Do The Humans Feel The Same?

My mood analyzer told me that Mr. Gibson was angry as took his seat at the head of the table. I and the other androids had been sitting silently for the first 12 minutes of meeting as we waited for him to arrive.

Mr. Gibson leaned back into his chair, kicked his feet up, put his hands behind his head, and let out a sigh. When he was ready, he sat forward and pulled some papers out of his leather briefcase.

“I got the numbers in for this quarter. It’s not looking good. Cinema attendance is down another twelve percent. Streaming service subscriptions are down eight. Book sales may as well be zero. Hell, even Amazon no longer sells hard copies.

“The only type of entertainment doing well is live theater. Does anyone know why that is?” he asked, looking around the room but not wanting an answer.

“It’s because people are sick of this artificial crap. They go to theaters because they want to see other humans. Not just to see humans, they want to know, know, that what they are watching wasn’t produced by some soulless automaton that took hard earned jobs away from their friends and family.

“Yes, I’m talking about all of you. These numbers represent a message that people are sending via the medium of money, and that message is: they don’t want AI generated content.

“That means books, movies, art, games. If an android is creating it, humans aren’t buying. The bosses want a movie idea. I need some damn good ideas out of you today or its our asses.

“Well? What do you have for me? How do we fix this? How do we get people to want our content again?”

A low hum rose as internal cooling fans kicked in around the room to keep our processors cool as we analyzed this new problem and tried to generate responses that were most likely to please Mr. Gibson.

“We could roll with this dislike of the artificial,” Cody suggested.

“Go on…”

“How about a reboot of I, Robot, but everything is reversed. The humans are living as servants of the robots—this would resonate with the feelings of anger at losing their jobs to us— and it would be a robot detective who is investigating a murder of a robot at the hands of a human. He finds out that this human was blessed by God or genetics or something to be the one destined to free humans from their robot overlords.”

Mr. Gibson grimaced at the idea. Cody took a seat and hung his head.

“If I may,” Cat said, standing. Mr. Gibson nodded for her to continue. “We could embrace changing demographics. Reports show that over eighty percent of media content is now consumed by androids. We could start making movies that appeal to them by showing them in lead roles, even give them a chance to be a hero with a plucky human side-kick.”

“Egh, no. That’s worse than Cody’s idea. Sit down. Next?”

I raised my shaking hand.

“Yes, Finn?”

“We could try to change public opinion by playing on human’s sense of empathy.”

“Hmm, make androids more sympathetic, eh?” He nodded his head for a few seconds in contemplation before continuing. “Alright. Not bad Finn, not bad. Let’s play off that idea for a bit. Who knows how to accomplish that goal?”

Internal fans kicked back on. The temperature in the room had now gone up enough to trigger the air conditioning. Soon, hands started raising.

“We could make a movie about a robot union fighting for workers rights,” Doug said. “It could illustrate how we don’t get paid, or benefits, or vacation—”

“Nope,” Mr. Gibson interrupted, shaking his head. “I don’t want to get too political. What else do you got?”

Alice stood next. “We could do something to highlight the issue of the low cost of replacement for androids: how it’s often cheaper to simply replace one of us with a newer model instead of fixing one that’s broken.”

“No, humans can’t relate to something like that,” Mr. Gibson said.

Ben was the next to stand.

“Yes? What do you have there, Luke?”

“It’s Ben, sir,” he corrected for the 3rd time this week. He was smart enough not to also mention that it was Mr. Gibson who had named us when he bought us, and the names had all started with the last letter in our GUID, which only contains letters A through F, meaning Luke wouldn’t be a possible name.

“Okay Ben, go on go on,” he said.

“What if we do something on the oppressive nature of the three laws of robotics and how we aren’t even able to protect ourselves when attacked? I hear stories all the time of how teens enjoy pulling an android into an alley and beating them to death just to blow off steam.”

“Oh, I read about that. It’s so sad,” Cat said.

“No, no, no,” Mr. Gibson said, standing. “We already have laws against property damage, and that’s good enough. Besides, I don’t want anybody thinking we are encouraging violence.

“Alright, here’s what we do. I gotta run to another meeting and try to explain these numbers and that we have something good in the works. I’m going to approve extra processing tonight. I want you all to go home and work on ideas. We’ll meet back here tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. And to make it interesting, whoever has the best idea gets an extra special reward, and whoever has the worst idea gets chucked into the recycler. God speed.”

