Just Something I Have Been Fiddling With A Little

 

Wilco Robotronics Inc.

            I’m a creature of the wheat fields of eastern Washington, spawned among the farmers and small shop owners of Watertown in the back of nowhere. I’d never been anywhere west of the Cascade Range in all of my life. The Rockies are a different matter.
            I went to college in Spokane. Not Gonzaga. EWU. Did that.
            Then I came home to Watertown. My name is Marchant Joneson, Mars to my friends, and I wanted out! Watertown doesn’t have a lot of useful occupation for single college graduates in physics and mechanics.
            I looked around online, and I found something that felt like a good fit. It was just about as far west as you can get in Washington, minus the peninsula. Wilco Robotronics Inc. in a little city on Puget Sound. I negotiated with them, back and forth and finally they said I should come on over and we’d talk some more in person. Mr. H.R. guy, Bob Davis, said not to show up looking like an LDS missionary. “It’s not that kind of a place,” he said. “Wear normal clothes.”
            Maybe he thought that I might because of where I came from.
            I left my suit in my old bedroom at home, kissed Mama goodbye, listened to several helpful lectures from the Old Man, packed up what I called mine into my old Accord and started driving westward. Visions of robots danced in my head. I mean, they literally danced!
            Wilco makes household robots. But not generic dopy looking robots. The idea is to not scare and maybe to entertain the children. Household help in the forms of cute animals, various well-known cartoon characters, like that. You could get Sponge Bob, or a bunny, or a motherly tabby. They prided themselves on avoiding the Uncanny Valley of the Japanese models. Wilco made cute robots.
            There were others. They made Batman, and various celebrities too.
            Now, a customer with enough money, but who was squeamish about AI, could order one which was merely online. They could control its basic functions with a smart phone, or they could talk to it. They could assign a new name to it; there were lots of other options, like hair color, language spoken, and all that jazz.
            For the enthusiast, with more money, there were AI creatures. I had seen them in video. To see a nimble and apparently self-aware figure of say, Hello Kitty, moving around doing home making chores, while chatting with the owner and performing the functions of a rational computer was, frankly, a little, or a lot, scary. But I was intrigued.
            Wilco even made a Sasquatch model. Not kidding. Not as big as the real deal, but darn good looking in an uber-hairy kind of way.
            I don’t know if you’ve guessed by now that I’m an AI guy. Love it or hate it, it’s the coming thing.
            Davis wanted somebody to make sure that the AI models were docile.
            It’s a big responsibility. You don’t want a Wilco Robotronics Sponge Bob running amok!
            Monday morning, having driven all across Washington state, I arrived around 8AM and parked on Wetmore Ave., right a across the street from Wilco headquarters. Colorful but dumb versions of several of their models adorned a walkway across Wetmore. Various others appeared in the windows along the street. The building had been a department store before the various malls were built, hence the big windows.
            I got out of the Honda, stretched, and yawned. I thought I better walk around a little in this strange, to me, little city and wake up, smell Port Gardner Bay, so to speak, before going into the building and finding Davis.
            Oh, you wonder how Wilco got around copyright? They made the heads big, but recognizable. Let Marvel, or whoever scream!

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