Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200

A lovely story of a grandma in need of help looking after her house and garden and a goat. What she gets is a helpful robot that takes on the task of moving the goat around the field. Only, it keeps getting destroyed or eaten by the goat. The robot communicates with its other versions in an attempt to solve the problem, keeps failing, and gets into what appears to be a depression. Then a comment by the grandma changes its perspective, and it achieves its goal. And in doing so, the grandma may have finally sparked the robot and its kind into intelligence.

RSA Garcia's Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200 is a delightful short story about a grandma on a farm who needs some help with her planting and her ornery goat, and finds both assistance and friendship in the form of a determinedly helpful robot.

My thought was, what if the singularity arises due to an empathetic purpose, like the desire to help and be of service to those in need, instead of data mining an Internet that’s basically a repository of our worst impulses?

This is the quote that hooked me from this interview in the same issue of Uncanny.