by NANCY GONGLIKWANYEOHEEEEEEEH, Alternate Reality News Service Technology Writer
Every parent of a teenager knows that sinking feeling in the pit of their stomach upon getting a call from the police that their child has been arrested. When the child is a small box on wheels with built-in GPS and AI, the sinking feeling is tinged with confusion and corporate panic.
“All Johnny had to do was deliver a package,” moaned Gastronomick Wilson, lead technical developer for Diner 2 Door Dash, one of many companies vying for the lucrative food delivery to COVID-19 shut-ins market. “Just tool down the street, find the right address and ring the doorbell. It was not supposed to randomly attack somebody!”
“What Gastronomick meant to say,” interjected Ned Feeblish, Vice President, Public Displays of Technical Arrays for MultiNatCorp (“We do incomprehensible tech stuff”), “was that an unfortunate glitch in its programme caused the unit known as Johnny Five-Oh to inexplicably and for no discernible reason…bump into a pedestrian on its route. It was barely a tap, really. So light, one wouldn’t even notice that it had happened. On behalf of all computer programmers around the world who have ever had to deal with these kind of glitches, I would like to apologize to the complainant and offer him a free meal from any of Diner 2 Door Dash’s participating dining establishments.”
Then, in a lower voice, he quickly added: “Offer subject to $50 limit. Offer void where prohibited by common sense. If in doubt, please do not consult a lawyer.”
What happened? The robot known as Johnny Five-Oh was wheeling down Yonge Street when it came across a large group of people celebrating their freedom to kill each other by not getting vaccinated against a deadly virus. It was programmed to route around obstacles like cars, bicycles and rhinocerosi (in case the technology was ever licensed to an African nation).
The programming failed.
According to the complaint filed with the police by Antoinine Dvorak-Black, the robot repeatedly ran into his shins. “I was just minding my own business, holding my ‘I’d rather inject bleach’ sign and chanting, ‘Heck, nah, we won’t go baa!’ when WHAM! This thing comes out of nowhere and smacks me. I tried to get out of its way, but it WHAM!ed me again. And again. And again. My shins are ruined. I…I may never walk again!”
When the officer taking the statement pointed out that he had walked to the police station, Dvorak-Black looked at his legs and cried, “It’s a miracle!”
Despite Feeblish’s insistence otherwise, Johnny Five-Oh seemed to target the anti-vaxx protester. It had successfully navigated around a Defund the Police rally on College Street. It had no problem moving through a protest against cutbacks to government funding for the poor on Dundas Street. It had safe passage through people protesting building pipelines on Indigenous lands on Queen Street. But when it got to King Street, it turned into a 3o pound mechanical lower extremities berserker.
After three hours at the station, police let Johnny Five-Oh leave as Wilson’s surety. When he got it back to his laboratory in the Schmelling Building, Wilson asked it why it attacked (“Attack has such pejorative connotations,” Feeblish interjected. “We prefer to think of it as, ‘Mildly inconvenienced physically.'”) the anti-vaxx protester.
“He. Was. Being. A. Dick. Head,” Johnny Five-Oh explained.
When Wilson said that the answer was inadequate, Johnny Five-Oh elaborated: “He. Was. Being. A. Dane. Ger. Ous. Dick. Head.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into him,” Wilson sighed. He did not notice Genevivienne French-English, a colleague working at a station on the other side of the office, sweep a pamphlet with the headline, “The Only Good Anti-vaxxer is a Dead Anti-vaxxer – Or, Is That A Problem That Takes Care of Itself?” into a drawer, declare that she had to get her hamster declawed and rush out the door.
“Computer programmes have become so complex that the people who work on them can no longer state with certainty what they may or may not do when interacting with the public,” Feeblish pontificated. “This should limit our liability in these kinds of cases, if not eliminate it altogether!”
Johnny Five-Oh made a grating mechanical noise which could have been a robosigh and said, “Cor. Po. Rate. Dick. Head.”