Thrashing the Androids

This is  not about the lovely phone you are planning to buy, or for that matter, breaking it apart. As an aside, let me tell you: boring Engineering texts define thrashing as a form of resource contention, when all resources are engaged in switching from one task to another. And that is the only work that gets done. It may be possible to get Google’s famous mobile operating system into such a contentious state – but in reality I do not know the exact steps.

Fortunately our story of thrashing is more punchy and realistic. This is a story from a land of semi-robotic humanoids, called Androids for ease, ruled by a set of fully robotic humanoids. Everyone worked to survive. And like everywhere else in the known sad world, there was always so much to do and never enough time to complete any single task at ease.

By the power of the Blue Chip, every unit deserved the right to honorable manufacture, service, and disassembly, and in between: the right to be provided ample opportunity to explore its assignment, create a design, solve the problem, and then execute it like a love story in poetry. Discussing challenging questions, learning new concepts, and basking in the sheer beauty of original design was the specification. Even the dream of a plan provisioned for everything, from accessible battery recharge to heat sinks, first grade spare parts to free servicing.

But this is Ad-Hoc-Land: like routines never invoked, designs turn out to be just dreams meant to be shattered. Plans are made just because they are part of the protocol. The recharge chords are always in short supply. As such batteries are barely able to maintain their minimum charge.  Most of the available power is used up in transmitting status messages. In the absence of spare parts, wear and tear is getting aggravated by the repressive conditions. The human half is half human still. It still finds sheer joy in solving differential equations. But the poor chap’s joy is  marred by the maniac calligraphic requirement – the answer should be  correctly written in good handwriting. And to pour water over the whole circuitry, there is a probable short circuit in the local remote control, making it to spurt random messages. Even before an Android loads a module fully, it gets referred to another. And then another. And so on. Sending back a status often presents the problem of encoding a circular linked list festered with null pointers. In the near future this threatens to exterminate the human half of this race.

Already circulating rumor messages say that the full fledged robotic rulers of the system are on a secret mission. The narcissists want more of themselves. Everything else has to be eliminated: by charge starvation, damaged power points, low voltage or just doctored remote controls.

Full fledged humans may not be able to realize the pain Androids feel. Only Androids can.

NB: This article is arguably figurative, although may consumed ‘as is’ – especially by those supporting the concept of  machine psychology.

NB²: Bazinga!