The Problem With HARD BS

PART 1, THE INFOMERCIAL 

Hi there, I’m John Johnson, and I’m here to tell you about our incredible new deals on Household Assistant Robotic Devices, or HARDs for short. The HARD is more advanced than any of the previous generations of robotic assistants produced by First Learning Automated Managerial and Industrial Networking GO (FLAMINGO), with the software and hardware bugs from previous generations cleared out. And this incredible new innovation is going for just $499.99! [large text showing the price in bright yellow font flashes on screen]

Show all your friends your HARD and you'll be the talk of the town! Your HARD has specifically been designed to easily complete household tasks, so that no family will ever have to fight over who’s turn it is to take out the trash again [footage of family arguing over the dinner table fades into footage of a happy nuclear family]. Just one HARD is enough to clean up your house all on its own, and is so unobtrusive that you’ll never even know it was there [footage of what appears to be an empty room].

Gone are the generations of robotic assistants that would spend hours backed into a corner by your cat, trying to get instructions for their next task! Instead of relying on infrared heat detection, the newest generation of HARD is able to identify humans, and will only approach someone who they identify as human!

[footage of factory] The HARD was designed to be as approachable as possible, and is humanoid in shape but is in fact made entirely from environmentally friendly, sturdy, non-GMO, non-toxic, non-organic materials! 

So, how does it work? Wherever set to ON, the HARD will roam around your programmed space, doing any chores that you assign it.

And, if along its route it encounters a member of your household, it will ask “How may I help you?”, and you can assign it any new tasks on the fly! And all this for just $499.99! [price flashes on screen]

The HARDs come with a very simple base AI installed, but if you have a passion for programming you can use our FLAMINGO Binary System (FLAMINGO BS) to modify them to perform other household tasks. In fact, as part of our special new deal, you can get the HARD and a disk with a copy of FLAMINGO BS and an instruction booklet for just $569.99, that’s just the beginning! Because wait, there’s more! [prices and images of products flash on screen] If you order within the next 20 minutes, you can get all that, and we’ll also include a FLAMINGO branded hat to put on your HARD. 

And if that wasn’t enough, there’s even more! The first 20 orders we get will also get a behind the scenes video detailing the process that we went through designing the HARD, which includes interviews with some of the greatest minds behind this innovation! In fact, we’ll show you a clip now!

[Johnson stands there in silence, no clip plays]

Again, that’s the first 20 orders, will get this incredible one time offer, and that full video with Jay! To place your order now, just call us at [fades out].

PART 2, THE CUSTOMER REVIEW

I’ll be honest, when I saw the HARD’s incredible viral marketing campaign, I was sold on their promise of a cheap and efficient household assistant, so I bought one for myself. Then, a few months later, my friend became my roommate, and to our surprise we ended up with two HARDs in one house. A little silly, and a bit of a waste of cash, but not a big deal we thought. So we put a few ads out in the paper, and while we waited for a call we let them both run in the house. Probably not necessary, but it won’t hurt anything, right?

Both my friend and I work, so we were both out of the house for the day, and we had both the HARDs running. When we come back from work (at the same time, we carpool) we find that they’re standing in the middle of the living room, facing each other, overheated, with no charge left. So that’s pretty weird, they’ve been running at the same time for weeks at this point and we’d never seen them interact, let alone do whatever the hell this is. But they’re not really damaged or anything, so we plug them back in, say to hell with it and figure it’s a one off fluke or something.

A month passes, we’ve settled in as roommates at this point, and we’ve wasted more than a little change on getting another ad in the newspaper to sell the extra HARD, but life’s still going pretty well. Then we both come back from work and they’ve stopped again! Looks the exact same, facing each other, overheated, dead batteries, but this time they’re in the kitchen. So we figure it’s gotta be something about what happens when they meet each other in their routes. And at this point, we’re both invested, so we set up a little experiment. We put in a custom route that meant they would run into each other in the sitting room, and we sat down together on the couch to watch the fireworks. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as we had hoped.

They both walked into the room at the same time. My roommate and I were carefully hidden under a blanket, so they didn’t recognize us in order to ask us for any tasks, and instead honed in on each other. You see, they’re both shaped roughly like humans in order to be more ‘approachable’ or something like that, and apparently they detect if a person is in the room or not through a rough ‘humanoid form’. So they walk in, see each other, and ask, at the exact same moment, “How may I help you”. Now these things are programmed to handle a lot, and a lot of what they do is fairly complex, but it mostly boils down to if a human asks them something, they give it to them. Now what they think is a human is asking them a question that they have no idea how to answer, because they aren’t programmed to answer that. So to the sound of my roommate’s muffled laughter their fans slowly increased in volume until their batteries died, and they were still there, in the sitting room, looking into each other's eyes, unable to answer the question themselves and awaiting an answer.

This is particularly funny because the programmers at FLAMINGO did think of this issue in a way. As Jay says in this clip from the interview that was released with some of the first orders in their marketing push:

[no clip found]

So they did realize that mirrors could pose a problem because those existed in their testing area, but they never thought of what would happen if someone happened to put two HARDs in the same room with no humans in sight. Because as they said in the advertisements, “just one HARD is enough to clean up your house”.