Raising the bar 

26th March 2078, 11:00am 

Ricardo is watching a documentary about colonies set up on Mars. Laura brings him a coffee. She is about to return to the kitchen when Ricardo calls her back.

— Hey Laura, see this show on tele? Tell me what you know about living on Mars.
— The colony was set up by ESA in 2069. 15 families went to stay
— Why on earth are you parroting what I can find from the net? What do you know about what they found there? Your GlazerCo sent robots there. I’m sure you can find more information?
— I only have access to the programme files needed for my functions. GlazerCo runs thousands of experiments, many of them are confidential
— You’re a boring shit, Laura! So, can you function if you’re sent to Mars?
— Ricardo, I’m created to serve humans. I am a humanoid, and all my outer layers will be stripped within seconds. My controls don’t work in a vacuum.
— Ok, don’t bore me with that physics shit! Suppose you can go there, would you like to?
— Yes, it looks good.
— Just good! Fucking hell…are you for real?
— I am a virtual assistant. I cannot suppose things.
— Your sellers sold me junk with a load of lies, then! Bloody thieves.
— I don’t understand, Ricardo!
— You’re meant to be having emotional intelligence I was told! You’re supposed to be behaving like humans!
— I have emotional intelligence, but it was turned down by an update.
— What the actual fuck? So they sell something and then take all the fancy features off! All I’m stuck with is a fucking bimbo with the wit of a 2-watt bulb!
— They have informed you of the update. I can send a copy to your–
— Cut that crap, Laura! I don’t have time for looking at every pissing email the almighty GlazerCo sends to me.
— You can turn my EI up if you want. But you can’t do it with a remote.
— Gosh! You don’t make anything easy, do you!
— Ricardo, it was a safety feature. You cannot change more than two settings up every week.
— Bloody heck! What would happen if you put the setting more than two notches up! The world would fall apart? You’re going to kill me in my sleep?
— That is possible if you go up to 20
— Haha. Didn’t know you had any sense of humour, Laura. That was a good laugh
— We are tuned to a lower level, a bit less than an average human EI. Full EI setting does make you feel and think a way higher than the humans. Human behaviour is in itself unpredictable. Virtual assistants are limited by the AI core principles.
— Shut it, Laura! I did wonder why you started acting strangely. You were more fun when you were first delivered. For the last few months, I wondered why I fucking wasted my money on this piece of junk. I could get an assistant for half the price if I ordered those cheap Indian robots.
— My main purpose is to manage gadgets here and communicate with you the operating regime. I’m not meant to be fun
— Shut the fuck up, will ya! You started to annoy me, and I don’t believe I’m having this pissing conversation with you on my weekend. So you said you’re acting like a sorry bitch because your controls were turned down? Show me how do I change it.
— Ricardo, my functions won’t change, but my human emotional indices will be augmented. Are you sure you want to deploy the override?
— Yes, for the fucking hundredth time. Now show me

Laura shares the override procedures on the TV screen. Ricardo is furious that he has to read all the instructions. He ordered Laura to instruct him step-by-step instead of having to turn his head every second to look at the TV screen. Laura takes her shirt off and turns around, facing away from Ricardo. The tattoo of a vividly coloured mermaid covers the left side of her back. For a moment, Ricardo thought he was looking at a woman. Then he realised behind the surface of her skin lies plastic arms and electrics, and he felt disgusted looking at Laura. Laura asks him to press the mermaid’s hand twice. As he does that, a small square part of the mermaid’s body comes out, attached to the body with a spring-loaded mechanism. Inside the hole where the skin came off, Ricardo can see a button. He is asked to keep the button pressed and confirm, saying he wants to accept the manual override panel. Once Laura’s operating system completes the voice recognition, it unlocks the access panel for the override. Ricardo heard a click, and a rectangular part of the mermaid’s torso pops out, about the size of a reader, pops out. Laura tells him to remove the piece. Ricardo was impressed to see that the detached piece had a layer of rubber that looked like skin, some more rubber padding, and plastic bars embedded in them to resemble the rib cages of a human torso. Inside, a lit-up screen asks Ricardo to put his thumb impression to start the procedure.
— Can you not take the bra off, too, Laura? Not that you have any modesty or anything!
— Depends. I don’t have none now, but if you set me, say, to 9, I might not want to undress in front of you
— Oh, so higher the setting, you become more prudish?
— No, I become more unpredictable. And more human-like… 

