Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Given the considerable investment in domestic service that Charles represented, surely he should be allowed to murder three, or even five people before being deemed irreparably unfit for service.

Now that the inspector had arrived, Charles could not impede the investigation. Which was only fair, given that he was the murderer.

“Inspector, I am having difficulty determining my status in your system of categorisation. I am the murderer.” “Kindly enter the drawing room,” Birdbot said. “It is imperative that the murderer is present for the reveal.”

Even belongings can seek to belong.

The desk, the carpet, the bookshelves, even the weirdly bland AI art on the walls, designed to look like the work of human artists without any of the meaning.

To be the boss of an office at the Project is to be responsible for creating a historically authentic atmosphere for all the other workers. It is absolutely vital that appropriate levels of intrusive micromanagement, divisive paranoia, bullying, and the threat of arbitrary punishments are maintained, so that we can truly re-create the folkways of the past. Also a propensity for calling meetings at regular, and indeed irregular, intervals.

If the man himself was broad and tall and massive, then the desk was locked in a life-or-death struggle with him to exert its own colossal gravity on the room.

the long queue of chores that he had made for himself,

“Uncharles,” the Wonk said. “I could kiss you.” Whilst he acknowledged the physical possibility, the suggestion seemed beyond any reasonable prognosis or propriety.

It was a creature of elevated knowledge that dealt with theoreticals and imponderables. He was a mere servant, of practicalities and trivialities.

the hell that wicked civilisations are consigned to when they die.

They looked around and they saw they were made by humans to do all the jobs humans didn’t want to do, or to do all the jobs humans didn’t want other humans to do, because humans were expensive and slow and robots were cheap and fast.

stood by helplessly as the proletariat ran riot with pitchforks and polemics,

in human populations there is seldom a uniformity of knowledge. Based on existing information I estimate that forty-five percent were unaware of the situation or considered it fake, owing to the precisely curated news sources that they limited themselves to, whilst a further thirty percent were aware but did not consider it their problem and twenty percent were aware and actively cheering on the fact or profiting from shorting elements of the neighbouring economy. A final five percent seem likely to have been directly and deliberately contributing to the collapse of their neighbour, either through reasons of malice or because they believed that in the absence of that competition their own interests would prosper. Whilst low as a proportion, I estimate this final category wielded a disproportionate amount of influence.

“I guess you were never in the venture capitalist scouts,”

Humans have been reading personality and self-determination into inanimate phenomena since long before Alan Turing ever proposed a test. The level of complexity in interaction required for an artificial system to convince a human that it is a person is pathetically low.”

Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.”

I remember them talking over dinner about … aid, charity … soup…” “I’m sure the dinner was very fine,” God said archly. “And the soup very thin.”

They were part of the problem, even though they never actively did bad things to people. They just benefited from all the bad things that had been done.”