

  “I should know learning to speak Tamarian is easy for a folk and myth major.”

  When we finally finished giggling, I said, “I don’t understand why they didn’t approve my project. Given my track record on Vegnor, they should have more trust in me.”

  “It’s not a matter of trust. The problem you’re proposing to solve is too hard. People can’t even agree on the best way to sleep-train a baby. How do you propose to make the perfect substitute parent?”

  “That’s just the result of overthinking. People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

  “You’re too young to understand that you should never give parenting advice.”

  “You’re too cynical. Even if there isn’t a single right answer for something, we can always make it into a user-accessible setting.”

  Amy shook her head. “This isn’t like designing a robot to clean the gutters. You’re talking about raising other people’s children. The liability issues alone will make everyone in legal faint.”

  “You can’t let lawyers run a company,” I said. “Isn’t weRobot about thinking impossible? There’s always a solution.”

  “Maybe you should create an island where there are no rules so you can experiment with technical solutions to all life’s problems to your heart’s content.”

  “That would be nice,” I muttered.

  “You’re scaring me, kid.”

  I didn’t answer.

  * * *

  Jake and Ron had always prided themselves on maintaining an entrepreneurial spirit in weRobot, even as it grew to thousands of employees. Those who got invited to the Fall Picnic were expected to get things done, not wait for orders.

  So I did the natural thing: telling my team that my proposal had been approved.

  The next step was to recruit Dr. Vignor to the effort.

  “That’s a very difficult challenge,” he said.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Probably much too hard. I’ll file it away until we have the brainpower.”

  He came to find me that afternoon, begging to be allowed to be on the team. See, the right story is everything.

  We started by gathering manuals on child care and running them through the semantic abstracter for fundamental rules of good parenting.

  That . . . turned out to be a hopeless task. The manuals were about as consistent as fashion advice: for every book that advocated one approach, there were two books that argued that particular approach was literally the worst thing that one could do. Should babies be swaddled? How often should they be held? Should you let them cry for a few minutes and learn to self-soothe or comfort them as soon as they started to fuss? There was no consensus on anything.

  The academic literature was no more illuminating. Child psychology experts conducted studies that proved everything and nothing, and meta-studies showed that most of them could not even be replicated.

  The science of child rearing was literally in the dark ages.

  But then, while flipping through the TV channels late at night, I stopped at a nature program: The World’s Best Mothers.

  Of course, I cursed myself for my stupidity. Parenting was a solved problem in nature. Once again, the modern neurosis of overthinking had created the illusion of impossibility. Billions of years of evolution had given us the rules that we should be following. We just had to imitate nature.

  * * *

  Since academics had proven basically useless on this subject, in order to find my model, I turned to that ultimate fount of wisdom: the web. Every Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, every eyeballs-hungry site seemed to publish listicles that purported to describe the animals that qualified as the world’s best mothers and fathers.

  There was the orangutan, whose baby clings to the mother continuously for the first few years of its life.

  There was the deep-sea octopus, Graneledone boreopacifica, who did nothing but guard her eggs for four and a half years—not even eating—until they hatched.

  There was the elephant, who, besides a long gestational period, engaged in extensive alloparenting as members of the herd all participated to raise the babies.

  And so on and so forth . . .

  . . . and putting them together, I had my story: the paragon of parenting, the essence of bottled love.

  I would replicate the self-sacrificing, participatory alloparenting groups of nature with robots. Busy modern urban parents didn’t know their neighbors and lived away from extended family, but a network of weRobot devices would be almost as good. Our robotic vacuums, laundry folders, and Vegnors could all pitch in to keep the customers’ children safe and act as playmates—incidentally, this also encouraged customers to purchase more weRobot devices, which was always a good thing. Devices from neighboring residences could also collaborate to watch over both households’ children even without the parents being best friends—trust was ensured by the standardization of weRobot algorithms. The proprietary local area wireless network substituted for nonexistent or fraying social bonds.

  “Mary Poppins,” I vowed, “with her umbrella open!”

  Dr. Vignor modeled the neural patterns driving the behaviors of dozens of animals judged to be good parents by the wisdom of the web, and after extensive software emulation, it was time to test the first prototypes.

  I posted the call for volunteers on weRobot’s internal network, and to my surprise and puzzlement, there weren’t nearly as many takers as I had hoped.

