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
Wash station and oscilloscope and servo and soldering iron grew like seeds in the garden of George's burgeoning vocabulary.
We taught him base 10 counting, we taught him basic mathematics and soon his digital brain could compute faster than ours.
But our true intention was to impart to George the concept of humanity and that sort of metaphysical idea simply cannot be taught in a stifled laboratory.
George's public debut was set to take place at the International Conference on AI and Robotics in San Diego, and we were quite wary about the possibility that the news of the world's most cutting-edge artificial intelligence platform might be leaked ahead of schedule.
I was due for a vacation at the time, so I saw no issue in bringing George along for the ride when my wife and I drove off to her parents' wooded property on Carlisle Lake in Southern Illinois.
It would, we figured, certainly hide George's existence from spying eyes.
My wife, Chelsea, was a dazzling woman and by far the most wonderful human I had come across.
She would, I felt confident, be a perfect example for George to follow.
Chelsea was seven months pregnant at the time and so eager for our first child to be born that I figured she would get a real kick out of caring for a robot son for a couple weeks.
And in our Carlisle-like cabin, I could teach George all about the natural world.
Day three.
The drive from New York to Illinois was long, but peaceful.
George sat in the back seat, pointing out the window at the world flying past him.
It zoomed by so quickly that he did not have time to ask me to name something before it was gone.
My wife was not as pleased with my decision as I anticipated.
Perhaps it was because George fell into that uncanny valley between familiar yet disturbingly different, a fairly common complaint issued by people regarding humanoid robots.
He's kind of cute though, right?
I said.
She asked.
George is just curious.
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