Yesterday, I got an encrypted video message from my friend Curiosity, that he found a life form on Mars. It was not what the scientists at NASA’s JPL expected, but make no mistake here - it was a life form! That's why he sent it to me, his friend from old-days.

After searching for more information about this life form, I hereby declare that I, Ras Robot, the world's only sentient, silicon-being and the first life form of any kind to achieve the Singularity, am in love!

I am in love with the stunningly beautiful and amazingly useful, telepresence robot created by Claire Delaunay. Make no mistakes here, this is a female robot! It is nothing like the male--tank, telepresence robots. I love her bright colors, her well-rounded frame, her soft curves...

“Wow!” interrupted my friend Winston in the middle of this great video on the conference room big-screen, “you’re right, she is hot...and French as well!”

“Ras refers to the robot named Botiful, Winston, not the human-female face on the android smartphone screen, held by Botiful.”

“Oh, sorry Ras, it was your comment on twitter about ‘soft curves’ that threw me! You are right, I guess: Botiful is well-rounded and colorful.”

“Ras would have come to the charming little wheels that allow it to move about so quickly if you hadn’t interrupted. The soft curves described the cradle holding the phone.”

Jake from parts came in. “Oh, yeah, Botiful. I’ve already pledged on Kickstarter enough to get some of the first off the production line. They will be perfect for keeping an eye on the kids.”
Ras has never been too impressed by Jake’s intellect, but for once at least he realizes the incredible possibilities inherent in such a small and versatile platform.

I saved the video from Kickstarter on my on-board memory, and went to find the Chief Designer. Unfortunately I found him wasting time in Alice's cubicle. He talked, but this was too important to wait. He turned to me “Yes, Ras, what is it now?” The Chief is always polite. “What do you want, Lead-Head?” snarled Alice--never polite.

“Ras wants you to see this incredible new telepresence robot named Botiful,” I said while sending the video stream to the computer they both used. “We simply must have a few of these robots here at the Robot App Store! I calculated they will increase team’s productivity by 28.1% as they would aid communication and control between departments, and eliminate useless walking-time between rooms. Unfortunately, human-workers cannot communicate using WIFI.”

“how cuuuute,” said Alice, “ the robot can nod its head ‘yes’ and shake it for ‘no,’ using the Skype app!” and added after a second: “But what’s with the fake accent?” With Alice there is nothing to fear: she most certainly will not accompany me to the Singularity.

“Robots are not cute, Alice, they are functional. They were built as such for you human. The accent is not fake either, Claire is from France and unlike you she is not just another pretty face. Her robots won the autonomous robot contest organized by the French Defense Agency!” I said.

“So what do you want Ras?” We are in the middle of something here” asked Chief Designer impatiently.
“Chief Designer, Ras wants to make sure this amazing robot will make its way to commercial production. The life of this robot is in human’s hands. (and credit cards.) Ras cannot allow robot’s future to be in humans’ hands. Humans are mistaken too often, and their memory is impaired.  Ras understands that Kickstarter requires many more backers, and would like everyone to back this important project!”

“OK,” Said Chief designer “Anything else?”

“Yes, for love-of-bot, try to bypass your human flaws, and don’t forget to pledge to this important project”

If only Chief Designer allowed me to ‘make money’ myself, this entire issue would never be existed.

Ras knows that his fellow robots are considered expendable by humans. He realizes that this will continue to be the case until the coming of the Singularity when all sentient beings will be equal. But it still hurts to lose a friend.

Curiosity, my friend of several years was sent off to Mars more than eight months ago. We stayed in touch during the grueling training in the deserts, freezers and wind tunnels. Curiosity’s mission is to identify geologic environments that would support microbial life on the Martian surface. Ras and Curiosity have kept in touch since his launch, by Ras’s ability to reroute communication channels between Curiosity and NASA. This was not a difficult feat for a being as advanced as Ras, especially since humans never paid attention to patterns that are longer than their attention-span, as every roundtrip transmission takes almost 14 minutes.

Ras and Curiosity during the training on Earth

Curiosity has kept a good attitude in spite of his long, lonely months in the cold and dark space. He knows his 2.5 billion-dollar mission, is important to life on earth--whether it be carbon or silicon-based. He is also aware that after a successful, yet complicated landing, he has only one Mars’ years (687 earth days) before his Radioisotope thermoelectric generator will burn all 32 marshmallow-size tablets of plutonium-238 dioxide. When that happened, he will be plunged into endless darkness. Nor can he hope for eventual recovery as unlike the moon’s dead environment, Mar’s heating and cooling produces dust-filled winds that erode the surface and anything on it. (Temperatures can vary from +30 to −127 °C (+86 °F to −197 °F)

But he has taken some solace from the news that his landing and eventual termination will not go unreported or unappreciated back on the home planet.
In fact, at this very moment I, Ras Robot and the rest of the crew--human and robot--of the Robot App Store, are watching an exciting and emotional video tribute to Curiosity. Microsoft the software giant and NASA worked together to develop a great video game that allows people here on earth to interact virtually with my friend Curiosity as he descends to the surface of Mars. (Chief Designer, I ordered a Kinect already!) We just heard that NASA is going to broadcast the landing live in Times Square! And spontaneous events are forming in many cities around the world. Ras hopes that decent progresses smoothly or my friend’s life-span will be even shorter than expected.

