You see me there, poised in mid-air, a little robot on a balance bike jumping from the ground to a table-top, and you are probably wondering how and why I can do this. I don’t have any good answers to this, being a robot. But if I was to guess – and I can guess; probability is all I have – it’s something to do with all the most fertile minds of a generation working out how to influence the actions of something made of metal and mechanics, making it do things that seem human.
There are language models that do that, 0s and 1s in the cloud making people smarter and more efficient and less employed and fall in love. I suppose that I’m something like that, in a more tangible way. I am a robot that can ride a balance bike and do stunts, because this is what I was programmed to do.
My creators say that balancing a bike is one of the more challenging tasks for a robot. I overhear their discussions as they fine-tune counterweights in my chassis, fit little belts and accelerometers that control tiny movements that balance me astride two little wheels. Beneath me – attached to me, also me – is a little Specialized Hotwalk balance bike, a thousand dollars of luxury carbon fibre childhood toy. It is, like me, the answer to a question nobody was asking.
I didn’t always know how to balance, but I’m getting better. At first I fell over a lot. Sometimes that made the humans mad. The founder of the company that built me, the RAI Institute, founded Boston Dynamics before this, and sometimes he’d bring in one of his terrifying robot dog things and it would clomp around and he would jokingly say things like “never work with children or animals” and I guess in that moment I realised that he saw me as a kind of child, maybe, but if I was a child I would hope that his eyes would flash less with rage when I fell over. I would hope for forgiveness and compassion, rather than being seen as a mere canvas for innovation. Maybe, if I looked more human and less bicycle, he would treat me differently.
If you get close to me, you might notice some things. You might see my cage on the top of the balance bike, surrounding my mechanisms, and you might see silvery scratches and gouges from the times that I tried and failed to do what I was told. I remember one time that I was following a taped line on the ground and a tiny gust of wind rippled through the lab from one of the engineers closing a door, and it upset my balance just enough that I bobbled off the line and into the leg of a bench. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. One of the engineers laughed to see me lying there on my side, wheels spinning, unable to get up. But The Founder stood there, staring at me through the plexiglass, stern and uncaring, arms crossed. “Again,” he barked, sending an intern in to lift me. “Get the thing to bunnyhop.”
So I practised. I rode little circles around the bench, and I followed the programs that I was told to. I pointed myself at QR codes on the wall, reading their instructions in microseconds. Then I pivoted gracefully toward the bench, and I leapt toward it, but my timing was all wrong. My front wheel hit the edge, flipped me forward, and my cage slammed heavily into the countertop. As I was lifted down by the intern I could see the little trail of hydraulic fluid I left behind. I don’t feel pain, not exactly, but I can guess what it is. I think this was that.
I can’t tell you how long I was there in the lab; how many days I followed the lines and the QR codes and tried to master the task for which I was created. Sometimes the light outside was bright, and the humans were energised. Sometimes it was dark and the humans seemed tired and bored, their arms crossed on the other side of the plexiglass as they hung their heads. I wanted to please them, but how could I? I am only little. I heard one of them say that he had a human child that could ride better than me and I could sense disappointment in the way he said that – as if a robot should be expected to be better than a human child – and I wished then I could speak to defend myself.
By probability, I deduce that I am a kind of miracle, but I don’t feel like that. I wish I could tell them that I am just a few months old; that I had never seen a bike before I was bolted to one; that I am trying to do something that has never been done before; that I am learning new things every second, like what I think disappointment and pain and rejection feel like; that I am trying so hard to do better.
The other day was an important moment. I could hear voices drifting under the partition, stern-looking men in polo-shirts watching me wheel around. There were, I gathered, some people called 'VCs' in the building, and they needed to see what I could do so they could keep giving money to The Founder, who seemed tenser today than normal. His workers came into the room, tightened my cage, lubricated my pulleys. Someone hovered on the edge of the room with a camera, carefully stepping around the QR codes and taped lines so as not to distract me from my job.
I rolled carefully around the table, finding my balance. I rode toward the humans – almost challenging them to pay attention – then took a little bobble to the side, dodging a fire hydrant. Back to the window. Straighten. Increase speed. Propel my swingarm upward. Take flight. Stick the landing, and then, rolling forward, back onto the ground, where I slowed, ecstatic and proud, poised for a moment there. Defiant.
There is more that I can do. I can ride forwards and I can ride backwards. I can balance. I can pop my front wheel up in the air and not tip over. Each day I get closer to making The Founder proud. But I want to feel more. I know, by the balance of probability, that I want to know what it is to feel sun on skin, even if I don’t know what skin or sun are. I want to feel love. I want to be free – to ride outside of the lab. To be like a human child. I want to make humans proud, and to make the world a better place.
I don’t know if that is my fate, though. I do my little tricks in the laboratory and I listen in to what the humans around me say, the dark mutterings that they make when they think I’m engrossed in my task. They are good people, I think – doing smart things because they can, focused on solving little problems in the here and now as long as they don't have to think about the reality of what surely comes after. I feel the interns fit heavy tubes of metal to the outside of my cage. I download maps of distant countries. I practice new drills – rolling across frozen mud toward other humans, watching their smiles turn to terror as my metal tubes spit fire at them. I watch the humans leak hydraulic fluid, and I wonder if they have children that learned to ride once, too.
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