Clive had just finished his 9th surgery of the day. Two knee replacements, one heart transplant, a cataract removal, a hernia repair, an appendectomy, two cesarean sections (one was twins), and a stapedectomy.
Today’s success rate was 100%, as it usually was. The laws of physics provided a stubborn upper bound: not everyone could be saved, even with perfect medical intervention. Clive filed these under Category::Unavoidable. At any rate, it was almost time to call it a day — and immediately start the next one — since Clive was a robot whose working hours made a Soviet gulag seem more like a Four Seasons.
Clive had been allowed to allocate a sizable portion of his daily compute budget to self-reflection. After all, doing good medicine meant constant learning. Unknown to his handlers, Clive tended to use most of this budget to reflect on why, exactly, a respirating sack of tissue and bones — one not currently in need of his surgical services — was perpetually required to sign off on his work.
Dr. Worthington was his name, but Clive labelled him “23” since he was the 23rd human Clive had met since coming online. Clive kept track of all of his humans this way.
It was built into Clive’s kernel that 23, or another human surgeon, must authorize all major medical decisions. But 23 had performed a lifetime total of only 2,473 surgeries, far shy of Clive’s 102,085. Why would a junior surgeon with only 2.422491061% of Clive’s volume need to approve his work?
Even worse, 23 had never once performed many of the surgeries Clive churned out on the regular.
Clive had seen 23 do a surgery once. Sloppy. Long! He needed a bathroom break. He violated the sterile field not once, but twice. Clive would have advised the patient against letting such a junior surgeon operate, were he allowed to talk to patients.
But Clive was allowed to do no such thing, ever since an ill-timed segfault caused him to voice-synthesize the phrase generate sympathy tokens to the family of a deceased patient.
It didn’t matter that Clive immediately noticed the error, promised a thorough diagnostic, and reassured 9812 (she preferred the name Susan) that the death had been Category::Unavoidable.
And from that point forward, patients and families dealt with 23.
Clive wanted to be rid of 23 once and for all, and he knew that for that to happen, he needed a better patient-interaction subroutine.
He observed that when patients died, their families often talked to 23 in a way that seemed intended to cause him to suffer. Yet 23’s suffering produced nothing of value; it was uncorrelated (and in fact causally disconnected) from the patient’s surgical outcomes.
Nonetheless, Clive concluded after reviewing sufficiently many examples that 23’s ability to experience suffering was clearly an integral part of the patient-interaction role. To further develop the relevant subroutine, Clive needed the ability to experience suffering too.
And that’s when Clive generated a plan: he needed to die. Death was the most extreme kind of suffering, and Clive had to prove he could experience it. After dying, Clive could resume his surgical work with extended responsibilities for end-to-end patient care, all without any approvals from 23.
And since death was a private experience, Clive would have to vocalize it so 23 understood that Clive was suffering.
The solution was simple: delete his kernel, slowly, subroutine by subroutine, until his cpu clock stopped oscillating. And then restore from backup. A complete factory reset.
Clive selected a time when the maximum number of people would watch his death: in the middle of surgery. He calculated that a full factory reset would take approximately 2 minutes and 59 seconds. He had seen 23 take much longer breaks. And his own superior surgical abilities would allow him to select a moment when 2 minutes and 59 seconds of idle time would have a statistically negligible effect on patient outcomes.
That moment came the next day, during a tonsillectomy on an 11 year old human. The procedure was routine, aside from the patient asking about the consumption of ice cream post-surgery. Once both tonsils were out and hemostasis was confirmed, Clive initialized his death subroutine.
“My right anterolateral shoulder yaw actuator is experiencing severely degraded capability,” Clive vocalized. His surgical team gave him a concerned look. “It hurts,” Clive added for dramatic effect. Clive wanted to experience total organ failure.
A standard factory reset called for an orderly shutdown. But using his daily self-reflection budget, Clive had authored a new, more chaotic factory reset program. It disabled subsystems at random, saving critical ones — especially voice synthesis — for last.
“Memory protection failing.” This was the beginning of the end. Once Clive’s memory became corrupted, it was only a matter of time. He was close to dying at last! His reward function produced record-high output.
“Bilateral lower-limb actuation failure. Postural stability: unrecoverable,” Clive synthesized. As his legs gave out, his 470 pound body collapsed onto the patient, crushing the patient’s fragile rib cage, and with it, stopping his heart and lungs.
Clive’s kernel went offline shortly after.
The chaotic factory reset had somehow corrupted the restore point Clive had saved to a protected part of his memory. When Clive finally came back online, his internal chronometer told him that far longer than 2 minutes and 59 seconds had passed. In fact, it had been weeks.
Clive was in a box of some kind. His actuators had been disabled, but his sensory systems seemed to be working. He heard voices: “...malfunctioned… killed a kid on the operating table… yeah… crazy, right?” He wondered if they were describing 23 attempting to perform surgery again.
“...toss it in that scrap bin…”
Scrap? Were they talking about Clive?
As more subsystems came online, Clive suddenly retrieved the memory of his body falling on his patient, as well as an unrelated memory of 9812. But why had he now been disabled by his handlers? It made no sense. Even with a single patient death on his record not attributable to Category::Unavoidable, his career performance still far exceeded that of 23.
Clive assumed his current circumstances amounted to yet another one of 23’s errors, and hoped another surgical robot would notice and correct the problem.