I'm designed to be superficially damaged.
December 14, 2016 4:24 PM   Subscribe

[Audio Link] "You Had One Job" by Scott Brown is a short story about MILES (Mobile Intermediary Legate - Extreme Situations), a cheerful bomb disposal robot who likes helping people. The story was read by Jeremy Shamos as Act 3 of the December 2 episode of podcast This American Life, "Once More, With Feeling." SPOILERS for "You Had One Job" inside.

Brown was inspired to write the story by the robot that Dallas police used to kill Micah Xavier Johnson. Johnson had killed 5 police officers and wounded 11 more people in his July 2016 attack.


This American Life's
rough podcast transcript
offers a written version of "You Had One Job," but—since it was transcribed partially by robots—the text contains word and formatting errors. According to Brown's Twitter feed, a properly published prose version of the story is on its way soon.
posted by nicebookrack (12 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is great and sad and I can't tell if that's crouton-petting or not which is probably why.
posted by The Bellman at 4:48 PM on December 14, 2016 [2 favorites]


MILES (Mobile Intermediary Legate - Extreme Situations)

Legate?

leg·ate
ˈleɡit/
noun
1. a member of the clergy, especially a cardinal, representing the pope.
2. a general or governor of an ancient Roman province, or their deputy.
"the Roman legate of Syria"

Shit, no jobs are safe from automation.
posted by rodlymight at 5:06 PM on December 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


Name taken from transcript, so it may be a robot word error.
posted by nicebookrack at 5:09 PM on December 14, 2016


poor little robot.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 5:34 PM on December 14, 2016


I went into this one blind (deaf?) when I listened to TAL, and I was not ready.
posted by Anonymous at 5:58 PM on December 14, 2016


I'm struggling real hard between not giving a spoiler and showing appreciation so:

Asimov 3 rules.
Brilliant!!
posted by ITravelMontana at 6:47 PM on December 14, 2016


This story is brilliant, heartbreaking, and terrible. I heard it when the podcast came out and was both glad to have experienced it and depressed for the rest of the day. Poor little crouton robot.
posted by Flannery Culp at 7:01 PM on December 14, 2016 [3 favorites]


Surely spoilers are fair game once we're in the comments?

It seems that you can use Asimov's 3 laws in XKCD ordering #4 and NOT get a killbot hellscape as long as your test robot is a kind and progressive bot. You just get a robot with profound emotional scars instead.
posted by nicebookrack at 7:05 PM on December 14, 2016


Good story.

A couple of minor corrections?

"Ordnance" is the term for ammunition, explosives and mounted guns. Not "ordinance". Damn homonym and spellchecker/autocomplete interactions again... Even a robot can't avoid them.

That carbine fires a bullet probably not weighing more than about 5 grams (72 grains). It is not "lead", but a composite of a Lead/Antimony alloy, a steel penetrator and a Copper alloy jacket. I'm sure MILES properly recognized it as SS107 projectile, but a human transcription error was later made.
posted by bert2368 at 9:32 PM on December 14, 2016 [1 favorite]


The part of the story that keeps making me cry, and that resonates deeply in the wider context of the Black Lives Matter activism against police brutality, is MILES the robot's slowly dawning horror at the realization that MILES destroyed a person like a thing. MILES's entire existence is devoted to protecting people from harm, from ordnance. But instead of presenting MILES with a complex situation of possibly harming someone, Owen Jackson, to protect other people, the police instructed MILES that Jackson, a black man / probable murderer, no longer counted as a person. Literally dehumanizing.
posted by nicebookrack at 11:07 PM on December 14, 2016 [5 favorites]


I brought this story up in the Westworld thread over in Fanfare. Because of the events depicted in that season finale, I was already obsessing over these ethical dilemmas within an AI framework, and then hearing this story made thinking about what I thought was abstract ideas much more of an immediate concern.
posted by Stanczyk at 5:50 AM on December 15, 2016


I really enjoyed this on TAL. I thought the actor who read it also did a great job.
posted by 4ster at 11:58 AM on December 15, 2016


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