Tom Merritt
speaker
245 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Tom Merritt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Day one.
We called him George on account of his curiosity.
He was the first of his kind, as much a social experiment as a scientific one.
He could walk, he could talk, he could learn.
We consulted with every expert we could think of, from neuroscientists to behavioral analysts to robotics and electrical engineers.
And although George was a four-foot android, he was the closest thing to a son that I had.
George had a large round head and a body like a watermelon.
Two stubby legs supported his squat frame, and he had two short arms with big white fingers.
He was stocky, but surprisingly dexterous.
George was a miracle in machine learning, programmed to emulate humans, but capable of little else.
We had wanted to start from square one, no predefined rules or base knowledge.
When we first switched George on, we thought that we had failed because it took him a solid two minutes to say a word.
His animatronic head swiveled this way and that way, two blue LED eyes taking in everything they could find.
His first words were, What am I?
Self-reference straight out of the gate.
You are George, I said.
The days that followed, well, how can I put it all into words?
It was a blur of wonder.
George paced the floor, learning the names of my colleagues and every color and the names of all the equipment in the lab.
When he came upon something new, George would point to it and we would gift him with a new word.
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