October 19th, 2063 by Sammy Nguyen, Robotics Correspondent
World Personality Database, Personality Cores / Wetware / Robotics / Adam Project / GEC

The world's first shared database of personality cores for Wetware-using-robots has been established. Overseen by the United Nations Robotics Council, it will serve as a single source for all newly created Wetware Robots for the foreseeable future. Following this is further legislation that any organisation or individual who wants to make a Wetware-using-robot will now have to get personalities from the WPCD.

The Database

The council has set out the following principles for the database:

• To provide a single shared source of personality cores for all
• To be the only source of personality cores on Earth
• To have it be a randomised list of cores that cannot be manipulated by humans
• To maintain a list of trustworthy cores that fall within safe working boundaries of emotion

The database has taken 3 years to build, following many years of growing concern and activism across the world regarding how Wetware is distributed (the most common criticism being that only megacorporations are 'allowed' access to the technology).

The spark for it is commonly argued as being a result of GEC's increasing dominance of the robotics world, where rivals have alleged that GEC restricts access to Wetware based on undocumented reasoning. When previously questioned about this, GEC executives point to their applications terms & conditions as outlining the reasons for access.

Following the obscurity, and other major scandals in the past years such as the "Marseilles Truck Wall", activism across developed countries has risen to demand more oversight over Personality Cores.

Some have argued that it's problems with the Cores themselves - pointing to the 2058 public scandal for Creed International, where it's North American division was the target of a class action lawsuit, leading to a recall of the 'Rupert-Laurence' Core. The action stated the Core was documented as directly leading to fatalities on construction sites across the continent. Lawyers for Creed International during their arguments pointed to "unexpected personality quirks" listed in their documentation as part of the Core release, which was met with an outcry amongst those following the case.

True Random

A major goal of the database is to remove hand-picked selection of cores for roles, instead focusing on giving cores out from a list that have been thoroughly vetted for use in real-world locations.

Lead Scientist for the project, Rupert Nelson, stressed that: "the [selection process] is as close to true random as we can make it: it's a complete black box, and now that it's started, we will never know what value it returns next. We need this in order to assert that no one human can choose".

Some believe there are still possibilities for human intervention to happen: "We know that GEC has hundreds of military contracts, and we know how the US intelligence agencies like to operate; so until we can see the source code itself, we have to assume there's a backdoor" said Amelia Steadfast, a technology news influencer in a liveSpeakr broadcast earlier today.

Some critics also point to being able to brute-force the database with repeat deployments. By repeatedly accessing the database until a person/group gets the personality core you want, they can still hand-pick personalities. When asked of this, Martin Lorensson said: "Yes you can brute-force it, but with time as the database continues to grow, this process will be harder to replicate."

Continuing later as part of talks leading up to the inauguration, Lorensson stressed the randomness: "[the database] must not have any human influence beyond the personalities we design, it has to be random, as otherwise we will fall into the dark pit of eugenics real quick"

How is each Personality Core different?

Personality Cores are what drive Wetware-using robots to emote & think more naturally than AI or Machine Learning agents.

Each core has slightly different configurations for how they should react to certain stimuli. Whilst different models of Wetware have different densities of neuron-like CPUs, and Wetware can run any Personality Core (The end result of what that personality will do depends partially on the Wetware).

These configurations are what's being stored in the Database.

A common example across Wetware Researchers is: "We need people who aren't afraid of heights to build skyscrapers, and likewise we need artists to draw. So, as with people, we need Robots with different personalities for different kinds of tasks"

When will it be used?

The database is slated to deliver it's first cores tomorrow, following some initial tests in various sites around the world.

Multiple robotics-focused universities have announced events related to the occasion, with ones such as Imperial College London's Robotics faculty running hackathons using cores from the database.