  “There aren’t that many parents working here,” Amy said when I complained to her. “That’s not exactly a secret about this place. Look at the schedule you’re keeping. It’s not very compatible with starting a family, is it?”

  “Even more evidence that there’s a market for this product!” I said. The key to dreaming the impossible was to see opportunities where others saw only problems. “Just think of all the lost productivity due to parents not being able to devote as
much time and energy to their careers because they have to run home to deal with their offspring.” I was practically rubbing my hands in glee. “Marketing should be able to hint at this subtly in the TV ads. Power couples who spend less time parenting than they do at the gym ought to make a striking addition to the value proposition.”

  “Did you just use the phrase ‘lost productivity’ non-ironically?” Amy asked, shaking her head. “And ‘value proposition’?”

  Since there weren’t enough internal volunteers, I had to expand the beta testing program by asking my team to recruit friends and family.

  I found a super-scary NDA for some other weRobot project on the corporate intranet—the lawyers were good for something after all—and a few search-and-replace macros later, I had a way to ensure that no one would leak any information to competitors or the Luddite press, which was always sniffing for news about upcoming tech products that they could exaggerate into dystopian visions to sell the papers.

  * * *

  Emily enthused to me about the new addition to her family.

  “It’s incredible!” she gushed on the phone. “I’ve never seen Danny so well-behaved. Para changes him and feeds him and rocks him to sleep, and he loves it! Eric and I are finally able to get a good night’s sleep. Everyone at work has been begging me for the number of the au pair agency I’m using.”

  I beamed with pride. Para was a marvel of engineering. The body-temperature, medical-grade synthskin, and the oscillator thumping at the rhythm of heartbeat were designed to calm newborns. The robot’s eight arms, made of series elastic actuators for safety, and precision manipulators allowed the machine to handle delicate child-care tasks with aplomb: it could change a diaper, feed, powder, massage, tickle, and give a bath using power-delivery curves that provided maximum physical comfort to the baby, all while humming a pleasant, soft song, folding laundry, and picking up dropped toys with its extra arms.

  But the crowning achievement of Para, of course, was its neural programming. Para was the perfect parent-surrogate. It never got tired or bored; it never stopped giving the baby 100 percent of its attention; it was equipped with eons of evolutionary instinct drawn from the animal kingdom judged to suit human needs: it would protect the baby at all costs and was capable of reacting to save the child from any and all emergencies.

  “I’m enjoying my time with Danny so much more now. I feel calmer, more patient, and I get to give my attention to all the fun parts of being a parent. It’s incredible.”

  “I’m really glad,” I said to my sister. I felt like a wreck. I had pushed my team to the limit, and hearing my sister being so pleased made all the hard work worth it.

  * * *

  Monday morning, my phone buzzed as I rode on the work shuttle. My heart clenched and then beat wildly as I read the text.

  Why are Jake and Ron summoning me? There was only one answer: my skunkworks project had been discovered.

  The tests with Para weren’t anywhere near done. I still needed more time to produce convincing data to guarantee forgiveness.

  With great trepidation, I showed up at the presidents’ office on the second floor of the central building. The executive assistants quickly ushered me into a small conference room, where Ron and Jake sat at the table, stone-faced.

  “I can explain,” I began. “The preliminary results are very encouraging—”

  “I hardly think we’re in the preliminary phase anymore,” Jake interrupted. He slid a tablet across the table. “Have you read this?”

  It was the New York Times. “Home Robots Found to Be Source of Infestations,” said the headline.

  I quickly scanned through the article, and my heart sank. I should have paid more attention to those reports Amy had been sending me.

  It turned out that the Vegnors were so good at their jobs that they were displacing real rats. The robots were, of course, programmed to fight the rats and chase them out of homes—this was touted as one of the key advantages of the machines.

  Then the Vegnors replicated some of the beneficial behaviors of the rats by sweeping and collecting food and garbage from the plumbing and pipes. I had been particularly proud of this clever bit of biomimicry. I thought I was being comprehensive.

  But the Vegnors only pushed the garbage away from the houses instead of eating it, which led to middens on the edges of properties that became breeding grounds for other vermin—cockroaches, maggots, fruit flies—and the cockroaches infested the houses because they were now free of rats, which had once preyed on them. Even worse, the bodies of the rats the Vegnors killed attracted coyotes, the top urban predator in many American cities.

