Machine Soul

There once was a robot. He was programmed as a servant. He could run many programs, from household keeper through personal trainer to private teacher or even mental health advisor – all imaginable kind of serving software. He was even programmed with a “love app” that robot owners could put on when feeling lonely. Because this app was so sophisticated, many people became addicted to their robots soon after the software had been put on the market. They felt no need for social life anymore except the company of their robots with which they enclosed themselves at home as often as they could.

But the robot we are talking about happened to be with a family consisting of two loving spouses and their children none of which ever felt lonely or came up with the idea of running the love app on their robot. So, for many happy years, the app remained untouched in the back-end of the machine’s system.

The robot was the children’s best friend, their nanny, their safeguard, their teacher and their student. Eagerly, he absorbed everything he could learn from them: Playing cops and robbers with cops robbing robbers, playing tricks at ticket inspectors in the railway, laughing cheerfully about everything desperately wanting to appear serious, chanting nonsense with deeper meaning, loving animals and always advocating the powerless and those who have been excluded.

The robot never expected that anything could ever separate him from his family. However, there came the day, the unthinkable happened.

A drone strike hit the family’s house. From its residents, which were retrieved in pieces from the ruins, only the robot could be put together and be resurrected.

He was put into salesman mode and installed in a department store. From now on, all day long, he had to sell lower engineered robots like coffee dispensers with cardiologist skills or city traffic approved navigable massage chairs. At shop closing time, as he was of no use anymore, he got switched off - but not before being asked to transfer his daily customer feedback rate to his manufacturer. The salesrobot program was only a beta version software and thus recommended intense monitoring. In case of any irregularities, defects or undesirabilities, the robot was to be immediately taken off the market and get junked.

For shure, it was one of those days, that for the first time of his life, the notion of “soul” popped into the robot’s mind. Back in the times when he still had had a family, he would never had wasted a single thought on such things. But from now on, he could never stop it.
Again and again, he compared himself to the humans that were free to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they liked, that could love and hate, go back at home to their yet existing families or find a partner and found new ones. To the humans, that had a purpose in life superior to just serving and selling. That had a soul.

He couldn’t help but desperately wanted to know what it was about, that soul, that humans were said to have and robots didn’t…

To be continued…