The Robot

Once upon a time there was a robot.

It was superbly engineered. This robot was nothing like anything else that anyone had ever seen. It helped people in the town with all kinds of tasks. It dramatically improved the quality of people's lives.

It wasn't a very complicated robot. It didn't have a lot of bells and whistles. But this was part of its beauty. It was simple and highly effective. And everyone in the town loved it.

The robot had been designed and constructed by a phenomenal robotics engineer, the best that the town had ever seen. He had left the robot to the town, for their benefit, and then he had gone away. The designer had left them with the instruction that the robot would work perfectly and would always improve their lives, as long as they didn't tinker with it.

One day somebody had an idea. "Wouldn't it be great if the robot had some additional features?" So they brought some engineers and some tools and they added an extra arm to the robot with additional functionality. The robot wasn't quite as sleek as it was in the past, but people were too excited about the additional functionality to care.

Then somebody else thought of some further features that could be added. So the engineers came back and attached some more parts that gave the robot even more functions. This happened again and again and again.

At one point the robot changed even more dramatically. One of the engineers, Lionel, said that he had happened across some of the original designer's plans to add many more features to the robot. Some people wondered if these plans really were written by the original designer, but many (though not all) highly respected engineers were very impressed with these plans and said that they must indeed have been written by the designer. So they added a whole slew of new features to the robot.

After a long time, the robot looked nothing like its original state. It had arms and tools and lights and exhausts everywhere. Some people thought that this new look was beautiful in its complexity, though others differed. The robot now offered a myriad of different features, which many people thought was most wonderful, and they boasted about how their robot was the greatest robot in the world. But others felt that it had become less effective at many of the more basic tasks. It had become cumbersome, and some of its new abilities directly hindered some of its original abilities.

Furthermore, due to the new complexity of the robot, it now required a legion of engineers just to maintain it. Eventually almost everyone in the town was working to keep the robot operational. This seriously detracted from the other tasks that needed doing in the town, but as almost everyone agreed, there was nothing more important than keeping the wonderful robot in the best condition.

Then one day a little boy in the town was reading a book about the history of the robot. He saw how it originally looked, in its beautiful and pristine condition, and how it had improved everyone's lives, enabling them to get on with other tasks with great efficiency. He discovered reports of how, as the towns' engineers added more and more features to the robot, there were always some engineers who had protested these "improvements", arguing that they were not being true to the intent of the original designer. And so the little boy spoke up, and argued that the new features should be removed, and the robot restored to its original condition.

"How dare you?!" thundered the engineers. "What do you know about such things? You are not an engineer!" And the engineers' supporters also vociferously rebuked the little boy: "Why do you have to be so negative and so critical? Why can't you just look at the positive aspects of the robot? And don't you see that all the engineers are against you? Where is your respect for them?"

So the little boy stopped talking. Instead, he found some of the city's engineers who didn't agree with all the modifications that had been added. They left the town and moved to a new village, where they managed to build a robot that was identical to the original model. It helped them with all kinds of tasks and dramatically improved the quality of their lives, just as the robot had done originally.

The people in the first town heard about them and jeered at them, claiming that they had disrespected and lost the respect of the engineers. But the townsmen were running into a problem. There were so many people working on their robot, that they weren't able to do all the other things that need to be done to make a town survive. And so they reached out to the village and demanded that the village supply them with everything that they needed, in order for them to be able to keep on working on their robot.

Some of the people in the new village didn't want to acquiesce. But others did. Eventually the resources of the new village were all drained into the old town, in order to provide for the engineers who were working on maintaining the robot. Both the new village and the old town were threatened with ruin.

What happened in the end? I don't know, the story isn't finished yet.