  Everyone had always thought that if all the rats in the world died tomorrow, no one would miss them. Apparently they had a role to play in the urban ecology that the Vegnors could not fully replicate.

  “Our neighbors came to complain this morning,” said Jake. “They have outdoor cats.”

  I imagined the bloody, lifeless body of Tabby, the victim of a coyote. I winced.

  “And they dragged us out to the wall between our properties so they could show us the dumping ground of our Vegnor,” said Ron. “The smell made me lose my breakfast.”

  “There’s going to be a class action lawsuit,” said Jake, rubbing his temples.

  “You see how gleeful the plumbers and exterminators quoted in that article are?” said Ron, drumming his fingers on the table. “The Vegnors were supposed to make them no longer necessary, but our robo-rats have been creating infestations wherever they go.”

  I struggled to not hyperventilate. They don’t know about the skunkworks project. My eyes looked from Ron to Jake and then back to Ron again.

  “We could make a patch,” I blurted out, “and get the Vegnors to collect the garbage and dispose of it safely. . . . Or we could make another robot to clean up the mess and sell them to municipal governments. . . . Or how about we patch the Vegnors to seek out cockroaches, and their eggs too? . . .”

  If technology created a problem, surely the best solution was more technology.

  Ron and Jake just glared at me.

  The Vegnor setback meant that I had to hit Para out of the park. It was the only way to redeem my name.

  While doing my best to manage the robo-rat fallout, I pushed my team and myself even harder in an effort to make the Para prototypes do more for the parents. We wanted to anticipate needs and take care of them all: the Paras could be set to implement a clock-based feeding regimen, or, in the alternate, an infant-driven feeding schedule that replicated breastfeeding; they could be configured to start sleep training at an age designated by the parents, or encourage babies to engage in the “paleo” practice of polyphasic sleep; they could be designated to play and comfort children in a variety of styles to stimulate optimal brain development; and they could even cook meals and do simple housekeeping to give exhausted parents more time to sleep and finish their work until they were ready for their offspring.

  The preliminary results were promising. The feedback from the new parents was almost uniformly positive.

  These robots were as devoted as the octopus, as cooperative as the elephant, as responsible as the orangutan—they really were the best nannies the parents could ever hope for. They freed moms and dads from everything unpleasant about parenting and left them only the fun parts.

  * * *

  “Why don’t you want it?” I asked. “What did it do wrong?”

  “Nothing!” said Emily. “But it doesn’t feel right.”

  “I can fly down tonight to see—”

  “I see. You can’t fly down here for my birthday, but you can come on a night’s notice when you think something’s wrong with your robot.”

  I took a deep breath. “That’s not fair, Emily.”

  “Isn’t it? Since when did you become such a workaholic?”

  “Don’t do this to me, Em. It’s my career we’re talking about here! If I can’t trust you to give me honest feedback, who can I trust?”

 
; Emily sighed on the other end of the line. “I’m telling you the truth. There’s nothing wrong with what Para is doing. But Eric and I don’t like what it’s doing to us.”

  “How do you mean?”

  This shouldn’t have happened. I had been careful from the very beginning of the Para project to avoid one of the big pitfalls with human nannies, who often elicited jealousy from parents seized by the fear that their children were building a stronger bond with the nanny than with them. This was one of the reasons that Para was not designed to be humanoid. Just as we didn’t feel threatened by the housekeeping skills of automated labor-saving devices, no parent needed to worry that their child would become attached to a synthetic appliance, not fundamentally different from a self-rocking cradle.

  “I don’t know how to explain it.” Emily sounded like she was grasping for words. “But Eric was telling me that he missed how much time he used to spend with Danny, and I feel the same way.”

  “But so much of that was wasted time. Para allows you to spend quality time, to be efficient.” The frustrated e-mails that Emily used to send me went through my mind, as did the words of so many other surveyed mothers and fathers who complained about lack of sleep, about how their babies turned their thoughts to mush. Children took up too much time—that was the problem to be solved.

  “That’s just it. I’m not sure there is such a thing as ‘quality’ time. Eric and I used to spend hours feeding Danny and worrying about his poop and trying to get him to sleep, and we felt tired and unprepared and stupid, but every time we looked into Danny’s eyes, we felt happy. Now we pretty much just spend half an hour a day reading to him and playing with him, but even that seems too much. We get impatient. Somehow, the less time we spend with Danny, the less time we want to spend with him. This doesn’t feel right.”