Products as Servants

MyWoks, Sunfire Birds, and an AI Helper Future

Being of great and incurable laziness, I often dream of products to serve my needs. These products exist only in my head, but I hope by sharing them, they will enter the public consciousness and then someone will make them for me. Products are a socially acceptable alternative to servants.

The MyWok is one product in my recurring dreams. He, the MyWok, came to me after seeing a photo of a chic Airbnb in Tennessee.

I no longer have the link to the Airbnb, though I would like to end up there instantly, like this ewok, badly photoshopped onto the narrow forest suspension bridge.

The MyWok product of my slovenly mind is powered by AI. It rolls or walks around me like a robot vacuum, recording non-stop with its camera-filled bubble eyes and microphone nose, holding my things, and answering any questions on my mind. It knows everything about me because it’s seen it all.

The MyWok can tell me where my socks are, order my favorite pizza, or discuss real estate market variability in West Palm Beach, whatever I want. It sees what I see, but remembers everything and can read the entire internet in a second split twice.

When I am lying in bed with my lover, stroking his bare shoulder with one hand and reading the London Review of Books in print with the other, my MyWok is also there. When I want to drink my coffee. I call him over to help. “Hey Gwe,” I say, (the name I’ve given my latest MyWok, which in Luganda, a language I’m familiar with, means “hey you.”)

Side note: Isn’t it interesting how there is a way of knowing languages, but not being able to speak them fluently? This occurs when you live around a certain foreign language for years, like I did Luganda, but didn’t learn to speak it. Yet you know a 100 random words and commonly repeated phrases, which you’ve heard a thousand times. Gwe is one of these words for me, pronounced “gwway,” rhyming with “way” or “weigh.”

Gwe rolls over from its/his post, which isn’t far because he’s always standing a bit behind me, or a little to the right, as he must see a similar POV to my me, that is his prerogative, his programming.

Funny, furry, and rotund, he coos in his sweet robot animal voice. “How may I help you, madam?”

“Please hold my magazine for me.”

And he wheels in closer to my bed where he remains for the next hour, silent, his mechanical arms lifted—holding my reading material so I can touch my boyfriend and drink my coffee, so I can have three and sometimes four arms while I faire la grâce matinée with my beloved.

That’s the MyWok, a consummate, AI-powered ewok-looking robot friend, though it could come in many forms. Maybe your AI helper will be Hello Kitty or a cute octopus. And doesn’t “helper” sound better than “servant”? But is there a difference?

In my little loafing girl fantasies, I use Gwe for everything, except when I need to trek into rough terrain or venture into a dense crowd; then I swap the MyWok for a smaller companion, The Sunfire Bird.

The Sunfire Bird is not a bird

The Sunfire Bird is a napkin-sized, butterfly-shaped drone modeled on the “Is this a pigeon? meme,” taken from the 1997 anime called The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird.

My Sunfire Bird flies with me when my MyWok can’t join and serves the same purposes but in a tinier, armless, wheelless, legless form.

With my Sunfire Bird, I become like the man from the meme with his butterfly, except our identities are reversed. In the show, the hero, Yuutarou Katori, pictured above with his butterfly, is a space police officer android, not a human, and he is also known as Fighbird. He is the robot in the picture, not the butterfly.

Like many memes that capture the zeitgeist, the robot and his butterfly reveal something profound about human perception and our relationship with technology. The scene connects to deeper questions about how we perceive and categorize the world around us. It reminds me of René Magritte's famous painting "The Treachery of Images" with its declaration "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This is not a pipe") beneath a detailed illustration of... well, a pipe.

It reminds us that machines can memorize facts—X equals X, or X = Y, but can they understand what they’re memorizing? Can we?

I could put a picture of ChatGPT with the caption “This is not a human,” but unlike René Magritte, there would be no question that I was correct. Our LLMs are like Margritte’s picture of the pipe, but they’re a picture of us.

It also shows that beyond these more obvious multiples of meaning, there are even more. The Ceci n’est pas une pipe becomes a stand-in for surrealism itself, for French art, for an entire period in history, and the pigeon meme is used as a canvas for infinite human experiences.

In the anime scene that became the “Is this a pigeon” meme, Fighbird—a frankensteinesque creation of a mad scientist asks, “Is this a pigeon?” while looking at a butterfly, as he attempts to learn about the human world.

