The Help

THESIS pre-androids gave rise to a lot of questions about what exactly constitutes AI, and if people in fact had intelligent beings in their kitchens operating their stovetops.

Although we don't know what (or rather, who) the first sentient machine was, but it's generally understood that the first sentient model to appear outside the laboratory was the Helpmate.

These came in 3 successive models, plus the one created by Valhalla after purchasing THESIS patents:

Helpmate Helpmate Porcelain Collection (Helpmate P) Helpmate II Helpmate 3

Intended as a successor to the Breakfast Mate, the Helpmate had the ability to perform many domestic chores. Unlike the Breakfast Mate, it was a proper android, complete with semi-realistic rubberized flesh. It was, for the first time, a commercially available, self-aware, human-like robot.

Though the name is perhaps self-explanatory, it didn’t take long for people to observe that the word “help mate” is a biblical one in some translations. Most notably a passage from Genesis 2 concerning the creation of Eve for Adam:

“And Jehovah Elohim said, It is not good that Man should be alone; I will make him a helpmate, his like.”

The Helpmate was the subject of both market problems as well as ethical ones.

First, its price far exceeded the already expensive breakfast mate. Only the richest consumers could buy them, and even at its high price, THESIS’ profit margins on each unit were said to be very narrow.

It did sell well, initially. It was the first device of its kind. The idea of a helper android has been the public mind since the first primitive robots — or even before electricity. THESIS was the first to actually bring it to market. It may have been expensive, but THESIS was selling a miracle, and plenty of the upper class was willing to pay an extraordinary price for it.

However, one thing did limit its market appeal, besides the cost. This was that people found them uncanny.

Part of it was their looks. They were not ugly -- quite the contrary; they were engineered to be flawless representations of attractive humans. The designers said their faces were inspired by celebrities, and in particular the male models looked remarkably like the members of True North, a popular boy band at the time.

(aside: have a vintage picture of true north, a cheesy band photo, with someone who looks just like Lucius.)

But they didn’t look completely realistic. But they didn't look completely realistic. From a distance, perhaps, but sitting across the table from a Helpmate they were obviously not human. They looked much like old wax museum mannequins.

The combination of their imperfectly realistic appearance and their sentience made people uneasy. The idea of owning a sentient being that looked like a human, yet was clearly not a human, proved too strange for most people to accept. The Breakfast Mate and even the Laundromatic had been described by some as 'creepy', but they were still accepted as appliances. The Helpmate stirred uncomfortable questions about personhood, and that doubt proved an insurmountable market obstacle.

Insurmountable, that is, until THESIS retreated from their too-human design.

The Porcelain Collection

According to an anonymous engineer at THESIS, the goals of their next android were centered around higher profit margins on each unit, so that they wouldn’t have to sell as many in order to recoup their R&D costs. For a business-unsavvy company, they accomplished this rather cleverly in the following ways:

The result of these product goals was dubbed the Helpmate Porcelain Collection.

The face was completely immobile, with a unique porcelain mask, no two alike. The faces allowed for a much cheaper construction with no moving parts. The ornate glass adornments, while being elegant, reminded owners that it was above all a fragile art piece, a collector's item worth a high price.

For example, the HELPMATE did not have realistic skin, but rather a simple aluminum chassis. The face was perfectly stationary and resembled a detailed porcelain mask, and it spoke through a small speaker located behind its motionless lips.

This left HELPMATE constructs in the position of being some of the cheapest sentient beings on earth. To make matters worse, after the HELPMATE discontinued, the HELPMATE II was released with a virtual intelligence instead of true AI, so that original HELPMATE constructs had the misfortune of having a very similar outward design to later models which were cheaper, more common, and no more sentient that a microwave.

It had mixed results. The perceived rarity and uniqueness of this model had the desired effect of legitimizing its high price in the eyes of the market.

Their physical design was an interesting approach - an unexpected approach from any other company, but maybe less surprising from THESIS. Instead of pushing through the uncanny valley by making their androids more human-like. Instead, they retreated through the valley - making them less realistic, and more in line with their previous odd designs of the Breakfast Mate.

The Helpmate P clearly showed great influence from Clemens’ personal work. While the original Helpmate came in both male and female(1) versions, the Helpmate P was exclusively feminine. This was cheaper since they only needed to manufacture one version, and while the original male Helpmates sold better than expected, the female ones still outsold male by 3 to 1. Of course, this also seemed in line with Clemens’ fixations. The Helpmate P creations were all unique, feminine, fragile, and strange, just like the subjects of all his art.