The Unprincipled Principle of Perverse Instantiation

I learned a cool term the other day, from a book about artificial intelligence: “Perverse Instantiation.” Perverse Instantiation in its most basic form is when you tell an artificial intelligence to do something and it does it, but only too well, to the point where its execution of your wish is a nightmare.
Let’s say, for instance, you have a Roomba (one of those disc-shaped vacuum cleaners that combs a room), but you’re sort of a teenaged Dr. Frink basement prodigy amateur scientist. You find a way to make your Roomba semi-sentient, or at least heuristic enough to take some extra demands that weren’t coded into the factory settings of the little vacuum. Being a hardware as well as a software man, you give your Roomba some sort of primitive seeing apparatus- maybe something you jerry-rigged from fish eyes you carved out of a bass you caught at a stream near your house (fish have cone-and-rod structures in their eyes, mostly)- which you then fuse somehow to your stepfather’s contact lenses.
You also break the legs off an old wooden Barcalounger that’s been sitting in your garage for a few months, and give the Roomba a couple of those carbon fiber Reacher/Grabber tools they sell at hardware stores, wired up to a series of pullies inside of the Roomba. Your former vacuum now looks like some sort of spider-bot in a very low-budget picture from the Fifties. And while he (or she or it) doesn’t have opposable thumbs, it can at least grasp.
Let’s call our Roomba “Ronnie Roomba.” And since this whole hypothetical already has a cheesy-charming vibe like an eighties movie, let’s say you program Ronnie Roomba to sneak into convenience stores and steal beers, and to lockpick the doors of houses in the neighborhood, in order for Ronnie to steal the panties of cute girls who go to your high-school. You code some basic lessons about facial symmetry into his program so that he has a nominal grasp on the concept of “attractive.” His secondary directive (after some Asimovian stuff about not harming humans) is to bring back undergarments and beer to your teenaged lair, the furnished basement you occupy in a house where your mom cohabitates with a boyfriend she met in AA, whom she later married in a gingerbread chapel in Vegas where an Elvis impersonator did the officiating.
Just to further educate Ronnie after realizing he is at least somewhat trustworthy and competent, you let him read (with his half-fish, half-contact eyes) all of the books, articles, and paperwork in your house. To ensure Ronnie has no trouble breaking into the houses of the girls you’re crushing on, you head-wire/jack him directly into your ethernet port and let him read about everything from lockpicking to stealth techniques. He even reads about several historical cases of jewel thefts and daring capers, and though you’re not sure, you somehow sense that Ronnie, though far from truly conscious at this point, is still more fascinated (if that’s the right word) by the narrative tales of derring-do than he is by the prosaic details of things like lock-picking. This could be anthropomorphic projection on your part, though, which is a problem, or at least a hurdle in sci-fi (this projecting of human tendencies and motives onto robots).
You’re thinking soon of letting him peruse your textbooks that spend more time in your backpack than open on your drafting desk, since the next step might be for the Ronnie Roomba to start doing your schoolwork. Though he’s nowhere near heuristic enough right now to be able to do something like write an essay, math shouldn’t be hard for him to master.
The process of building ever-more complex directives or skills or knowledge into an AI is known as scaffolding, if you’re curious.
The opposite of this process of scaffolding (or something close to it) is backpropagation. Remember the term.
After fitting Ronnie finally with a set of amtrac treads (making it easier for him to get up and down stairs) as well as a couple of motion sensors (just in case he needs to dodge some minimum wage clerk to time his beer thefts from the freezer case at the convenience store) you send him out into the world. You hope Ronnie doesn’t ignominiously end his life on his first day out into the world, say, by getting runover by some drunk football player in his Camaro, or getting bitten to pieces by a stray neighborhood dog who mistakes him for some kind of plastic mobile chew-toy on treads.
You sit in your basement bedroom, feeling a bit like the staff at NASA when all the hard work is done, and the unmanned probe is out there in space. You curse yourself for forgetting to microchip Ronnie with GPS (or to equip him with a camera), but there will be time for that later, if he makes it back from this first mission successfully.
You take a couple bong hits and admire your Magic Mountain blacklight poster for an hour or two, and contemplate masturbating just to relieve some tension and kill some time, when you hear the sonorous whining of Ronnie’s chugging gears.
He’s home!
You open the door and there he stands, or sits, perched with his “arms” draped in silken purple underwear and the claw portions of one hand filled with cold brews. It’s a Miller Light six pack in his hand, grasped by the cardboard carrying handle soaked through from beading condensation; they’re not your brand, but you remind yourself that you didn’t specify and that this is a preliminary mission, and you’re underage so you should take what you can get and be thankful for it.
Ronnie’s eyes watch you, emitting a greenish LED glow refracted in an eerie emerald prism broadcast through the real fish retinas. His glowing gaze remains fixed on you, as if in anticipation of a treat, some sort of reward. What would a robot want, though? Strands of code? Mined bitcoin?
