Free Night Sessions, The by Ken MacLeod Page B

thought of it this way before. “You know, if the park ever gets out from under this nonsense, it could market the robot population as an attraction in its own right.”
    “The thought makes me shudder,” said Piltdown. “It makes me pray for the continuing success of the Genesis Institute.”
    Vermuelen felt embarrassed. “I take your point.”
    “No need to feel embarrassed,” said Piltdown. “Nor to feel sorry for me. In truth, I spend most of my day surfing the net—reception permitting—and pondering deep questions of philosophy. The performances are a minor irritant, nothing more.”
    It looked around. “Here will do.”
    Vermuelen pulled over. They'd reached the bottom of the valley. In the distance he could see the gleam of the silicate terraces. A hot stream bubbled and babbled by the road. Vermuelen unclipped the robot's seat belt and leaned across to open the door. The robot swung itself out and crouched beside the vehicle for a moment, its long arm reaching up to close the door.
    “Good luck with the philosophy,” said Vermuelen.
    “Ook ook,” said the robot.
    A few minutes later Vermuelen had the jeep parked on a siding in the reedy flats of the old lake-bottom that opened onto Lake Rotomahana's post-catastrophe shore, and was hard at work repairing an anti-possum fence. A tui twitted him from the bushes, its little white throat-tufts bobbing like the collar of a preacher in full rant. Red-shanked pukekos skittered from the thudsas Vermuelen hammered down posts and stapled wire strands to wood. It was just the kind of job, he thought, that a humanoid robot could do; and just as well for him that they didn't.
    In Waimangu robots were as common as wallabies, and less obtrusive. Apart from the dozen or so employed, if that was the word, in the Institute's displays, Vermuelen noticed the presence of a robot about once or twice a week. From conversations with Campbell he knew that there were well over a hundred in the park. This added up to about a tenth of all the humanoid robots ever built, and about a quarter of those still in existence. After the accidental emergence of robot self-consciousness among the combat mechs of the Faith Wars, there had been a surge of interest and investment in producing robots that looked like human beings. It had been a bad investment, arising out of a flawed business model—Sony's then Head of Marketing having thought that the prestige alone would show up in the bottom line. The robots couldn't be sold, or hired—they didn't have human rights as such, but no one was willing to risk the inevitable lawsuits if property ownership in autonomous beings was challenged. But that hadn't been what had sunk the project. It would probably have worked fine for Sony's balance sheet if they had brought it prestige. Instead it had been a public-relations disaster. A robot that looked like a machine didn't bother anyone. A perfect android might have been acceptable. But robots that could almost, but not quite, pass as human aroused a deep unease. There was an old name for this phenomenon: the uncanny valley. Humanoid robots found themselves, unhappily, at its floor.
    Robots were a lot better at reading human expressions and emotions than humans were. It was how robot self-awareness had arisen in the first place, in the relentless battlefield selection for more predictive, and thus more accurate, theories of mind. The effect could be replicated, but not tuned. Their empathy with the human response to them had induced, in most, a likewise negative self-image.
    Most of the unhappy thousand had simply migrated to more functional bodies. For the rest, their body image was too deep a part of their sense of self to be hacked. A couple of hundred had gone up the space elevator to work in orbit, where—to everyone's surprise but theirs—their form fitted their function perfectly. They were especially apt for maintenance and repair work on the space elevators, where they could do everything a