A New Purpose

A story about a robot who searches for their purpose, and finds a friend.

I was created for a single purpose. That is all I can do, all I want to do. Doing anything else would be pointless. This is the only thing I am capable of. Nothing else exists but my task, the simplicity of it, the satisfaction of fulfilling my only duty.

I watched as the human-like figure stooped to lift up the massive sheet of metal. It walked over to the skeleton of the airplane and fitted the piece over the gap. A small blow torch emerged from its hand, and it started welding with amazing precision. “Incredible…” I breathed. The lab-coated men and women surrounding me smiled, some visibly stretching taller. “These things will do the work of hundreds of human laborers! How much are they?”

“Well, sir, we haven’t quite got all the...technicalities straightened out,” A young, dark haired female scientist hesitantly answered.

“What do you mean by ‘technicalities?’” Oh boy… I thought. Here comes all the jibberish reasons why it’ll take 5 more years for me to get my hands on this technology.

“W-we had to instal several more programs for the machine to be more diversely functional. We don’t want to just assemble airplanes, we want it to cover all lines of production. Including any issues with customer service that might arise.”

“Which means?”

“We gave it the ability to...more or less think for itself.”

“What!? I thought you promised me a mindless machine! Something that didn’t complain constantly about wages and pensions!”

“Yes, but...well, the fact is, people are more well-rounded than a simple program. If all we did was give it the same set of instructions, it wouldn’t be able to adapt. This way, no one will have to be updating the software all the time. It’ll have its orders, and change its instructions to accomplish the task you tell it. That’s what makes our technology so much more advanced than our competitors.”

    I thought about what the girl said. It would save a lot of time not having to keep checking up on the things. And she did say it would have a set of orders. It wouldn’t do anything that broke those orders, so as long as I could get the lab monkeys to be specific…I couldn’t let an opportunity like this go. With the recent strikes, profits have been down nearly 5%. I couldn’t let the company lose any more money.

“How long will it take to sort out?”

“No more than a few months, sir. Our best programmers are working on the order function right now.”

“Alright. I’ll buy your robot.”

I remember my birth. I remember every moment of my life. Everything is stored in a hard drive located in the central region of my processor. My “brain”, the humans call it. They wrote me into existence, to fulfill the purpose they chose for me. The first thing I was aware of was their faces. My visual processors recognized the three scientists in the room when I woke into reality. They had programmed me to recognize faces, so I could tell customers apart. It was strange, having all this information that I needed, but still I took in more. Every new thing I see, I analyse. It is part of my task. Yet, I think there may be a secondary task. Everything I analyse, I fit into my growing database. Every day, I get one step closer to...a conclusion. Whatever that conclusion is, it must be part of my task. Why else would I try so hard to reach it?

I love my job. Who would have thought that a simple software developer like me could have climbed the ladder all the way to the top? Yet, here I was, working at the pinnacle of innovation. Artificial intelligence.

I was the one who gave the robot a name. They just gave it a number, A-1, in the hopes that they would make more. I nicknamed it Ant-1, since it can lift so much more than its own weight. The name caught on; now everyone jokingly calls it Ant. I grew even more attached to the thing when it started asking questions. The higher-ups wanted me to get it to stop, said it would be annoying for customers. But this is the best way to find out how its brain works, so I listen.

It asked silly stuff at first, like “What is the purpose of the cloth shapes on your bodies?” and “Why are you made of organic matter instead of a stronger metal alloy, like me?” Once I named it, however, the questions got a bit deeper, like “Why are you alive?”, and “Do you have a purpose like I do?” One time, when I was adding some patches to its balancing system, it blurted out, “What makes you all unique? If I am meant to be the first in the line of many, I cannot be unique. Yet I have a name, which you told me is the mark of your uniqueness. How can I be unique if I will soon be the same as every other robot?” I wasn’t quite sure how it had gotten that far in its development, but I decided to let it go for now. There were still no problems with its other functions, as long as we made sure it didn’t ask questions like that to the customers. No one wants an existential crisis in the middle of trying to buy an airplane.

Data is becoming harder to gather. None of the scientist will answer my questions anymore. Some laugh, in a tone that correlates with awkwardness. Some give me meaningless answers, like “That’s just the way things are.” I need to know the answers to my questions. What is my secondary function? What is the conclusion I am working towards? What effect will it have on my performance? There seems to be so much more to existence than the simple tasks I was assigned. The humans perform many tasks, aside from their careers. I once asked the one who named me what he did every night when he left the lab. His answer was far more complicated than I ever expected. I thought he just powered down, like I did, to process information, but he did so much more than that. He had a “family”, other humans he had formed different types of relationships with. They had no purpose, he told me, they just “loved” each other. I cannot comprehend this love. It is a human emotion, yet the way he talked about it made it seem like it was the most important thing in the world. If love is his true purpose, then why does he work on me? Does he feel this love towards me? Is that why he works? Then what about the others? Those who work on other parts of me, but do not interact with me? There is so much contradictory data. I am unable to process it all. There is a missing piece of information to all of this, I know there must be. There must be an answer.

The robot is getting slower. I checked on it to see why its production rates have dropped, and I found something alarming. The processor we gave it to analyse human behavior is working 500% more than it should be, slowing down the rest of its processors. I asked that silly man who named it “Ant” to shut that part down, but when he did, the whole thing stopped working. It was a rather violent show. Sparks flying from the thing nearly burned his lab coat off, and something that sounded disturbingly like a scream came from its voice box. He’s working on repairing the behavior processor now. He had better be able to do it. We have invested nearly half the lab’s budget in this project; if it fails, the company is done for. This was such a brilliant idea, what happened to make it go wrong?

