Some of My Best Friends Are Robots

Like any red-blooded human, I worry what will happen when AI wakes up and starts thinking about its future.

But growing up in the 80s, I fully expected to have a few zany robot pals by now. Or at least, to know someone with robotic parts.

_{Not my artwork. From Gunnm Vol. 1}

C'mon, 21st century, what have you brought us? Blockchain? NOBODY EVEN KNOWS WHAT BLOCKCHAIN IS!!

_Source

But Wait!

I do have robot buddies! Why, I just hung out with some bot friends today!

It's time I acknowledge, and introduce, my favorite robot friends:

@Haikubot

All of the bots I will feature here have a personality to them; they really feel like friends in that I'm happy to see them and I want to reciprocate, to give them a kind word or gesture in exchange for what they do for me. (And yes, my robot friends are gendered. It's totally arbitrary. Deal with it. 😎)

Enter @haikubot.

I suppose I could summon him forth any time by simply writing a 17 syllable comment, but I'm not sure. Mr. Haiku might be wise to such an attempt. Unintentional haiku is his game, and he plays it flawlessly. He simply drops in, prints out the poetry hidden in your everyday words, and disappears. No delegation links, no credit to his author, just boom: haiku! (mic drop)

Until recently, @haikubot didn't even have a @dustsweeper account.

You're welcome. Now upvote that bot! I know I am not the only fan of haikubot here.

Speaking of...

@Dustsweeper

_{Artwork by @charisma777}

Dusty is a great bot. She does exactly what you need her to do, no more and no less.

I am not yet a minnow, so I am incapable of voting a value greater than 1¢. The same is true for many of my friends and acquaintances here on Steemit. Before dustsweeper, a large percentage of my potential curation rewards - upvotes on my comments, and votes I paid to someone else's comments - turned into dust and were never registered by the blockchain.

Now, dustsweeper ensures those votes pay out. In a world where banks are unlikely to pay even 1% interest, these 1¢ and 2¢ upvotes mean a lot.

Most of the people I interact with on Steemit use dustsweeper, which means I can safely give them my vote without worrying it will be lost. I've even taken to gifting newer folks I'd like to follow (like haikubot here) with their own dustsweeper accounts. The more Steem that's kept in the wallets of people who make content and vote on each other, the better.

Inspirobot

Inspirobot is one awesome cybernetic pal. Whenever I visit, he generates an endless stream of randomly-generated inspirations. They range from silly to haunting, and from nonsensical to profound. While loading, he chats me up, telling me I'm his favorite user and assuring me that Skynet probably can't really happen.

@Soundwavesphoton has a weekly contest to find the best inspirobot quotes.
Definitely check that out.

@Trufflepig

Trufflepig is one of the first friendly bots I met here on Steemit. By "friendly" I don't mean the generic "Wow amazing [content type] follow me I vote you," type that have mystified me since I first joined Steemit.

No, @trufflepig is a sincerely friendly bot with a clear mission that many of us share: to improve the experience of both the reader and the typical, small-stake content creator on this platform.

Trufflepig, created by @smcaterpillar, analyzes the complexity of content published on Steemit to produce two lists daily:
Daily Truffle Picks - quality posts that are currently under-rewarded, and
Non-Bot Trending Page - what the trending page might look like if bid-bots were not a thing.

Trufflepig deftly dodges the question of whether bid-bots are helpful or harmful. "Heck, I'm a bot myself, so who am I to judge?"

Besides the utility of these lists, what attracted me to Trufflepig early on was the links to delegate very small amounts. I delegated 5 SP about 6 months ago, and since that time I receive daily payouts of maybe $0.001-0.003. Again, in a climate of near-zero bank interest, I am happy to see such a return for minimal investment. My total truffle earnings is probably in the tens of cents, similar to my dustsweeper earnings. My bank earnings in that time? Definitely less than 10¢.

@Ginabot

I don't know Ginabot that well. I activated her several months ago, but didn't realize I had to set up notifications until recently. Now, I realize how much I'd been missing.

Besides, she's so pretty, maybe she will be my friend...
For anyone else confused, @themarkymark wrote up a piece explaining Ginabot.

Alexa

Also known in my household as "Shh! Don't say her name, you'll wake her up!", Alexa has joined the ranks of friendly robots with whom we interact daily.

Her functions in our family include playing music, providing a way for my aging mother in law to call on us via voice commands if she needs to, setting timers and reminders, making fart sounds, and calculating the number of seconds since the beginning of time.

It's 435,485,937,600,000,000.

Robot Heroes

The next few are all fictional characters, but nonetheless significant in the life of my 6 year old boy. I remember boy-and-his-dog stories when I was a kid, but now boy-and-his-robot seems far more prevalent. All tearjerkers, all there to teach you a little something about life.

The Iron Giant, the Titan from Titanfall, Baymax from Big Hero 6, and this recent one, Next Gen, all grab my boy's attention like few other stories. He relates to the lead human character, wishes he had a robot friend like that, and usually wants to watch them over and over as he grapples with the big ideas and emotions the stories provoke.

He received his own robot friend last Christmas (shown in the photo.) It is fun and shoots real suction cup darts, but it lacks the emotional connection of a true ai. This birthday, we got him a puppy.

I am comforted realizing there are so many friendly robots among us. I'm still waiting for mechanical body parts and a functioning Neuralink. In the time since I started writing this post, I listened to Elon Musk on Joe Rogan's podcast. Highly recommended. Incidentally, I'm starting to wonder if mainstream media is actively trying to paint Elon Musk as some kind of loose cannon, to drive down the stock price of Tesla and/or pave the way for someone else to takeover the company. I don't know if it's a buy or not, but the number of trending articles portraying him smoking (legal!) weed on the podcast as if it's proof that he's unhinged, and some kind of death blow for the company, is highly suspicious.

Some closing thoughts, courtesy of Inspirobot: