You know the old saying that machines are only as smart as the minds by which they are programmed? Many brilliant engineers and mathematicians hail from the southeast (not knocking it – this writer is a southerner) where grammatical shortfalls are accepted more readily than in the publishing houses of New York City. Let's just suppose that a cyborg is programmed by a scientist from North Georgia - here are a few examples of what our artificially intelligent friend might say:
1) "Don't not compute."
2) "Hello my name is Ronnie-a-Tron 5. I ain't programmed for no violence."
3) "Take me to your daggumed leader." (okay, admittedly this sounds more like a hostile alien who learned English by watching reruns of The Andy Griffith Show.)
If southerners with a poor grasp of grammatical rules can program robots, then why can't wistful romantic types? Romantic robots:
1) "Why was I programmed to feel love?....sigh"
2) "I feel my Motherboard breaking...sigh"
3) "You're breaking up with me? Does not compute....syntax error!"
This is indulgent, but why not a Robot programmed by Pirates:
1) "Ahoy. Invalid command."
2) "Avast ye scurvy dataset. Me thinks ye be incorrectly solving for integer y.”
What must society do to correct these flawed machines? Grammatical rehab for a cyborg from Appalachia would most likely be akin to the regime that Eliza Doolittle was subjected to in My Fair Lady, complete with the famous ‘the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plains’ linguistic exercise. Inevitably, the Professor Henry Higgins-esque character charged with the machine’s instruction will learn to love Ronnie-a-Tron 5 despite his grammatical foibles. More problems surely will ensue.
Okay, just for fun, what if a Romantic robot ends up in a robot rescue program (kind of like the pit bulls rescued from Michael Vick's dog fighting ring), and an attempt is made to assimilate it into society. The rehabilitation program will require
Romanticon-57 (a great robot name) to live with an Ozzie and Harriet type of suburban family, sharing a room, secrets, laughter, tears, clothing and possibly boyfriends with daughter Susie. Old habits die hard, however, with little Susie frequently whining to her mother: "MOOOOMMMM..Romanticon-57 keeps telling me his robot heart is overflowing with love for me!!" Knowing that this kind of behavior won't do, Roman eventually learns to cover his tracks, i.e.: "Uh, no, I....ummmm, was just trying to tell Susie that my Robot parts are overflowing with WD-40."
Pirate speaking robots will be the toughest nuts to crack. Interventions will need to be held for these denial ridden machines, explaining to them that it’s not kosher to keelhaul the family computer, or to refer to an iPhone as a scurvy bilge rat. Ultimately, most cyborgs suffering the ill-effects of swashbuckler speak will end up in halfway houses with others of their kind, smoking cigarettes and watching Pirates of The Caribbean on DVD, while a lucky few might end up as fill-ins for the aging animatronic characters on the Disney Ride attraction.
So the next time you bump into some Millennial, whiz kid engineer in the making using double negatives or reading a romance novel, or a pirate applying for admission to MIT, hand them a copy of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation. Do it for the Robots.