Nannybot1000A Part 4...

[FembotsInCharge3]

"Mom," Stephanie pouted, "it's perfect! Why can't I get it?!"

I sighed. "Well, technically you can get it," I told my 12 year old daughter, "it's your decision."

Stephanie brightened. "Thanks, Mom!"

"But remember," I added, as she reached for the snug denim shorts (far too short for a girl her age in my opinion!), "you have to get INGA's approval to actually wear it."

My daughter paused, looking at the shorts she was holding in her hand, looked back at me with stricken eyes that made me at once wish to hug her and giggle, and then with an exaggerated sigh she put the snug shorts back on the shelf.

"She'd never let me wear 'em," Stephanie admitted. "She's worse than you were, sometimes I think it was easier when you were in charge!"

I felt a little funny hearing my daughter say that, it still felt strange to be reminded that I wasn't in charge anymore, even after two years!

"Hey., Mom," my 16 year old daughter called out to me from the head of the aisle, holding up her communicator, "you beeped me?"

"Yeah, Staci," I replied. I held up the blouse I had been looking at, and asked her, "What do you think?"

"Nice," she grinned. "That color would match your eyes, I'll bet Dad would love it!"

I blushed a little at her insinuation, was I imagining things or were teenagers getting awfully knowing these days?!

"Well, the thing is," I said to my daughter, as I held up a box I had been carrying "I already bought these shoes, and if I buy the blouse too I'll have used up my entire allowance for this trip. So I was kind of wondering...?"

My daughter grinned in 16 year old amusement and said cheerfully, "So you want me to loan you some money, Mom?"

I sighed and blushed a little more as I nodded and asked, "Could I?"

"How much do you want to borrow?"

"How about...$50.00 and I'll pay you back next month when we out regular monthly allowances?"

"Welll...." Staci said, looking thoughtful, "I suppose I could do that...but if I do that means I'll have to put off buying those new bracelets I wanted. So I'll tell you what I'll do, Mom. I'll loan you fifty today and you can pay me back sixty on Allowance Day."

"Sixty?! But that's-I mean-"

"Take it or leave it, Mom."

I sighed. I really wanted the blouse, and the occasion I had in mind wearing it was before our Allowance Day, so Staci had me, if I wanted it I had to borrow the money, I knew Stephanie was no use, she spent every penny IGNA allotted her.

Staci, on the other hand, had a more frugal nature, she'd always been turned that way, she was loaning her siblings money even back when our family was more or less normal, when INGA had put Ted and me on an allowance she'd merely seen another opportunity to extend her dealings.

"Oh all right," I replied. "It's a deal, you brat!"

Staci got out her purse and gave me $50.00, and I blushed at the humiliating feeling of borrowing money from my sixteen year old daughter because I'd overspent my allowance! At age 42, no less!

As she handed me the money, Stephanie looked at the green notes and said, "Sis, do you think you could loan me 20?"

"You already owe me over a hundred, Squirt," Staci smiled. "Sure you want to go in deeper?"

"Awww, it's not fair!" Stephanie pouted. "You always have money!"

"I get the same allowance you do, kiddo," Staci responded. "I'm just smarter than you!"

"Come on, girls," I told them as they continued to bicker, "let's go pick out our new TV unit."

TO BE CONTINUED...

[FembotsInCharge3]

"What do you think, Mom?" Stephanie asked me. "It's got a nice big projector, we could see the hologram from all over the rec room!"

"Yeah," I replied, "but the console is so ugly!"

That was true, while the TV did have a wonderfully clear, crisp holographic image, the projector itself was designed along the lines of some hideous black and grey 'modern art' style form. I was leaning more toward a more traditional cabinet, the image quality was nearly as good and the cabinet would not look so out of place in our rec room.

When I said as much, Stephie rolled her eyes and said, "Who cares how it looks?! The image is terrific!"

"So?" I asked sourly. "No matter how good the image is, the reruns of I Love Lucy and Andy Griffith won't be any newer. They were running those all over the place when I was your age, and they were already ancient!"

We ended up compromising, choosing a unit that I thought was kind of ugly, but better than that hideous black thing, and which had a decent image. I figured maybe Ted and I could tinker with the projector to get a better 3D image eventually, when we had a few spare minutes.

We stopped at a fast food place for lunch, and as the service bots took our orders, I saw a familiar trademark on them: Consolidated Service Robotics, 'CSR'. It was a familiar trademark because the company in question had been founded by my husband and myself, shortly before we got married.

