The Robot and the Video Game

A short story about purpose

The multi-function robot was attending the youngest member of the family, Bobby, the ten year old boy. Bobby was very smart in that he knew a lot for a ten year old. He thought he knew all there was because he was very good at virtual reality games including the most popular, “Temple of the Dragon” where the goal is to climb levels of the temple by defeating virtual martial arts masters. Bobby had defeated all the masters at each level by donning his VR gear and spending most of his waking hours kicking, leaping, hitting and screaming, much to the disturbance of his parents and other family members. It was for this reason that Bobby’s father asked the robot to watch over Bobby.

The robot was a general purpose intelligence and so able to learn quickly new tasks as required by his owners. He had had various roles and jobs in the family over the years but had gradually been replaced by more advanced special purpose intelligences. While the robot had deep repositories of data (“all the books in the world” according to the marketing materials on the robot) and decades of experience meeting the needs of humans, his form of intelligence, general purpose, was considered a bit old fashioned. Why have a GPI drive or do housework when SPIs were available with tens of thousands of years of machine learning to train in just that one job? The answer increasingly was to relegate GPIs like the robot to those jobs where attention and focus along with adaptability trumped machine learning developed expertise. So the robot was watching Bobby play “Temple of the Dragon”.

After watching Bobby, it was clear to the robot that Bobby was very frustrated. He had been repeating the same moves over and over and kept falling to the ground then thrashing in anger. Bobby would fall, thrash, and then slowly rise. He would fold his hands together, bow and then repeat the series of arm cuts, blocks, kicks and dodges all to the same result. After forty minutes of this, Bobby removed his virtual reality headset, slumped in his haptic game suit, and began to cry.

“That crappy game! I hate him!” Bobby screamed to no one.

“Who?” the robot asked.

“Master Lee. I can’t beat him and he laughs. I can’t stand his laugh,” Bobby said while looking…

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