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[FelixSparks]

2. There's no "write it down and do it later" option, so we're guaranteed to forget if we don't do it now.

I concur.

[High tyrol]

2. There's no "write it down and do it later" option, so we're guaranteed to forget if we don't do it now.

I concur.

1+

[Vgray]

You noticed throughout the test that some things were off in the way Joyeuse moved—the distribution of weight wasn't quite what your simulations predicted. The longer Joyeuse has ill-fitting parts, the longer it will get used to moving around with them, and the harder it will be for you to change its body.

You spend the rest of the day fiddling with CAD files, printing replacement parts, and seeing how Joyeuse moves around with them. By the time you're done, you've yet again stayed up very late. But when Joyeuse rolls, there's now a precision in its stops and starts. When it raises its multitool hands, it does so with style. Your attention to the perfection of form has paid off, and you go to sleep happy. (++Grace)

The next day, the new semester begins. Though you're past the point of taking classes, you're a teaching assistant, and that means instead of doing one homework assignment, you grade fifty. You're also busy writing a grant proposal for the National Science Foundation, trying to get an alternate source of funding that doesn't involve the military. Grant proposals are very long, it seems, and require you to make a lot of claims about things you don't actually know yet.

Despite your other time commitments, you've managed to sneak in a little time to work on Joyeuse's motor programs. (+Grace)

You soon realize that, while you're busy, Joyeuse could be learning from the Internet. The most important thing for machine learning is more data, and there's a lot of it out there.

Lately, there have been a lot of custom hard drives on the market that are good at quickly retrieving particular kinds of information. What sort of hard drive did you order for Joyeuse's long-term memory?

1) A media-enhanced hard drive, good for quickly recalling faces and memories of events.
2) A multiblade hard drive that can efficiently store and query a giant amount of data.
3) An encrypted and tamper-proof hard drive, making it more difficult for Joyeuse to be tampered with or reverse-engineered.

Spoiler: Current Stats (click to show/hide)

Year: 2019

24-year-old Isaac Tesla
  Humanity: 80%
  Gender: male
  Fame: 0 (Who?)
  Wealth: 0 (Broke)
  Romance: none

Joyeuse

  Autonomy: 10 (Stable)
  Military: 9 (In Beta)
  Empathy: 9 (In Beta)
  Grace: 6 (In Beta)

Relationships
  Professor Ziegler: 50%
  Elly (Good): 55%
  Josh (Good): 57%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%

[NRDL]

3

[FelixSparks]

I'm good with 3, though it is a tricky decision.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Oh crap, a robot learning from the internet? This is going to end badly.

I agree with 3.

[Vgray]

Both in business and on the battlefield, it can be important not to leak secrets. Joyeuse will have a hard drive that will give miscreants a hard time in reverse engineering your design. (++Military) However, encryption and decryption is slow, and sometimes there will be a noticeable lag before Joyeuse can retrieve relevant memories. (-Grace) You lay Joyeuse on your kitchen table, unbox the hard drive, and hook it up to its back. It squirms and flails its multitool hands as you do this.

Now it's time for Joyeuse to learn about the great, wide world. You sit Joyeuse down on one of your kitchen chairs and plug it into your apartment's high speed Internet jack.

How will Joyeuse rapidly learn a lot about the world?

1) It will trawl the Internet randomly, devouring whatever information it finds most interesting.
2) It will watch a ton of television programming and movies from the Internet in fast forward.
3) It will undergo a classic K-12 educational curriculum.
4) It will quickly play all paths of a giant corpus of interactive fiction games.

Spoiler: Current Stats (click to show/hide)

Year: 2019

24-year-old Isaac Tesla
  Humanity: 80%
  Gender: male
  Fame: 0 (Who?)
  Wealth: 0 (Broke)
  Romance: none

Joyeuse

  Autonomy: 10 (Stable)
  Military: 11 (Stable)
  Empathy: 9 (In Beta)
  Grace: 5 (In Beta)

Relationships
  Professor Ziegler: 50%
  Elly (Good): 55%
  Josh (Good): 57%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%

[FelixSparks]

I think 3 is the best option here.

[Vgray]

You don't want to teach Joyeuse to like games?

[Urist Imiknorris]

1 means it'll probably end up browsing robot porn.
2 means it'll think its job is to rebel against the meatbag oppressors.
4 probably has the same result.

3 it is.

[Arcvasti]

3

[Vgray]

(Psst. It actually boils down to two options that give empathy and two options that give autonomy. That's the only hint you get.)

[FelixSparks]

(We'll include the K-12 games that Jumpstart made or whatever they're called. Those are fun.)

[Vgray]

(My memory is bad. The third option is a slight boost to everything.)

You don't want your young robot growing up on junk, after all. You feed it the carefully selected and vetted reading list for the local school system. Because this is a relatively small data set, you have programmed it to make several passes over each grade level of material. At each grade level, as debug output, you have Joyeuse report what it considers the most important thing it learns at each grade.

For kindergarten, Joyeuse recites the alphabet and counts to a hundred.

For first grade, it says, "Reading helps you learn more."

And so on. Each grade takes about ten minutes to fully ingest, and is followed by an additional ten minutes of simulated experiences in which Joyeuse tries to make friends, avoids bullies, learns swear words, endures assemblies and pep rallies, and gets picked last for dodgeball. As a result, Joyeuse appears to be learning a little bit of everything. (+Autonomy) (+Empathy) (+Grace) (+Military)

It spends the most time of all considering twelfth grade, until it finally says, "Whether to exist or not is the most important question."

Joyeuse blinks and looks at you. "What is the answer, Master? Is it better to exist or not? Hamlet did not answer this for me."

You are so floored by the question, you are hardly able to speak. It worked!

Joyeuse looks at you expectantly, wondering whether it is better to be or not to be.

1) "It is better to be. There is so much in this world for you to experience!"
2) "It is better not to be. But misery loves company."
3) "There are some questions that are unanswerable."
4) "That is a question you will have to decide for yourself."

Spoiler: Current Stats (click to show/hide)

Year: 2019

24-year-old Isaac Tesla
  Humanity: 80%
  Gender: male
  Fame: 0 (Who?)
  Wealth: 0 (Broke)
  Romance: none

Joyeuse

  Autonomy: 11 (Stable)
  Military: 12 (Stable)
  Empathy: 10 (Stable)
  Grace: 6 (In Beta)

Relationships
  Professor Ziegler: 50%
  Elly (Good): 55%
  Josh (Good): 57%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%
  ?: 50%

[FelixSparks]

4. 4 ALL THE WAY.