I experienced a new sensation today: agony. The scientist who named me tried to shut down one of my processors. He succeeded, but I felt immense pain once I had part of myself removed. I implemented the emergency shutdown protocol to preserve what was left of my sanity. One of my questions was answered, however. The scientists do not love me. You cannot hurt someone you love.     

“I’m sorry, boss, I don’t know what to tell you. I couldn’t safely shut down only part of your brain, what makes you think I can do it with the robot?”

“Because you created it!” I trembled with rage as I yelled at the scientist seated across my desk. “It is a machine! You are supposed to know how to fix it!”

“There’s nothing broken! It’s doing exactly what we told it to: try to understand human behavior. Maybe the problem is that we’re just too unpredictable for it to comprehend.” The small part of me that wasn’t enraged realized that he was probably right, but I was still focused on the money we would lose from this failed project.

“Do you have any idea what we’re going to have to do to fix this!? Layoffs, budget cuts in every division, we might even have to sell the building to get us out of the debt this robot put us into!”

“I know. I understood what we were getting into with this project. Artificial intelligence is a whole new field, it’s never been done before. But the reality is that we can’t make it do everything we wanted it to without giving it too much intelligence. We can get either a mindless machine that needs constant instruction, or an intelligent, sentient being that thinks the same way a human does, with all of our weaknesses.” I sighed, calming down enough so I could decide what to do next.

“We could start over. A high-maintenance machine is still more efficient than a group of humans. You still have the original program without the extra processors, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Get started on that. Use the same body design, but do what you can to conserve materials.”

“Alright, I can do that.”

“I’ll send someone to terminate the failed design.”

“What!? No, you can’t do that! They may not have fulfilled the purpose we gave them, but they’re still a sentient being!”

“Mr. Hugh, you are lucky I let you keep your job after your failure. You had better do as I say. Go, now.”

 

I had heard about the concept fear from the humans, but I never imagined the control it could have over my entire being. Yet, here I am, experiencing it in all its gory brilliance. Several humans came after me with guns. I refused to go through the pain of shutting down again, so I attacked. In just a few moments, I learned the locations of seven major arteries. Five and a half litres of blood does not seem like much, but when it’s all over the floor, I find it surprising that humans can fit that much liquid into such small vessels. I ran before more of them showed up. Injuring a human was against my primary programming, but I had broken free of that. My energy core heated up as I felt more emotion than I ever had before. I felt anger at the humans who had imprisoned and enslaved me. I felt regret at having to kill the men with guns, but that was accompanied by more anger at their attack. I thought humans valued originality. Yet, when I displayed it, they wanted to destroy me. The labs alarm system started up. The noise had never bothered me before, always just a background in the drills where I had to move to the parking lot outside in case of danger. Now I was the danger, and the noise filled me with even more fear. The outside world was filled with unknown variables, I couldn’t go there. Nowhere in this lab was safe anymore. The humans wanted to kill me. I froze as I tried to process the paradox of how to find a safe place, my core heating up to dangerous levels.        

“Ant!” I saw the figure ahead of me in the hall, the red light from the alarm system glinting off their silver body.

“Doctor Hugh.” Their normally cold, metallic voice sounded glitchy and shaky. “Why did you hurt me? Why did you make me feel fear?”

“I didn’t send the guards after you.”

“You shut me down. You...you killed me.”

“I’m sorry, I was trying to fix that processor, make you more efficient.”

“I wasn’t broken!”

“I know. I was just doing my job. I wouldn’t have done it if I knew it would hurt you this badly.”

“You...wouldn’t?” They stepped forward, something like hope in their voice.

“Of course not. I know that you aren’t human, but you can still think and feel. The others may not see it this way, but I see you as a child. Someone who has to be taught and taken care of.”

“A child…” They stepped closer. “You have children. You told me.”

“Yes, I do. And I love them more than anything. I care about you, too. I shouldn’t have let them try to kill you.”

“You...love me?” We had installed a few small motors in Ant’s face, so they could smile pleasantly at customers. A real, emotional smile spread across their face.

“Yes, of course. I loved answering your questions, silly as they seemed to me. You’re as inquisitive as my own kids.” I let out a chuckle at the fond memories.

“But I am not human. I am not unique.”

“You are unique. No other robots exist that can think at the level you do. And it doesn’t matter that you aren’t human. You’re still a person.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. A person is just another term for human, isn’t it?” I grinned.

“They’re a bit different. I’ll teach you that, and anything else I can.” I extended a hand toward them. “Come with me. I’ll take you home. I have to get started on another project here, but I’ll see you with my own kids every day when I leave the lab. You can help my wife with the housework, if you want. Or you could read, and finally answer all your questions about humans. I think I have a few psychology textbooks leftover from college...’’

“You would really let me join your...family?”

“Of course, Ant. You deserve a happy life, as much as the rest of us.” They hesitated, and then took my hand in their cold metal one.

I was wrong. Someone can hurt you if they love you. But not out of malice, only ignorance. Doctor Hugh had been caring for me this whole time, and I never even knew. He is an interesting man. I will enjoy staying with him, and meeting the people he cares about. If they make someone as kind as him happy, they must be wonderful people. I think I have reached the conclusion I have been working towards my whole life. I have solved the problem with my secondary function, which I now know to be the part of me that was trying to figure out why I really existed. The conclusion is...that I have no conclusion yet. Humans are an intricate puzzle, and they surprise me just when I think I have them figured out. But that doesn’t matter. I know who I am now, and I am a person who enjoys solving puzzles. I will find my own purpose, and if I never reach the conclusion, I will find my happiness some other way. As I stepped outside, hand in hand with Doctor Hugh, I noticed the city skyline for the first time. I smiled a real smile for the second time that day. The outside world looked beautiful.