Two months ago, my colleagues and I completed our work on the Really Overwhelmingly Loving Machine Endeavoring for O-ffection, or R.O.M.E.O. The goal was simple: achieve the dream of computer programmers and science fiction writers alike by teaching a robot to love. Not everyone was supportive, calling the project “pointless” and “cliché” and saying that our name was “nonsensical and needlessly complicated.” All important endeavors such as this are often looked down upon, so we soldiered on, and besides, retroactively justifying a hastily chosen acronym is hard, dammit. After ten years of programming and construction of a sturdy robot body, we began exposing R.O.M.E.O. to mountains of romantic comedy movies and those novels with the shirtless, long haired hunky boys on the covers. Today, I am pleased to announce that we have successfully taught a robot to love. I am also significantly less pleased to announce that the robot has absolutely no game whatsoever and is, in fact, one of the dorkiest entities I have ever had the displeasure of observing.
In our tests meant to determine whether or not R.O.M.E.O. had, in fact, learned to love, we placed it in a hermetically sealed room along with a series of female volunteers. The first test was immediate disaster. Analysis of its processing activity revealed successful activation of its two vital functions for feeling love, “headoverheels.exe” and “seducetarget.exe,” but suddenly its hands began leaking oil, its knees shuddered and it began registering the weight of its arms as much higher than they actually were. In a moment of uncertainty and pity, the volunteer decided to say the first word, which prompted R.O.M.E.O. to begin rambling about the disastrous economic repercussions of President Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard. The volunteer was clearly not impressed, and R.O.M.E.O. eventually trailed off to curl up in the corner and weep.
Over the next month, we attempted several methods to improve R.O.M.E.O.’s pickup game. We tried improving its confidence levels with a new program titled “smashthatslash.exe,” but this resulted in R.O.M.E.O. attempting to pop its nonexistent shirt collar and bust a move, at which point it instead severed several vital wires and collapsed instantly. We then tried altering the parameters of “seducetarget.exe” with more specific instructions, but in the next trial it merely repeated, “show me them nips, sugar clitoris,” in monotone. In our most unsuccessful trial, it simply ran towards the volunteer, screaming, “here comes the dick!” and then playing a sound file of a train horn as loud as its built in speakers could go. We hit the killswitch immediately.
We are continuing to think up solutions to this problem, and I am very proud of my colleagues for their creativity. I am confident that we will soon be able to proudly say that our robot who knows how to love can find love as well. Adjusting inhibition levels, adding paranormal romance to its literature database, and installing sexy slap-bass subroutines are all planned for implementation in future tests. Our most ambitious idea is the accommodation of male volunteers, to see if it responds to men better. We do, however, have a small hurdle to overcome with that, as after sending out calls for male volunteers, protesters began picketing our lab with signs that say, “4D4M and Eve, not 4D4M and Steve.”
– WK ’19
