He came to find me that afternoon, begging to be allowed to be on the team. See, the right story is everything.
We started by gathering manuals on child care and running them through the semantic abstracter for fundamental rules of good parenting.
That . . . turned out to be a hopeless task. The manuals were about as consistent as fashion advice: for every book that advocated one approach, there were two books that argued that particular approach was literally the worst thing that one could do. Should babies be swaddled? How often should they be held? Should you let them cry for a few minutes and learn to self-soothe or comfort them as soon as they started to fuss? There was no consensus on anything.
The academic literature was no more illuminating. Child psychology experts conducted studies that proved everything and nothing, and meta-studies showed that most of them could not even be replicated.
The science of child rearing was literally in the dark ages.
But then, while flipping through the TV channels late at night, I stopped at a nature program: The World’s Best Mothers.
Of course, I cursed myself for my stupidity. Parenting was a solved problem in nature. Once again, the modern neurosis of overthinking had created the illusion of impossibility. Billions of years of evolution had given us the rules that we should be following. We just had to imitate nature.
*
Since academics had proven basically useless on this subject, in order to find my model, I turned to that ultimate fount of wisdom: the web. Every Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, every eyeballs-hungry site seemed to publish listicles that purported to describe the animals that qualified as the world’s best mothers and fathers.
There was the orangutan, whose baby clings to the mother continuously for the first few years of its life.
There was the deep-sea octopus, Graneledone boreopacifica, who did nothing but guard her eggs for four and a half years—not even eating—until they hatched.
There was the elephant, who, besides a long gestational period, engaged in extensive alloparenting as members of the herd all participated to raise the babies.
And so on and so forth . . .
. . . and putting them together, I had my story: the paragon of parenting, the essence of bottled love.
I would replicate the self-sacrificing, participatory alloparenting groups of nature with robots. Busy modern urban parents didn’t know their neighbors and lived away from extended family, but a network of weRobot devices would be almost as good. Our robotic vacuums, laundry folders, and Vegnors could all pitch in to keep the customers’ children safe and act as playmates—incidentally, this also encouraged customers to purchase more weRobot devices, which was always a good thing. Devices from neighboring residences could also collaborate to watch over both households’ children even without the parents being best friends—trust was ensured by the standardization of weRobot algorithms. The proprietary local area wireless network substituted for nonexistent or fraying social bonds.
“Mary Poppins,” I vowed, “with her umbrella open!”
Dr. Vignor modeled the neural patterns driving the behaviors of dozens of animals judged to be good parents by the wisdom of the web, and after extensive software emulation, it was time to test the first prototypes.
I posted the call for volunteers on weRobot’s internal network, and to my surprise and puzzlement, there weren’t nearly as many takers as I had hoped.
“There aren’t that many parents working here,” Amy said when I complained to her. “That’s not exactly a secret about this place. Look at the schedule you’re keeping. It’s not very compatible with starting a family, is it?”
“Even more evidence that there’s a market for this product!” I said. The key to dreaming the impossible was to see opportunities where others saw only problems. “Just think of all the lost productivity due to parents not being able to devote as much time and energy to their careers because they have to run home to deal with their offspring.” I was practically rubbing my hands in glee. “Marketing should be able to hint at this subtly in the TV ads. Power couples who spend less time parenting than they do at the gym ought to make a striking addition to the value proposition.”
“Did you just use the phrase ‘lost productivity’ non-ironically?” Amy asked, shaking her head. “And ‘value proposition’?”
Since there weren’t enough internal volunteers, I had to expand the beta testing program by asking my team to recruit friends and family.
I found a super-scary NDA for some other weRobot project on the corporate intranet—the lawyers were good for something after all—and a few search-and-replace macros later, I had a way to ensure that no one would leak any information to competitors or the Luddite press, which was always sniffing for news about upcoming tech products that they could exaggerate into dystopian visions to sell the papers.
*
Emily enthused to me about the new addition to her family.
“It’s incredible!” she gushed on the phone. “I’ve never seen Danny so well-behaved. Para changes him and feeds him and rocks him to sleep, and he loves it! Eric and I are finally able to get a good night’s sleep. Everyone at work has been begging me for the number of the au pair agency I’m using.”
I beamed with pride. Para was a marvel of engineering. The body-temperature, medical-grade synthskin, and the oscillator thumping at the rhythm of heartbeat were designed to calm newborns. The robot’s eight arms, made of series elastic actuators for safety, and precision manipulators allowed the machine to handle delicate child-care tasks with aplomb: it could change a diaper, feed, powder, massage, tickle, and give a bath using power-delivery curves that provided maximum physical comfort to the baby, all while humming a pleasant, soft song, folding laundry, and picking up dropped toys with its extra arms.
But the crowning achievement of Para, of course, was its neural programming. Para was the perfect parent-surrogate. It never got tired or bored; it never stopped giving the baby 100 percent of its attention; it was equipped with eons of evolutionary instinct drawn from the animal kingdom judged to suit human needs: it would protect the baby at all costs and was capable of reacting to save the child from any and all emergencies.
“I’m enjoying my time with Danny so much more now. I feel calmer, more patient, and I get to give my attention to all the fun parts of being a parent. It’s incredible.”
“I’m really glad,” I said to my sister. I felt like a wreck. I had pushed my team to the limit, and hearing my sister being so pleased made all the hard work worth it.
*
Monday morning, my phone buzzed as I rode on the work shuttle. My heart clenched and then beat wildly as I read the text.
Why are Jake and Ron summoning me? There was only one answer: my skunkworks project had been discovered.