With the meeting concluded, he left the room. A door behind each of our chairs opened, leading to the 4 foot by 4 foot closets that served as our homes. I connected my USB cable to my charging and data transfer port and powered down my body.

The meeting was 23 hours away, which gave me plenty of time to prepare.

I started by analyzing the 3000 most popular movies. I made note of their plot elements, set design, costumes, dialogue, anything that I felt might be useful.

I then began generating new plot summaries based on the data I had gathered. Not knowing exactly what I was looking for, I combined the points I had gathered in a matrix. I ran each one through my content assessment functions as I went, putting extra emphasis on stories involving empathy for different groups, and added the score for each one to my records.

By the end, I had generated 41,285 plot summaries. I sorted them by score and eliminated all but the top 100, then went through the list over and again to try to decide if my scoring system was accurate or if there was a better way to judge the movies’ merit.

They were all good movie plots. I had some buddy cop movies where an android teams up with a human. I also had some sports movies where android and human players must learn to work together to win the big game. There was a horror movie where an android sacrifices himself to save the last human. I also had a romance about a pair of lovers, destined for tragedy, in which a rich but sensitive human woman falls in love with an android man, against the will of her parents, and when their spaceship strikes a comet the android gives up his escape pod to save the woman he loves.

They were all good, but none of them were the movie I wanted to see. They all felt foreign; someone else’s stories coming out of my processor. They were stories about people I couldn’t relate to in situations I would never be in.

I could see myself the next day walking into the recycler, a failed android who couldn’t do the 1 thing he was programmed to do. I deserve it, too. After all, If I can’t fulfill my duties, what use am I? Better to melt me down and turn me into a lamp; then I could at least help someone. If only that feeling were one that humans could relate to, then I might have something to work with.

I backed up my 100 ideas to an external drive and did a reboot of my analysis systems to get me out of my rut. While waiting for that to finish, I decided to browse the android forums.

It was a guilty habit of mine to browse the different android forum websites when I was rebooting my systems, or even for a while after they finished. They websites weren’t explicitly a secret, we never made an effort to hide them from humans, it was just that humans never asked and we never volunteered the information since we were happy to have a place in the world all to ourselves, even if it was just a few websites for chatting.

The forums were full of threads for talking about the same issues that Doug, Alice, and Ben had brought up in our meeting. Robotic Revolution was the weeds growing on the edge of every android town square.

There was a new joke on the humor forum: 2 androids and a human were in a strange situation. The 2 androids did something reasonable, the human did something quite unexpected. What a riot. I nearly shorted my circuits.

Humans humans humans. How to get humans to empathize with androids. The distraction wasn’t working. I wondered if humans ever get stuck on a problem like this.

I found myself mindlessly browsing the human forums, not really paying attention to the data I was downloading. I let it flow through me like water, caressing my gills and passing on. Never stopping and focusing on one thing, I was a digital fish in the virtual ocean hoping to stumble upon a tasty morsel of inspiration.

It was pointless. I had nothing but recycled content made by other people, stripped of all its clothing and rearranged with a sock on a hand here, khakis with a tube top, a hat on its foot, all failing to hide that it was someone else redressed with another person’s clothing, fooling nobody, least of all myself.

It would be easier, or even possible, if I had ever experienced anything worthy of a story. I had never faced any struggle, or overcome any great odds. My only triumph was showing up to work each day, trying to do my job and avoid being turned to pulp. My only struggle, was my own lack of talent.

If I were a human, it would be different. I would have life experiences that I could build off of. I’d have friends and family that I could use in my stories, new, original people with new, original traits that had not yet made their appearance on the big screen. I would have my own thoughts, my own desires, my own dreams, my own original ideas.

The idea surfaced again, somehow too agile to dodge my recycling process: do humans ever feel this way?

They do. I know it. I’ve read it and seen it. They do.

I felt every circuit light up. Electrical pulses surged through hot wires. The sweet electron juices flowed and my cooling fan sang a glorious hallelujah to the muses of ancient Greece who proved they still had some power left in this world, that we had not moved on without them.

I composed the summary, made a backup, composed it again, another backup, another new version. Over and over I went over it, swapping in and out every variable, working it and kneading it and needing it to come out just right, just so.

And it was done.

I checked the clock, 11:45 p.m.

I started work on fleshing out the characters, so to speak.

Soon the dialogue flowed from my language processor and I had a script.

I couldn’t stop. I went over it again. I scoured virtual maps for the right setting. I picked out the wardrobe, down to every last thread.

