But to do the multitude of things I wanted him to do, he had to have hands, eyes, ears, and a brain. . . a good enough brain.
Hands I could order from the atomics-engineering equipment companies who supplied Hired Girl’s hands, only this time I would want the best, with wide-range servos and with the delicate feedback required for microanalysis manipulations and for weighing radioactive isotopes. The same companies could supply eyes-only they could be simpler, since Frank would not have to see and manipulate from behind yards of concrete shielding the way they do in a reactor plant.
The ears I could buy from any of a dozen radio-TV houses-though I might have to do some circuit designing to have his hands controlled simultaneously by sight, sound, and touch feedback the way the human hand is controlled.
But you can do an awful lot in a small space with transistors and printed circuits.
Frank wouldn’t have to use stepladders. I would make his neck stretch like an ostrich and his arms extend like lazy tongs. Should I make him able to go up and down stairs?
Well, there was a powered wheel chair that could. Maybe I should buy one and use it for the chassis, limiting the pilot model to a space no bigger than a wheel chair and no heavier than such a chair could carry-that would give me a set of parameters. I’d tie its power and steering into Frank’s brain.
The brain was the real hitch. You can build a gadget linked like a man’s skeleton or even much better. You can give it a feedback control system good enough to drive nails, scrub floors, crack eggs-or not crack eggs. But unless it has that stuff between the ears that a man has, it is not a man, it’s not even a corpse.
Fortunately I didn’t need a human brain; I just wanted a docile moron, capable of largely repetitive household jobs.
Here is where the Thorsen memory tubes came in. The intercontinental missiles we had struck back with “thought” with Thorsen tubes, and traffic-control systems in places like Los Angeles used an idiot form of them. No need to go into theory of an electronic tube that even Bell Labs doesn’t understand too well, the point is that you can hook a Thorsen tube into a control circuit, direct the machine through an operation by manual control, and the tube will “remember” what was done and can direct the operation without a human supervisor a second time, or any number of times. For an automated machine tool this is enough; for guided missiles and for Flexible Frank you add side circuits that give the machine “judgment.” Actually it isn’t judgment (in my opinion a machine can never have judgment); the side circuit is a hunting circuit, the programming of which says “look for so-and-so within such-and-such limits; when you find it, carry out your basic instruction.” The basic instruction can be as complicated as you can crowd into one Thorsen memory tube-which is a very wide limit indeed!-and you can program so that your “judgment” circuits (moronic back-seat drivers, they are) can interrupt the basic instructions any time the cycle does not match that originally impressed into the Thorsen tube.
This meant that you need cause Flexible Frank to clear the table and scrape the dishes and load them into the dishwasher only once, and from then on he could cope with any dirty dishes he ever encountered. Better still, he could have an electronically duplicated Thorsen tube stuck into his head and could handle dirty dishes the first time he ever encountered them . . – and never break a dish.
Stick another “memorized” tube alongside the first one and he could change a wet baby first time, and never, never, never stick a pin in the baby.
Frank’s square head could easily hold a hundred Thorsen tubes, each with an electronic “memory” of a different household task. Then throw a guard circuit around all the “judgment” circuits, a circuit which required him to hold still and squawl for help if he ran into something not covered by his instructions-that way you wouldn’t use up babies or dishes.