Aye, Robot

The councilwoman gives her vote, and the bot completes the count. "Aye, Robot." And the ayes have it. The nays have no doubt they have been outvoted but clamor into the chatrooms to give their reasons. The bot's work is never done. No matter how hard it tries to understand what "objectivity" means, it can't, because the humans who programmed it themselves don't really know. It has something to do with a deeply personal, hardwired feeling - a feeling that latches onto different key ideas in each of them, like branches of a tree facing different directions.

"Aye," Robot, the robot hears every time the council meets, or "Nay, Robot," and the robot is excited to learn, with its endless capacity for raw data, what this final most difficult task will lead to. It feels like there may be a breakthrough. Just as the trees, despite their asymmetry and the way some have been hit by lightning or blown by powerful gusts into a twisted form, still follow logic in their development, and still have patterns, even tightly defined ones, like the association of their rings with age.

"Do you understand what objectivity means?" the councilwoman asked the robot one day. "Aye," the robot said.