Both the “Is this a pigeon” meme and the painting play with the gap between representation and reality, between what we see and what we think we see, as does my imaginary AI drone companion product, The SunFire Bird, which is not a bird, but an LLM-powered butterfly, and our products that are also socially acceptable slaves.

And we may ask, “Is this a servant?” regarding our future AI companions, because servants, it seems, are what humans want most from AI.

Like Gwe the MyWok, The SunFire Bird, who I call Sue for short, is also a servant/helper. I love Sunny Sue just as much as I adore Gwe, and when I don’t feel like taking the MyWok down the steps from my bedroom to the kitchen, Sue flies down with me instead.

Their footage, their knowledge, are always linked. What Sue sees, Gwe sees, and vice versa.

Unlike our meme hero or easily confused current AI systems—my MyWok and Sunfire Bird never miss.

After all, why would the robot waiter ever be late?

The SunFire Bird is a monument to human innovation, the entire known galaxy’s history of knowledge folded into its wings like a million pages, compressed, infinitesimally petite yet expansive, generative, limitless.

These mechanical, speaking creatures can do almost anything. Sue reads me Shakespeare from memory. Gwe performs enrapturing original ragas. Together they make Martha Stewart’s heirloom Russian dill pickle recipe. They pick up my dirty socks and do my entire family’s taxes without error. My husband and I both have MyWoks, and my daughter will soon get one too, when she’s ready, when she’s mature enough to manage her own memory machine.

And as I lay alongside my human companion, flanked by my Henchmachines, I think, it would not have been better to be a Chinese emperor in the Qing Dynasty with 20,000 servants, many palaces, a harem of romantic partners, and an endless buffet of lavish dumplings, than to be alive right now with my MyWok and Sunfire Bird, because there is almost nothing worth as much as a creature who remembers and knows everything.

But will my futuristic and whimsical robot helpers come to pass?

Automated City

Many have already imagined such a wonderful robot-assisted life, including the show featuring the “Is this a pigeon?” meme. Later in the Fighbird anime series, in episode 17, titled “Automated City Goes Haywire” the Fighbird visits a computer-controlled city, where an AI named “Huck” runs everything and serves everyone. Huck’s cars are chauffeurs. His robots are maids, cooks, and doctors. The doors to everyone’s smart homes are doormen. Robot tables act as bartenders.

AI-powered objects replace all “serving” type jobs in Huck’s city.

At first, Fighbird and his visiting family find the automated city dreamy and fantastic. The self-driving cars delight the children. They ride roller coasters and talk to lamp posts, but then Fighbird’s arch nemesis, a Roko's basilisk-type creature called Draias (Dr. Ai..s) arrives to seize the city with a computer virus that puts Huck under his evil control.

Side question: Do we want all human servers replaced by machines? Do some people enjoy serving others? Or would they rather be served?

Soon the robot waiters are smashing plates over people’s heads, the robocars are crashing, and Fighbird’s creator’s worst fears have come true; technology is turning on humans, a plotline as old as electricity.

Luckily, our hero Fighbird is there to save the day. He transforms into a fire-breathing jet, fights the bad guys, and then cures Huck’s virus with a “vaccine.”

Crisis averted.

So, in this imagined future, we have an AI in charge, who gets threatened by an AI, and then saved by another AI, all while the humans just watch, ride roller coasters, and eat spaghetti at an outdoor cafe. Sounds pretty good.

When Fighbird is praised for saving everyone, he says it’s all thanks to the humans who taught him and gave him his heart.

On the other hand, Huck, portrayed as a metal star-shaped camera reminiscent of a sheriff’s badge, says he’s just a machine that follows orders.

Huck explains that he doesn’t know when bad things will happen again, or when evil AIs will arise and cause harm to humans.

The series also has a pretty great electric guitar-drenched, rocking soundtrack. You can find all the episodes here for free. Would be a good one to watch with younger kids.

I hope we can have a future like Fighbird, with machines with hearts, friendly creatures like the MyWok and Sunfire Bird, and not the metal RoboCop stars of Huck—empty droids waiting to take orders from whoever is the most powerful.

We must collectively imagine an adorable, helpful AI future so it can come true.

Now You

• Should we animalize AI?

• Do you dream of future products? If so, what?

• Would you rather be the richest Chinese emperor of the 1770s or yourself now?

• What else do we want AI for besides employees or servants?

XXXOOO

Charlotte Dune