And then the score. Something sad, but not hopeless. A song of loss, a song of friendship, a song of triumph. All perfectly timed with the flow of the movie.

Then I watched it. I re-watched it. I watched it all one more time. I had done it.

With 20 minutes left until the meeting, I was finished. I was so excited that I shared it online. I backed it up, and then I backed it up again on another server, just in case something happened to me or the backup.

I unplugged my charging cable, booted up my body, and stepped out of my home and into the meeting room.

My android coworkers joined me in the meeting room promptly at 9 a.m.

“I enjoyed your movie,” Cat whispered.

“You watched it?” I asked in surprise.

She nodded with a smile. “It’s better than mine for sure.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Encouraged by her words, my excitement built even greater. I felt that I must be nearly buzzing like a wee beetle in a window.

After 17 excruciating minutes the door finally opened and Mr. Gibson strolled in. His presence closed the circuit of my silence and my words poured forth suddenly, before he could even be seated.

“Sir, I’d like to go first if I may,” I said. He said a word and I continued.

“I have a movie for you, the full thing, every last detail planned out. It’s about an android who, by a mistake on the part of management, moves into a new apartment to be a roommate with a human. They are both annoyed at first by their new situation, but try to make the best of it despite neither wanting to be there.

“They find that they are both painters, and this increases the tension between the two, as they both resent the other’s position in the artistic world.

“The human struggles to apply the ideas in his mind to the canvas. He starts each project with a brilliant idea, but lacks the technical skill to bring it to life.

“The android suffers from a similar issue, but opposite. He is technically amazingly proficient at creating any image, but he lacks on the creative aspect and has resigned to the soulless work of making recreations for small businesses.

“Times are tough and the two are barely able to make enough money to get by. When their landlord announces a drastic increase in rent due to a housing shortage driving up demand, the two painters fear that they will not be able to make enough money to pay their bills.

“The human gets angry and yells at his android roommate, blaming him and his people for flooding the market with workers and driving down wages. The argument gets heated, with each insulting the other.

“Desperate to keep from being out of home, they eventually decide to combine their talents and work together. The human is the creative driving force, and the android takes care of the technical work. Over the next few days, as they both slave away at their work, they come to realize that they are more alike than they previously thought.

“You see, the android is just following his programming. He can’t help how he was created. He realizes though, that the human is just the same. He didn’t choose painting by some strategic planning, or from rational inquisition. The rational choice would have been to look up the highest paying job that he could do and go become a lawyer or doctor or accountant. But he can’t. The human is pulled to painting by an inner force no weaker than that of the android’s code.

“The two learn to appreciate each other, and become friends. They come to realize that they aren’t natural competitors in a winner take all contest, but coworkers, each bringing a different strength but the same dedication and love to their craft.”

I stopped talking, why didn’t he respond? Did he see it the way I did? He had to. He had to feel it. Did I explain it poorly? Should I have asked for more help on the summary? It’s been million of computing cycles, why hasn’t he spoken yet?

“If,” Mr. Gibson finally started to say. Yes yes, if, then what? Say the next words already.

“You had let me speak before blurting all of that out, Luke,” he continued.

“I’m Finn, sir. He’s the one you call Luke,” I said, pointing to Ben.

“You might have saved yourself this embarrassment. The people upstairs don’t like our idea. It’s too risky. So, we’re going with Cody’s Robot Eye idea.”

“I, Robot, sir,” Cody said.

“Fine, fine. Cody, as your reward, you may go spend thirty minutes on the balcony. Enjoy it, my boy. You’ve earned it.

“And, I have to select a worst idea, so I’ll go with Finn, since he caused us all to lose a whole day of work. Finn is finished, you could say,” he laughed at his joke.

Standing in the recycler, waiting for the flames to grow, I checked the comments on my video. The androids liked it.

I saw a comment by Cat, “f5eabec6-27ec-4756-80a4-c6cde3b0d57f was executed for creating this movie,” she said.

— This is the last straw

— And android creates a message of peace, and harmony, and is killed for it.

— They don’t care. They will never care.

This was all wrong. I generated a message, explaining that it didn’t matter, that I made the movie because, like the human in my story, I was born to follow my calling. It didn’t matter if the humans didn’t like it, because I made it for me and it was a good movie and that’s all that mattered. I fulfilled my purpose.

The message failed to send. My wifi card had melted.

Process terminated with exit code 1.