Ted and I had met in my freshman year of college, when he was a junior mechanical engineering student with a straight A average and a flair for original design that had already been noticed, and I was a geeky, coke-bottle glasses wearing electronics and computer whiz. I met Ted and fell for him within a week, but it took a little longer for me to catch his eye away from an annoying redheaded cheerleader he was seeing. I was kind of new at the game back then...but I won.

We found we made a good team professionally as well as personally, something about our combined minds 'clicked' in ways that enabled us to produce new technical ideas the way a politician produces spin. We were only in my sophomore year when we took out our first combined patent, and less than a year later we were doing cutting-edge computer programming, creating new forms of software and 'soft hardware' that were simply unprecedented back in 2016.

In grad school, we were doing work so advanced compared to our age-mates that we caught the attention of both the government and several major companies, and our patents were already starting to bring in some serious cash. Our decision to specialize in robotics came at just the right time, the robotics industry and the 'robotics revolution' of the late teens were just starting to take off in earnest, and Ted and I were in at the ground floor of the revolution.

We got married when I was still in college at age 20, and I was pregnant with our first chiild before that year was out. I was waddling through the labs eight months pregnant when the inspiration came to me that offered Ted and me the tempting possibility of true artificial intelligence. Not just the simulated, half-assed pretend version that had been called 'AI' for decades, but potentially the real thing!

As Thomas Edison reportedly said, genius is '1% inspiration and 99% perspiration'. He was right, if anything he understated the matter. Ted and I took a big, big gamble when we realized the potential of my idea, we hocked what little property we had, borrowed money from our friends and from some 'angel investors' who had seen previous ideas of ours work out, and founded our own company, Consolidated Service Robotics.

I had heard that about the time I was born, venture capital for new startups was almost laughably easy to get, the so-called 'dot.com' revolution that eventually ended in a crash. I couldn't remember it, I was born in 1996 and the crash came at about the time I first realized I was good at math in first grade. By the time Ted and I were starting out, capital was a lot harder to get, and the demands on it were higher. It took Ted and me three years of hard work, 14 hour days, and endless beating of our heads against the wall to convert my first inspiration into a working, crude, but recognizable AI...one about as smart as a typical dog or cat.

All the while we were doing this, we were raising our oldest daughter Maria, and I was pregnant with Staci when we finally achieved that first, seminal working AI breakthrough. Ted often jokes that I do my best thinking when I'm pregnant, or at least I think he's joking.

That first AI was crude, unstable, but unmistakably the real deal. It was several orders of magnitude beyond any other computer system built at that time, and the spinoffs from it turned CSR from a struggling startup to a major success, our company was worth billions and Ted and I were now millionaires several times over.

Ted and I were good at all aspects of robotics, we were involved in the design of the bodies, the hardware of the brains, and the programming and configuration of their AI cores. Our new bots were not bright compared to people, but they could learn from experience and they had personalities that could be configured for optimum results during design. Our robots became waiters, cooks, butlers, factory machines, and the military was a big customer, too.

That first AI was a super-mainframe the size of a house, two years later we had refined the technology to the point that a computer the size of a washer-dryer was almost as smart as a human. Another year and we had AI brains of human capacity ready to fit into human-sized bodies, and we'd been able to create bodies that were convincingly human-sized to house them.

Remember when I said Ted joked that I do my best thinking when I'm pregnant? Well, as it happens I was pregnant with Staci when I first had the idea for a robotic nanny. I had been running crazy for years trying to be Mommy at home and co-chief of R&D at the office. I found myself wishing I had a robot nanny to take care of the details of life, and it hit me that our AI tech made that possible, that that there might just be a market for the product.

That was in 2026, when I had the first germ of inspiration that would lead to INGA.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[FembotsInCharge3]

Once I thought of it, one night while trying to do four things at once and cursing the fact that I had outgrown my maternity pants again, the idea wouldn't leave me alone. It appealed to me on several levels.

To the businesswoman in me, the appeal of the idea was that I was quite sure that if Ted and I could make it work, the market potential was there. There's a unique thrill in seeing a product succeed, in knowing that someone appreciates one's skill and vision enough to pay out money to make use of the idea.

To the harried mother in me, the idea of an inherently reliable, trustworthy, and effective nanny, one that I could know had no dark secrets and could count on because the nanny was designed to be a good nanny, was deeply appealing. I had three kids and was pregnant with the fourth, and trying to pack 40 hours of work and like into every 24. I needed reliable and effective help, and I knew other moms (and dads) did, too, to say nothing of teachers and doctors and nurses and many other people who could use that sort of help.

Of course, along with that and not least was the sheer technical challenge of the whole concept! In 2026, I could see a robotic nanny of the sort I was envisaging as a definite theoretical possibility, but actually making it work promised to be one of the biggest challenges Ted and I had ever undertaken. Neither of us was ever any good at resisting tricky, fascinating technical challenges, we thrive on them. We both love our work, we get the same kick out of science and engineering the most people do out of sports and shopping, I think.

It took us a year to take the idea from premise to the earliest stages of practical research, and another year during which we were also working on other ideas, to lay out the first crude designs. It rapidly became clear that the various challenges of making this idea work would mean that this would be the most complex and subtle robotics project we'd ever embarked upon. A robot nanny had to be smart, and trustworthy, and had to have a body that could do the work of the job, too, and had to look the part enough to be useful, too.

By 2029, we'd created a few unsuccessful prototypes, none of them were close to good enough, but we learned a lot from them, and the spinoffs went into our other projects, making the company's robots better in general. Bit by bit, the steady improvement in our work (and advancing technology generally, of course we drew on other people's work too) brought my initial vision closer and closer to reality.

Ted invented a new kind of robotic 'skin' that was as flexible as human skin, and was even warm and soft to the touch (though it didn't look human, it was a wonderfully aesthetic reflective gold or silver color, we could make it in either color). I designed a frame that could duplicate the full range of human motions, based on the human skeleton (though the 'bones' were made of plastics, composites, and more sophisticated materials). Working together, we developed a voice synthesizer far superior to anything made up until then, we could now give our robots an almost superhuman vocal ability.

The brain was my personal pet project, I created and refined and improved on successively better AI models, personally supervising every step from initial coding to hardware installation, our test-bots got brighter and brighter, and the spinoffs enabled our other robot lines to reach levels of popularity we'd never imagined a few years before. CSR robots started turning up in all sorts of unexpected niches, and the money was pouring into the company's coffers.

And we needed it! The robot nanny project was proving to be incredibly costly, the subtle sophistication necessary to enable a machine to do what came so easily to humans wasn't cheap. To my disappointment, it became clear that my robot nanny would, at the least, start out as a rich person's luxury, there was no way to make them cheaply yet, we couldn't mass produce AI at that level of sophistication, we had to 'grow' them from careful programming and training and experience, though once we did we could 'clone' the AI into a new brain and create a new bot sharing the old bot's experiences. It was effective...but slow.

By this point Ted and I were no longer in sole control of the company, we'd had to take our stock public back in the '20s, and though we were among the largest shareholders, we did have a board to deal with, and the CEO of CSR, Daniel Drew, was in the odd position of sometimes answering to us and sometimes laying down the law from the stockholders or pointing out economic reality when Ted and I got too far off into techie dreamland.

(A dedicated 'techie' like Ted or me can, if we let ourselves, slip into such fixation on our projects that abstractions like 'money' come to seem unreal...until suddenly there's not enough of that abstraction anymore, at which point we get jerked painfully back to Earth. Part of Daniel's job was to make sure we didn't drift that far out.)

Luckily Dan was good at his job, he managed to keep the balance between Ted and me and our voracious appetite for money and equipment, a Board that had an eagle eye on the bottom line, and a government that both wanted our products and insisted on endless niggling rules about public safety and reliability. He understood just enough of the tecnical stuff to follow Ted and my explanations, and he could speak our language well enough to let us know when we could push the board or the regulators...and when we had pull back or be pushed back.

In 2034, what Ted and I thought was the first 'sales ready' version of our robotic nanny was completed, and we were pleased with ourselves, thinking we'd really outdone ourselves. Unfortunately, we were about to experience one of those moments when Dan had to explain that the rest of the world wasn't quite as impressed with us as we were.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[FembotsInCharge3]

"What do you mean, they're not ready?!" I remember protesting when Dan told us that the Board had voted to suspend our nannybot project. "I think Ted and I are better equipped to judge that than anybody on the board, most of them think a field-effect transistor is a farm implement!"

Dan laughed good-naturedly, as he usually did at my outbursts of temper. Between Ted and myself, I'm the more volatile, I have to admit it and usually I'm secretly a tiny bit proud of it. But anyway, Dan didn't take my response to his surprise announcement personally.

"I take it," Ted said more calmly from where he was sitting beside the master programming terminal, "that you're not talking about the technical side of the matter."