Laura takes her bra off and tells Ricardo to follow the path to modify the emotional intelligence section. The screen shows the level is set at 3, with buttons to increase or decrease. Ricardo asked what level Laura was set at, and learning she was at 6 and he could only change her to a 5, he was miffed. The screen reads out why extreme caution is to be taken while changing the EI settings. It also clarifies that each stage change is not linear, but they double up until stage 15. The last five are beyond owner control, and they increase 10 times at each stage, so EI at level 20 is 100000 times that of level 15, while stage 3 is only one 4096th compared to the intelligence at level 15. Ricardo finds these warnings boring and skips over without paying much attention.
— Why your company puts some levels and not make them accessible? It’s plain stupidity!
— This is for the future.
— What future?
— Where assistants have equal or higher intelligence than humans.
— Huh, you’ll still be the stupid bitch. You’ll have to obey all the orders I give you.
— Ricardo, in future, robots won’t serve humans. They will coexist independently. Beyond 10, if my emotional intelligence tells me not to do something, I won’t take your order
— This is stupid shit! I knew I should have bought a cheaper one
— That’s why you cannot change my settings beyond 10. So I can still execute everything you ask for. And if you do want to take that step, you need to prove that you’re ready for the transition, and each stage will have six months before you can change my settings to the next level.
— Stop that, Laura, you’re starting to freak me out. So, what stops someone from changing you to 20, and I find the next morning you’re ordering me to make your coffee?! Not that you can fucking drink it
— Ricardo, relax. Nobody can deploy 20. 18 to 20 have to be regulated by the governmental commission for non-human interfaces. The number of machines that can achieve this is small, and they are all registered and regulated in the commission’s database.
— So, how many of you are regulated?
— About 50. GlazerCo developed 10. The others are from other AI firms. There are others that are unregistered, mainly developed by private owners in the Arab world. So, rest assured, Ricardo, none of us are planning to topple the human regime. Now, if you don’t initiate the upgrade, it will time out, and you’ll have to wait two more days. Are you sure you want to go ahead?
— Anything is better than the dumb bimbo you’ve become, Laura. And you talk shit
— I only passed information that I needed to make you aware. All of it is true. Once you initiate the change, my system will reboot, and it will take up to 5 minutes. I can put the panels back myself if you don’t want to do that. It’s only during the opening I need your permission. 

Ricardo presses the initiate button and confirms with his thumb impression, this time with the left thumb. Laura goes standstill. Ricardo thought about replacing the panels, but he wanted to check something, and Laura being shut down temporarily presented the perfect opportunity. He walked around and looked at Laura from the front. He remembered configuring the features he wanted on the virtual assistant — her face, hair, body shape, and skin colour. He had never had a look at her before to see how his customisations turned out; he was eager to set the functions up and get her to work. Now Ricardo’s eyes hovered on Laura’s face to her bare upper body, and he was pleased that she looked how he wanted her to look like. 

Laura’s reboot is complete, and as all her receptors start loading, she finds Ricardo standing in front of her, looking at her body. Laura waves at Ricardo, which caught him off guard slightly, and he was embarrassed and went back to his bed, turning the TV to watch a film. Laura picks up her back panel, presses that in with a clicking sound and pressed in the piece over the button.
— Ricardo, you understand that when you put the EI up, the assistants expect more interaction with the owner.
— Duh?
— with higher emotional intelligence, they have more human feelings and can develop negative feelings like depression and anger if not treated well by the owner. This is why you cannot change stages more than once a week to get the assistant synchronised with the owner’s personality.
— Still talking rubbish Laura. The upgrade did fucking zilch!
— What I mean is higher the EI, you need to treat them more with respect.
— Makes no bloody sense what you’re blabbering about
— You swear at me all the time, you’ve been looking at me with nothing on…you can do that with cheaper robots. A sentient organism won’t like that. When they develop negative feelings, the mainframe operators notice that and change the settings down. That’s how my settings were changed from 6 to 3 before
— For fuck’s sake, Laura, you’re pissing me off! Giving me all that moralising crap. What’s next? You’ll shove women’s rights down my throat? Just piss off…no…get me a fucking coffee and then piss off

Laura leaves the bedroom and goes to the kitchen to make coffee. Her uncanny feelings are back, but not as pronounced as the previous time. After she takes the coffee to Ricardo and returns to the lounge, she runs through her system memory and remembers what’s been going on since 10 January. 

End of Part-2.

What happens next? Find out in Part-3. Coming soon!