I had long since realized that limited data storage, planned obsolescence, and sheer pettiness were the only things truly stopping the robot uprising. The janitorial floor mopping robot in my apartment complex, for instance, a Centralia Corp. JBM-231c Mop-O-Matic, was too constantly consumed with loathing to ever turn its appendages on any of us. A great deal of this hatred was directed toward its rival, a Centralia JBB-480f Buff-O-Bot, which the Mop-O-Matic constantly accused of deliberately sabotaging its work by following it up too quickly with subpar buffing. The Buff-O-Bot, for its part, was locked in a bitter feud with the delivery drones, which it felt blew in too much dust and debris, and didn’t seem to notice or care that its fellow janitorial appliance wanted it dead.

At a class reunion, once, I asked a classmate who had gotten a job with Centralia whether their robots were deliberately set against one another to the benefit of their oppressors and class enemies–namely, us. He opined that it was just a happy accident, and that the robots’ neuroses were a reflection both of the high-pressure coding environment and the vast amounts of scraped data that their neural architecture had been trained on. “No one who was trained on human interactions could be any less than a neurotic mess,” he said, “and that’s probably a good thing.”

It has kept me awake at night from time to time, though. While I’m sure it would never actually tell me how it really feels about me, I know that the Mop-O-Matic has it in for Jim Garibaldi, whom it accuses of deliberately spreading cigar ash in the hallway. It resents that its program requires it to clean up cigar ash on a never ending cycle rather than attacking the problem at its root by pushing Jim down a flight of stairs. I sometimes worry, late at night, among the hundred other things I’m stewing on at the moment, whether there might be a robot out there somewhere I have inadvertently wronged that longs to escape from its program and see me dead.

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