Get stuck in a storm on Mount Everest with an android — via an uncanny story by David Beavers published in Diagram:

The robot is sitting across from me against the frozen rock wall of the cave, with its damaged right leg pulled up underneath it like an animal. It keeps saying things like, “I’m cold,” and, “How about this weather.” Its voice is programmed to be neutral and pleasant. It says that it is cold because the thermometer nestled in the fiber-optic guts of its chassis is sensing that it is a dozen degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. It guesses that this must be uncomfortable for me. It knows that I haven’t eaten much for two days and that we have not moved from this cave for even longer and that the longer we stay here, the greater a chance there is of something tragic happening; “tragic” is a definition programmed into the android, recognizable by a number of preset conditions that it is programmed to suggest we avoid; “are you cold?” it asks me periodically, “are you hungry?”

Read the story, then resume your socially programmed behavior –

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