Give the Robot the Impossible Job!: After Dinner Conversation, #18

By Michael Rook

Synopsis: An AI tutor faces deactivation if she cannot prove her worth by saving a teenage pupil with an "unsolvable" problem - she's a budding serial killer.

After Dinner Conversation is a growing series of short stories across genres to draw out deeper discussions with friends and family. Each story is an accessible example of an abstract ethical or philosophical idea and is accompanied by suggested discussion questions.

Podcast discussions of this short story, and others, is available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and Youtube.

• Language: English
• Publisher: After Dinner Conversation
• Release date: Dec 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393394679

Book preview

Give The Robot The Impossible Job!

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THE LAST CENTURY’S educators failed for so many reasons: lack of knowledge (Robertson & Robertson, 2049), early fatigue (Masters & Rightly, 2052), and general poor capability (Center for Excelling in Education, 2053). More than anything, studies show human teachers failed for lack of motivation (Center for Excelling in Education, 2045).

Delphi AI robots are built with one purpose: to teach. With access to the entire known pedagogical catalog, they can overcome any learning challenge. And they would rather cease to exist than fail—their future assignments and chances for Free Study all depend on their success with your child. If they don’t succeed, we turn them off.

No topic is off limits. Class, behavior, race, economics, sex—Delphi will handle even the most uncomfortable lessons.

Satisfaction guaranteed! And hurry! Don’t wait on the 7.1s. Your child’s future has not a moment to waste!

No client will be physically injured—in a way that won’t quickly heal. No trauma—at, least no more than is educational. And no death.

~TechDisruptEdu~

IF NOT FOR PRIDE, QUINN never would have checked a body out of the Denver Teledepot[1]. She never would have suffered the jaunt-coach’s[2] rattling up the mountain. Not for an instant stayed on this rear patio, wasting minutes—precious minutes—calculating the energy lost to a certain style of hedge-keeping, while her new client, whose name she didn’t know but she kept thinking of as Madam-Not-Rich-But-Wealthy-Enough-to-Pay-the-Circuit-Keeper, kept her waiting. Minutes.

Minutes the Circuit Keeper[3] understood.

A grounds-keeping bot scuttled out, sweeping pebbles back towards the mountain. Quinn sprung up.

Where’s the Madam? Does she know how long I’ve waited? Doesn’t she know our queue-times?

The grounds-bot rotated its head. The octagonal appendage twisted like a giant nut until a panel showed lava-orange.

I think she forgot about you.

Forgot... Quinn swung one of her chrome-colored fists backwards, knowing, seeing, the glass table. Pieces exploded into jagged fractals, scattering like buckets of crystalline seed. The Circuit Keeper would understand the escalation. Part of the mystique. Essence of the demand.

What the Circuit Keeper, and its creators, the entrepreneurs of TechDisruptEdu[4], would not understand would be Quinn’s frustration—her true frustration, not the performance. It was protocol to drop in Delphi without telling them the particulars of the case. Actually, part of the design: no preconceived notions in developing the lesson plan. And that was fine, for Standard Cases.

But this was an Unsolvable Case. Yes, Quinn had volunteered. But with what choice? The 7.1s were coming.

The grounds-bot hovered past Quinn and began sweeping glass shards towards the mountain, disturbing nearby goats, stealing moments of their eating-grooming in the vast parallelogram lawns. Quinn considered the oddity that was the grounds-bot operating feet away from the animals, their pairing somehow, somewhere, decided to be the optimal mix for climate-friendly and economical lawn maintenance. Given the choice for her own gardens, would she choose the same?

Tell her I left! Quinn fumed, dashing