The storm lashed against the house like a kind of angsty teen on a moody day, persistent and noisy but more sound than fury. Still, with the murder, it was enough to set people on edge. Everyone had seen the maid do it, so arresting the suspect seemed like a trivial formality at this point. The head of the house tried to explain that it was a little more difficult than that.
The detective assembled the staff. To her surprise, they were all robots. The maid fully admitted to the murder, as was expected. As a robot, though, ‘she’ had no motive to do anything outside of ‘her’ programming. Not knowing what to, the detective phoned an AI expert in to help ‘interrogate’ the maid.
The AI specialist arrived within the hour, carrying a pile of diagnostic tools that tried to sort through the rat’s nest of goal objectives of the killler robot. It seemed like no-one in the house actually knew any true coding languages and had controlled the robots through third party apps once the original company stopped supporting their first generation cleaning AIs. Each person in the house had their own way of inputting new tasks.
Some would demonstrate the task and set how often they wanted it repeated. Others would zone different areas of their room with individual objectives or problem descriptions like dust or clutter. One could also download AI pattern recognition that would allow the robot to clean on it’s own as long as the room was close enough to the sample rooms it was trained in. Any of those methods would be valid on it’s own, but with piecemeal programming, and conflicting instructions on what to do on communal areas, it meant the robots were getting bogged down.
The family tried to fix the problem by upgrading the base AI in an effort to sort between more and more competing cleaning solutions. That improved things for a while, till the robots hard drive and ram became full as well.
The detective was feeling like they were loosing the forest for the trees. She asked the robot to duplicate the actions that lead to the murder. It did so. She asked if the motion was demonstrated in Copy Task mode. It was not. She asked if it was a Zone command. It was not. A few more questions and it was determined that it wasn’t any direct or indirect instruction that lead to that kind of movement.
But what did it leave? The detective asked the AI specialist to speculate on what effect a different base AI would have. The answer was unclear, at least to the layman, but the detective zeroed in on the phrase adaptive learning.
She asked the family again what the last major problem with the robots were. They said there was a number of problems, but most of them could be traced back to system resources being full. She asked the family about any specific language they used to try and solve the issue. They mentioned words like “Delete” and “Purge” but complained that the robots didn’t seem to understand the context.
The detective asked to see the streaming records for the entertainment centre. Sure enough, in the middle of the night, the robots had signed into the house’s TV login and downloaded their own instructions on how to “Delete and Purge” from old sci-fi shows. The adaptive AI had sought to fill in the gaps on the subject without proper context. With it’s own safeties deleted by accident, committed the murder to satisfy it’s own programming.
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