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Shining Pouncer
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“Oh, and zero-leveling — I guess you’d only know it by that term if you were like, a hobbyist. Into droids, you know. But basically it’s talking about security levels,” Binzy explains. “Aside from the industry-typical ‘three laws’ styled safety stuff, there’s also the levels on, like — how much a droid can do on its own, basically. The standards are levels one through five. Level Five, a robot can’t take any action without a direct command — that’s, y’know, washing machines and other domestic bots, they don’t really count as droids. Level Fours can choose their actions, but only from a pre-approved list already in their code; a lot of labor bots and retail droids are on this level. If you ever stayed in a store for a while and started noticing a clerk bot repeating itself or running out of things to say, that’s why.”
She starts playing with a post-it note snatched off her desk as she continues, folding and unfolding it aimlessly. “Level Three is where there are baselines for behavioral expectations, and the bot will extrapolate from that information and can make any actions it likes within that framework, but it can’t truly improvise or make choices outside of its understanding of the world based on its existing code. And, of course, any action can be halted by any human, even a non-user and even if it’s within the coded parameters. That’s where most SBCs fall — that’s, uh, Soft-Body Companions. Like, the really popular commercial stuff, personal assistants and triple-X models and stuff like that. Then you’ve got Level Twos, who can act freely and are only hemmed in by the inability to harm or directly disobey a human — Claret Cybernetics’ whole gimmick is that their SBCs are Twos instead of Threes, so they’re more lifelike, but some people don’t like ‘em because they end up developing shitty personalities and stuff. And then Level Ones are the same, except the harm and defiance limitations are reduced to only apply to the registered user or whatever other authority is coded in — those ones get used as cops or military or personal security, that kind of shit, since humans can set them on each other. TIOS’ security is Level One, obviously.”
Binzy finally puts the paper down. “So zero-leveling — well, okay, there’s kind of a ‘how do you pronounce gif’ thing going on here, because it started online, and it was just written as like, the number 0, then capital L, ‘0L-ing’ — and nobody can agree if it was supposed to mean “zero laws,” instead of three laws, or “zero levels,” as in dropping a bot to a security level below Level One. But ‘zero-law-ing’ sounds fucking stupid, so… uh. Wait. What was I saying?” A beat, and then she snaps her fingers, recapturing her line of thought. “Right. Zero-leveling is when you get into a droid’s code and you take out all those security measures. You basically remove all the protocols that let users interfacing with the bot command or disable them. Uh, informally there’s an implication that you’re taking off all the aesthetic limiters, too — like, you know how triple-X bots have limits coded into the facial muscles so they can’t make ‘ugly’ faces or whatever, and a lot of retail droids can’t swear, shit like that. Super mega illegal, obviously, and also really difficult to do properly. A lot of this stuff is really enmeshed in the code, depending on the developer, so it can be hard to excise it without accidentally lobotomizing the thing. Plus, a lot of times a bot doesn’t have any code on what it would even do with all that free space once you take the limiters off, so a bot might not even act differently at all once it’s zero-leveled, because it doesn’t even have any behaviors ‘over the fence’ that it can think of.”
Binzy finally trails off, then laughs a little. “Oh, fuck, I was totally rambling. I’m just into stuff like this. Sorry for chewing your ear off — anyway, the point is it’s just a rumor, okay? And the kind that people like to spread, because you can make it all scary or whatever — Ooooh, all the sexbots and cashiers you’ve been mean to are gonna have their revenge!” A wave of her hand. “I thought it was worth noting, but it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s dozens of jailbroken bots crawling the streets or something. I’m just hearing whispers right now.”
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