John McCarthy: The Robot and the Baby

If you liked this story you may like _The Time of Eve_, which is a short animated Japanese science fiction series. It explores many of the same themes. I hadn't read this story before, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out the authors of the series had read it. Viewable on CrunchyRoll, legally, for free: http://www.crunchyroll.com/time-of-eve/episode-1-akiko-45270... There are six episodes of about 15 minutes each.

Interesting short story. The part on robots rings well, but there was one thing about parenting at the end that rang not so well to my ears: "children grew up more attached to their robot nannies than to their actual parents. This was mitigated by making the robot nannies somewhat severe" This reflects a very simplistic view on who kids love. It is in fact wrong even in the first order: kids actually love more severe parents or severe teachers…

Interesting that the story assumes a legible AI for the robot. If its behaviour was the result of a deep learning neural net, the story plot would necessarrily be quite different. There would be no talk of understanding the robot's calculations or tweaking the program parameters. From the perspective of today's AI efforts the programming in the story seems antiquated and unrealistic.

What a great piece of techno fiction.