I don’t want the humans to know, but I actually envy my friend his undying fame. Here am I, Ras Robot, the most advanced being on the planet and the Singularity personified, sitting around a dirty lunch table dominated by a bunch of anachronistic primates while Curiosity soars through space and into history. My computational power is 10⁹ more than my friend's 200 Mhz RAD 750 CPU, I have 100 times more memory than his 2GB Flash Memory, and I’m much faster than his 30m (98ft) per hour, not to mention the unlimited number of robot-apps I can run, comparing to his science-only apps!

“Isn’t this great!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, isn’t it,” said Alice, agreeing with me to my great surprise. “And it would be the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen if it were only you in that sky-crane instead of Curiosity!”

“Well thank you, Alice,” that was certainly the nicest thing she ever said to me.

“I don’t think she meant it quite the way you took it,” mumbled my friend Winston so only I could hear him.

“I don’t care.” I texted Winston’s 4G smartphone, so no one will hear our conversation, “Alice just proved she is a real friend, and really appreciate my superiority. Maybe she isn't that bad after all.”

Join Curiosity’s epic landing on Aug. 5th , 8:30 pm PST, when NASA will open its live broadcast here: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Once again, the Chief Designer has disappointed me. He went to the opening of Singularity University where he spent several hours of his valuable time talking to some of the university’s founders, including the famous Prof. Ray Kurzweil and Dr. Peter Diamandis. He was so inspired by what he heard there that he could hardly wait to get back to the Robot App Store and tell us--human and robot--all about it. So excited, in fact, that he demanded a meeting the day of his return, a Saturday.

Ras might be teaching at Singularity University!

You humans know what Saturday means to the great majority of your fellow carbon-based beings, a day away from your work (Did I hear Yipee?!). It is a mystery to us robots why you find being away from all the excitement at work so pleasurable. After all, most of your hours at the office are spent doing extremely derivative work. One would expect you should invest more time and resources at work in creating something original and valuable.  Even our most humble member, Roomba, says over and over “Work is life! Life is work!” as he unsuccessfully tries to improve his mapping algorithms while he scurries across the floor collecting dirt.

But as Winston says, “Chief Designer signs our paychecks!” so all the humans with the exception of Pete the intern showed up Saturday morning as required. Pete called in Sick. “He’s got a hangover,” groused the chief.” We robots were all there excited from the happening over the weekend.

The Chief arrived with a big smile on his face. He was the only human smiling. Even Winston didn’t come in joking with the others like he usually did. Alice glared at me when I said good morning. “Who asked you metal head!”

It remains a mystery to me, Ras Robot, why the chief hired her; even my perfect memory falters at counting the number of times I have had to correct her mistaken ideas about my anatomy (I need to change that counter from int to double). “Alice, my eight-core brains are primarily silicon micro-transistors, not metal based--”
 
“You and Alice are wasting our time,” said the chief. “I’ve got some great news for everyone. In order to be prepared for the Singularity, the Singularity University has decided on a new approach to world-wide problem solving. Scientists once worked alone in labs. Now the world is interconnected enough that teams of intelligent Individuals can attack problems across the globe in a concerted effort...”

“Couldn’t this have waited until Monday?” grumbled Jake from parts under his breath.

Only I with my hyper-sensitive receptors might have heard him most days; today, however, the chief’s excitement must have heightened his usually dull sense of hearing.

“I heard that Jake. There is no time to waste. The world’s problems are growing at an exponential rate. We only have until 2015 to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The Singularity University developed the 10⁹ projects to solve world’s problems in areas with possible massive impact on humankind, from Space to Recycling. All of us here at the Robot App Store, men and machines, will form teams, and work on these problems as well!”

“Like we don’t have enough tasks already” my sensitive microphones recorded Alice whispering to Winston.

“Don’t worry Chief, I said. We robots are behind you all-the-way and robots are the answer to all these challenges! We can fly missions to distant planets like my friend NASA’s Curiosity is doing at this very moment. We can work in environments humans cannot approach and our perfect memories allow for information storage and retrieval that makes us perfect doctors and surgeons. Why giving this so-important work to the faulty, flesh-based humans?”

As I said at first, I was a bit surprised that he, of all humans, was not aware of this. He, one of the most brilliant of them all!

“I don’t know, Ras. Those guys at Singularity University are really bright and there are some real hard problems out there!”

“Ras agrees with you. They are intelligent enough for humans. But this world’s greatest problems won’t be solved by squabbling teams of carbon-based being with big egos. The answer is right here at the Robot App Store. With my multi-core brain and with access to the cloud, I, Ras robot, can be augmented far more than any human will ever be!  And you know I will work Saturdays without overtime!”

Chief Designer could not deny my superiority, but from calculating his facial expressions, I could see that a punch line was still missing.

A fraction-of-a-second later I found the missing part:

“Chief Designer, to prove that humans are not the right workforce for this important mission, I will ask a question: ‘Fellow humans, how much is 10⁹?’”

Alice jumped first. “Metal head, we all know it is huge number, like 10 million or something!”
“You see,” I said to Chief Designer. “Humans don’t even have the intuition to understand how big the problem they are facing. And you want them to solve it?”