Bad Sign Number Six Million And Six

[bloodyrosemccoy]

"The Duchess" Who Wasn't Day
Birthday - President Lyndon Baines Johnson (36th President)
Birthday - Mother Teresa
Family Day (Tennessee)
Independence Day (Moldova)
National Heroes' Day (Philippines)
Wedding of the Giants (Belgium)

 

I think that one of my coworkers is a covert experiment in state-of-the-art robotics and AI.

You wouldn’t realize it when you first looked at her.  At first glance she is simply a middle-aged platinum blonde woman in bright pink clothes, although she might strike you as a bit odd. You may notice that she seems a little bit strange—that she holds herself funny, or that her face is slightly slack, or that she tends to hover blankly behind you while you are browsing, or that her skin is a rather artificial-looking traffic-sign yellow.  But it may take you a little longer to put the clues together.

 

Once you do, however, it all falls into place.

 

I think she is a secretly developed prototype gynoid, with biosynthetic skin and a realistic body-language program that took scientists at the Pentagon decades to develop. They worked their damndest to give her the finest positronic brain, capable of learning and integrating the information it gathers into its running programs and of modifying its own processes.  Then they stuck her in a retail job so that she would be forced to interact with people, synthesizing social cues and reactions so that she could learn from them and ultimately be able to interface with humans in such a seamless fashion that she would be indistinguishable from an organic, biological human.

 

Only I walked into the middle of the project, and she’s still got some bugs in her processors.  She doesn’t remember you from one day to the next, and she handles each task with a single-minded resolve that leaves no room for anything else—her parallel processing needs work. New situations elicit, literally, no response from her; she has no programs to respond with.  The AI experts are going to have to work on that, too.

 

So far, the experiment seems to have stalled.  But then, I haven’t been here very long.  It’s possible that, by this time next year, the gynoid will be so well programmed that it will be impossible to tell that it’s not human, except for the faint tinges of yellowness that the experts have passed off as a bad artificial tan.  And you will be able to walk into our store and be greeted by the greatest technological feat to date, and not even know it.

 

Once we get the bugs worked out.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.