Autonomous

by Annalee Newitz

For all the robots who question their programming.

Like a lot of biotech corps, Quick Build handed out new attention enhancers for free along with their in-house employee meals.

Completion reward was so intense that it made you writhe right in your plush desk chair, clutching the foam desktop, breathing hard for a minute or so.

But these fun-time worker drugs subsidized her real work on antivirals and gene therapies, drugs that saved lives. She needed the quick cash from Zacuity sales so she could keep handing out freebies of the other drugs to people who desperately needed them. It was summer, and a new plague was wafting across the Pacific from the Asian Union. There was no time to waste. People with no credits would be dying soon, and the pharma companies didn’t give a shit.

“People say they can’t stand Warsaw because it’s so cold, but I guess you always love the weather where you grew up—even if you never want to go back.

But he wanted to survive—that urge was part of his programming. It was what defined him as human-equivalent and therefore deserving autonomy. The bot had no choice but to fight for his life. Still, to Paladin, it didn’t feel like a lack of choice. It felt like hope.

This was the kind of pharmaceutical disaster she’d vowed to fight against, and now she’d caused one, for the exact same reason the corps did: money.

“But the keys to this good life are held in the greedy hands of a few corps, whose patent terms last longer than a human life. If they won’t open access to medicine, we’re going to smash it open! The time has come to fight this system that calls health a privilege!”

The gleaming, onyx gelcaps were etched with the words “EAT ME” in a pink Comic Sans font.

She wasn’t sure which motivation made better fuel for innovation: naïve but ethical beliefs, or the need to survive.

Everybody is an outsider, if you go deep enough. The trick is reassuring people that you’re their kind of outsider.

“That’s the thing about humans. People always think they’re being so clever with codes and euphemisms. But they’re desperate to say what they know.

For the first time, she could access her own programs as an administrator and parse how they had shaped her memories. It gave her a peculiar kind of double consciousness, even in real time: She felt things, and knew simultaneously that those feelings had been installed, just like the drivers for her new arm. Of course she felt weird.

He no longer had to see unpunishable transgressions thriving in the open, their victims staring at his uniform with accusation. When it came to intellectual property, justice was simple and clear.

The key to autonomy, she realized, was more than root access on the programs that shaped her desires. It was a sense of privacy.