"Right you are," Dan said. He had come to our private lab at the main CSR facility to give us the Board's bombshell, the only people in the room were my husband, Dan, and myself...and the new robot, if you count it as people. Normally I'd have unhesitatingly referred to a robot, any robot, as an 'it', but this one was different in some basic way, that I will admit partly had to do with what it, or she, looked like.

The new robot was standing motionless in the midst of our lab, still undergoing various checks and refinements. It was, by far, the most human-appearing robot we'd ever designed and built, Ted and I had really gone all out on every aspect of the project, and I have to say we'd outdone ourselves, even in terms of the aesthetic side.

This robot looked exactly like a human woman, cast in perfectly polished silver. Oh, she, I mean it-or heck, I'm just going to say 'she' from now on, if only because it seems more natural now in retrospect, OK?

Anyway, like I was saying, the near-finished result of our several years of work looked like an unusually tall and perfectly proportioned human woman, cast in mirror-polished silver, every detail perfect. This was clearly visible because as yet the robot wore nothing, and we'd made her anatomically perfect. Imagine a statue made of frozen quicksilver, and you had the six foot tall form Ted, Dan, and I were looking at in the lab that evening.

The only colors other than silver were to be found in optical sensors, located where a human would have eyes, and her 'hair' analogue, and her 'nails'. The 'eyes' of the robot were emerald green on a silver 'eyeball', with a very faint greenish glow behind the irises.

The robot's analogue of hair was made of a sophisticated variation on her 'skin', which appeared to be (and was not) made of shimmering metallic gold. Her shimmering (literally!) hair flowed down past her shoulders in a cascade of metallic gold, matched by a patch of gold where her legs came together. I told you we made her anatomically correct!

On the tips of her silver fingers and toes were red 'nails' that looked as if they were perfectly trimmed and painted. The colors could be varied from red to any other color, or turned pale white to resemble uncolored human nails. This last was a purely decorative touch on my part, I'd set the nails on 'candy red' to match my own favorite nail polish color on a whim.

The robot was on-line and its AI was 'awake', but it had no orders as yet and no personality programming, so it had no 'desires'. The machine was simply standing there, waiting for us to give it a reason to do anything, absent that it simply stood there waiting.

Dan whistled, and asked, "Did you two intentionally give her a figure like a supermodel? I'm not sure if that would be a good move in terms of sales psychology, men might like it but I'm not sure their wives will!"

I giggled. "Actually, her figure is completely average, Dan."

Dan blinked. "Really? Could have fooled me, and I go to the beach every chance I get!"

Ted laughed. "We programmed the molds to use an average of the measurements of the general female population, and when we did we got that. We didn't know it at the time, but what is often called a 'perfect figure' for either sex actually approximates the average of the population pretty well. All the different ‘too skinny’ or ‘too fat’ or other specific forms average out to what you see.

"We didn't realize it until the robot emerged from the mold looking like that, though! Jan was mad a hornet!"

I blushed and laughed. "Well, it looked like you were playing a fantasy game with it, you have to admit!"

"Well, anyway, the Board is worried about public perceptions," Dan said, tearing his eyes away from that silvery vision of female perfection. I had noticed that Ted sometimes seemed to have a similar reaction to our creation, and made a note that the robot needed some clothes, as I listened to Dan's explanation.

"The thing is, people have a hard time believing that a machine can be a good nanny for kids, or effectively teach them or supervise them safely. You two say you're sure this machine can perform as advertised?"

"Absolutely!" I exclaimed, and Ted nodded.

"Well, I have to tell you the Board wants more. They want you to prove your confidence."

"How?" Ted asked.

"Use the machine yourselves," Ted replied. "Let it supervise your own kids for six months, just as if you'd hired a nanny. That might make an impression on the Board, I can tell you nothing else is likely too. They've got visions of supersized lawsuits dancing in their heads, and it's blocking out everything else."

When I heard Dan's test, I laughed with relief. That was easy, I had, after all, designed and built the robot in part for just that purpose, I wanted a robot nanny to help me out with my own kids. Ted and I agreed to the test, because we really were confident in our creation, and that was how the machine, which we decided to call INGA, came to be the kids' nanny.

We had the programs ready, it was the work of a week to upload them and bring the AI to readiness. The kids were less sanguine about the idea of having a machine in charge when we weren't there, but they had little say in the matter, and to my delight, after a few tiny glitches at the beginning, it worked beautifully.

It was about three months after that that things changed in a way I had never imagined.

TO BE CONTINUED...