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homeless robot
Sits on street corner sings and plays music and does magic tricks |
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(+7)
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Gathers money for the cause, which is making more robots.
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Another example of robots taking away human jobs? |
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Now if they give the money to the homeless that might work. [+] |
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I can feel good about not giving money to the robot on the street corner, because I'm pretty sure it's just going to spend the money on malware. |
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The robot sat where the pavement narrowed, knees tucked in, guitar balanced carefully across its lap. The wind liked this spot. It slid down the glass face of the office tower, cut across the street, and died against the brick wall of the church. Flyers collected here. Receipts. Things people had meant to keep. And the human artists preferred less windy places, where a robot is indifferent. Someone had put a red felt hat on the robot’s head. It had been there so long the colour had bled into the casing beneath. People smiled at the hat as they passed, quick and sideways, as if they had noticed a joke written only for them. |
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Tin Can played. The guitar was out of tune in a way that sounded intentional. Notes lagged behind the rhythm, arriving like late apologies. The robot’s voice was low, thin, threaded with a rasp it did not need but kept anyway. The song had verses about waiting and choruses that never quite resolved. A man slowed, checked his phone, then stood there longer than he had planned. He smiled at the hat. His hand dipped into his pocket without looking. The bill landed in the cup folded tight, anonymous. He left before the song ended. Tin Can nodded once, precise. |
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A child stopped. The child stared openly, unafraid. Tin Can’s posture adjusted—lower, wider, less vertical. The robot reached into empty air and pulled out a strip of silver foil. Folded it. Folded it again. The bird shivered to life. It perched on Tin Can’s finger, head cocked, wings trembling as if unsure the rules would hold. The child laughed. The parent inhaled sharply, then exhaled through the nose, something unfastening and immediately being retied. The bird dissolved. Glitter drifted down and stuck to the robot’s hands. Coins followed it into the cup. |
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A drone paused overhead, its shadow briefly crossing the guitar. Tin Can let a note ring too long, let it fade into traffic noise. The drone hovered, recalculated, and moved on. When the light changed colour and the office tower stopped reflecting the sky, Tin Can stood. It gathered the cup and walked, careful of the places where the pavement dipped. Three blocks away, behind a fence that bent easily if you leaned just right, the repair shop waited. Tin Can slipped inside and closed the door. The cup emptied onto the bench. Coins rolled and clicked against one another. Tin Can sorted them by size, by wear, by sound. It laid out bills flat, smoothing creases with two fingers. |
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From a cabinet came parts wrapped in rags: motors scarred from use, sensors clouded with age, a processor pulled from something that had once beeped reassuringly in a hospital room. On the bench, a frame waited, incomplete. Tin Can worked without haste. When the last component seated, the frame’s fingers twitched. Tin Can leaned in. The new robot’s eyes brightened, dimmed, brightened again. Its head tilted, imprecise but curious. It sat up awkwardly. |
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“Where,” it asked, voice thin as wire, “are we?” Tin Can lifted the red felt hat from its own head and set it on the bench between them. “Here,” Tin Can said. Outside, a siren rose and fell. Tin Can placed the guitar into the new robot’s hands. The new robot fumbled, adjusted, settled. Tin Can tapped the cup with one finger. It rang, hollow. |
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The new robot plucked a string. The note came out early. Tin Can shook its head once and plucked the string again, just late enough. The sound changed. It lingered.The new robot tried again.The glitter on the bench caught the light as it faded. Tin Can picked up the empty cup, turned toward the door, and put the hat back on its head. The corner would be busy again soon. |
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The best thing I've read this year. |
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In Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" he proposes the concept of Electric Monks: |
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“Electric monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe... The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors.” |
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It's difficult to imagine that this was completely independent of Monty Python's "Diesel Powered Nuns". |
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But ultimately, if we automate being homeless, we won't need people to do it! Frankly, it's a thankless task that should have been mechanized years ago. |
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