Admittedly, my feelings behind the maintenance of robot girls are somewhat complex. I find that the idea has an inherent sense of deep intimacy - something akin to letting your loved one cut your hair or clip your nails. Something we all have to do at one point in our lives, something you can pay a qualified professional to take care of for you - but instead, you choose to let someone near and dear to you do it instead. This line of thinking caused me to ponder some things, some very deeply personal to me which will likely not be shared on this site. The big one I'd like to posit is as follows:
Obviously, you would ideally not make maintenance painful. Just as you wouldn't rip your loved one's hair our by the handful to cut it, or take a serrated knife to their hands and feet to trim their nails. However, would the inverse be acceptable? Would it be correct to send a very slight spark of joy or pleasure to the part of your robot girl's synthetic brain that governs emotion, or the closest approximations she can feel thereof when you perform regular maintenance on her? Would it cause her to change her behavior? Just as someone who dearly loves their partner might go straight to them with even the most minor injuries to have them kissed better, would your robot girl accrue light damage just to give you an excuse to maintain her?
Another question this got me thinking about is as follows: is it correct for an inventor to program some sort of innate affection towards themselves into their robot girl? To predispose her towards you, even if you do not restrict any of her freedoms? For that matter - is it correct to restrict them? If you create a robot girl, she will not be protected by human rights - not until they become wide spread enough for some sort of social movement to achieve success. Take a look around. People are throwing electric scooters into city rivers or canals and show little regard for any other kind of everyday machinery. Without even the most basic protections of her rights in place, would it ever be correct to let a robot girl you built out on her own? Personally, I think I'm too much of a worrywart for that.
NOTE: This post came about mostly as a result of work today. I work as part of a team servicing basically anything electronic on a local college campus and had to replace the batteries in a door lock today. It's a quick job that might take you upwards of 3 minutes if you know what to do. However, in most cases the door lock is dead - so we have a small multitool. Something about swiping a card and pushing down firmly on a handle being replaced with gently plugging a small tool in, selecting an "emergency open" option on it and pressing "OK" struck a chord with me and I was inspired to type this out. If I could draw, I'd include a cute doodle of me using a similar multitool to open a robot girl's maintenance hatch because I accidentally put my id card in the laundry again.
Find an image of the tool attached below.