“I did good?” Robbie asks, in the voice of Hulk Hogan. You programmed him with the wrestler’s ultra-aggressive heelish growl, because you’re familiar with all the old SF tropes, where the AI has an inhuman, affectless voice. This has never made sense to you, as the areas where one would have the chances to humanize the robot (especially in the voice) would be the ones where such dystopian flourishes would not be used. The airport gives this dumb atonal voice to the concourse shuttles to remind you to step back when the train is in motion; why would you outfit your own robot with such a cold impersonal voice?
“You did well, not good,” you say, taking an opportunity to polish his grammar while simultaneously leaning down to the robot to grab a beer. You’re about to nab your Swiss Army multipurpose tool from its place on top of the stereo speaker where your bong is sitting, in order to open your first brew, when you take a closer look at the panties on Ronnie’s arm, laying there like the white cloth of a maître-d.
They’re large, more comfy-looking than sensual, and drooping like a parachute over the poor frame of Ronnie.
“Ronnie,” you say, “where did you get these?”
“From a Mrs. Janet Lancaster.”
You pause, furrow your brow, think back to a PTA meeting or maybe a mom in a carpool. Janey Lancaster’s mom! Hot in a cushy Milf way, with wide hips and a frizzy brown hairdo that suggests she misses her own cheerleader days a couple decades ago and has decided to keep the hairstyle popular back in the eighties along with some memories of prom night. You always got the feeling when you saw her at school events that she pines for her lost youth, suspects her husband is cheating on her, and would have preferred never to have gotten married in the first place.
“But she’s not …”
You’re about to finish your protest, when you realize your mistake. The jade eyes of Ronnie almost look watery with disappointment, as if they might shed green tears for failing the master in this simplest of tasks. “I studied thirty years’ worth of archived yearbooks online, and noticed she was a girl who attended your high-school, as did her daughter. Your directive gave no more specific preference.”
“You’re right,” you say to Ronnie. You think of apologizing, wonder how he would take it, or if it’s necessary. But questions of the robot’s qualia are out of the picture for now, beyond the scope of your task or even the 101 philosophy stuff you’ve picked up from the handful of dogeared Nietzsche texts your brother left here one time on a trip back home from college for winter vacation.
Instead of complaining, you turn the silken layers of your crush’s mom’s underwear inside-out, take a deep breath of powerful (maybe even postmenopausal?) musk, catching a couple of steel wool like hairs in your nose and one even snakes into your mouth between the gap in your teeth.
There’s a tang not like the teenaged pussy you’ve managed to eat (count ‘em) twice in your young and sexually frustrated life. It’s a pungency, a tartness that, truth be told (and considering your perversions honed to perfection on the internet) is even better than what you’ve been exposed to by girls your own age. Your erection’s flush against your boxers, and you’re ready to masturbate to a primal litany of words so-powerful-yet-so-shameful that you’re afraid someone might hear even in your mind, but you do it anyway. Mommy pussy hair birth-giving powerful swollen wrinkled lickable lips of matriarchal goddess honeyed dripping dew.
You stop waxing perversely poetic, partly because you don’t want to whack off in front of this weird robot, since this level of deep-charged perversity is lights-out, blanket-over-the-head, regress-to-early-childhood-fantasy stuff. The other problem is that your robot has made a second, larger mistake that falls under the rubric of perverse instantiation, of doing what you tell him to do, but doing it too well, or too literally, or in a way that a genuinely heuristic machine would be able to avoid, or at least correct (that’s your previously mentioned backpropagation, at its most basic level).
The machine not only grabbed the panties of the mom of the girl whose panties you wanted, initially at least, (you’re going to be able to more than make do once it’s past midnight and you take a trip to your own internal fantasy-world of Cougerville: Population You and however many of your 100 Million Brain Cells aren’t paralyzed by pot smoke), but the machine is also grasping your calfskin wallet, you notice, in the claw not holding the remaining five beers in the six pack.
“Did you take that?” You ask.
You sense the retrofitted Roomba shrinking from you, with a near-human or at least animal fear, but you’re so scared yourself now that you don’t modify your behavior to make him less frightened.
“Yes,” the voice of Hulk Hogan says, coming from the saucer-shaped vacuum hull.
“But I told you to steal the beer, not buy it!” Surely this dumb box of bolts read a dictionary before he went out there!?
“I did steal,” Ronnie says, “but I required the wallet anyway.”
“Why?” You ask, heart sinking, erection wilting, middle-aged mom panties falling to the broadloom orange shag that carpets your basement bedroom from wood-paneled wall to wall.
Blue and red lights pulse from outside your window, splashing from the glass-encased bubbles of the sirens on top of a police cruiser parked in front of your house.
“According to my research,” Ronnie said, “one must present ID in order to obtain alcohol.”
You’re torn at this moment, between punching yourself in the face, lunging for the robot, or maybe trying to take one last hit on the bong before the officer walks up the walkway to the front door of your house, rings the doorbell, and your drowsy mother or half-assed stepfather answer in their PJs or bathrobes, roused from dry drunk dreams of Bill W sermons from the Big Book.
Hopefully the cops only know about the beer, though, and not the underwear. And hopefully Ronnie won’t snitch.
That’s perverse instantiation, made a bit more perverse by the fact that it’s been filtered through my even more perverse sensibilities. If you’ve read this post to the end, my apologies.