Designs of our Slave Race chapter 5

Chapter 5

Upon further thought on the topic I now realize that maybe we underestimated the potential of our little droid. It was so dumb during alpha testing because every time there was a glitch, and there were plenty of those, we had to shut it down to do repair or to fix up its programming, to fix the bugs if you will. We had to wipe its flash memory whenever we reinstalled its software and rebooted it: in layman's terms we would reprogram it and turn it on. Whenever we did that it would also remove data stored from the sophisticated learning matrix that I gave it.

It was six months of development later when the beta test phase came along. In beta testing we, and uneducated geeks that we would like to call “Professional Beta Testers” would be given a droid of there own to study and test, while still locating bugs and glitches. By this time though, the public would be very aware of these things, for Fran and her team would have banners, billboards, Internet ads and recorded press-release videos on Youtube (because Google rules that way) explaining to the public why these things would be good for us, and that one would need one in their own home. Naturally the dam religious right would be complaining about how these things would degrade the home, family, and society, but lets face it: no one in the modern era listened to them, for they say that about pretty well everything and their rantings are nothing more than background noise.

Designs of our Slave Race chapter 4

Chapter 4

About a year later, as the disturbing elements of the puzzle were fitting together we would start alpha testing. In alpha testing the development team would get a prototype droid to use in the office to test for glitches and bugs that were left uncaught earlier in development. The thing seemed “happy” to do some of the cleaning work around the office, getting us coffee and me sodas (for I never got the stereotypical taste for coffee) and would sometimes talk to us in the staff room and would make appearances at the meetings to see how its progressing. As it was an alpha test there were bugs and glitches and the dam thing would have to had been restarted and dismantled multiple times in finding the bug.

Designs of our Slave Race chapter 3

Chapter 3

Yeah, I know, I’m getting side-tracked here, just bare with me, for something by a friend of mine blew my mind one day, it was a week after that meeting with the Star Trek garbage.

I would be at home in my apartment in a Toronto skyrise. I would be on my personal computer typing out a reply to a roleplaying thread that I had started up on a forum site when I had a friend of mine that I met on that site IM me through MSN. After the normal “HI!!! How r u” stuff, the conversation went something like this (I’m Miko by the way).

Designs of our Slave Race chapter 2

Chapter 2

It was down to the coding, typing out the algorithms that the new robots, called the HX01, in doing the various tasks that the dam thing would need. I merely added in the more concrete sections: receiving visual, verbal, and textile input, than having the thing figure out what to do with those sensations. That was a start. It would recognize key words and phrases, than complicated sentences that might not have a signal keyword, and trying to figure out what the speaker might have actually wanted, and store that knowledge for later reference. In an essence a learning matrix, so it would know what “Get me a beer” and “Go into the kitchen and make me a sandwich” would mean and do it like the obedient hunk of steel that it was. Now, this wouldn’t normally bother me, for I had done similar programming logic for those chat bots and that, the only new thing being the learning matrix, no problems so far.

The problem would lie in the next phase: emotion recognition and synthesis. Clearly more than simply “if” and “else” statements: the intelligence would stem from all that input, and not just the words needed to be decoded but the voice pitch and tone, and not just voice but body language, the way someone is slouched, tensed up or shaky. I’m no psychologist, that’s another department that tells us the tall-tale signs of various emotions, and we figure out what the droids should do when these scenarios come about.