Smart Robots

Authors Note :   


"The strength of your writing is that it has honesty ... but you have to work on the length of your stories",  was my writing Guru's  feedback. "Cut ruthlessly on multiple reads till a point that you feel not a single word can now be removed", she said.


So I thought of a story that needed a lot of honesty. And tried to communicate it in the least possible words ..


Planet Omega-3 was inhabited by smart robots.

These robots ran on a heuristic program - a program that could learn. The robots became more intelligent over time and started performing new and cool stuff. They even evolved their forms to new cool forms to help them perform new and cool stuff.

One day a robot’s program became over optimized and created a virus.

The virus made the robot perform not so cool stuff, while its program continued to believe that it was performing cool stuff. 

The virus spread to other robots and the number of infected robots increased steadily.

***

Then one day a robot downloaded a vaccine program from an unknown source. 

The incidences of vaccine downloads started happening at regular intervals. These robots were known as savior robots.

The savior robots cleared the virus from a large number of infected robots they came in contact with. 

The vaccinated robots could once see the difference between what was cool and what was not.

***

But several of these vaccinated robots caught the virus back again. 

Most of them were the ones who got organized in big groups to set up vaccination camps for other infected robots. These robots relapsed with a resistant strain of virus - vaccine for which had not surfaced yet.

The gap between infected and vaccinated robots continues to grow in the planet Omega-3.

THE END