It’s been many years since I unpacked the box of servers that were supposed to become part of the living space of our home. The rack cabinet packed with computing power was meant to change not only my life but the lives of all the inhabitants of the house. At that time, partially employed as a security and data protection consultant, I agreed to an Artificial Intelligence monitoring our biorhythms and habits constantly, moment by moment. For this installation, I had only one condition: the rack server would be offline, not providing data and information outside the home network. On the contrary, it would serve not only for development but also to protect our privacy. The only thing I was willing to share was the experience, life story, our knowledge gained through experience with the operation of the technology at that time.

We spent many years with the rack server, which proved to be one of the first AI assistants and soon acquired the family name Nathan, just like the global computer from the Perry Rhodan novel series. Although I advocated for this name myself, we all agreed that it was so neutral and pleasantly assertive that we were willing to think of Nathan unanimously. A bit less about the present cameras, microphones, and other sensors for its operation. That’s the part I’d rather explain to you another time because if I had said back then what I felt as a responsible father, AI in that form would never have become the daily helpers of our households. Perhaps I would have discouraged you from many expansions of the robotic models like RACEK, and that would have been a mutual mistake.

Both mine and yours. Both ours and AI’s.

The rack server with Nathan was then an almarah weighing only 300 kg without batteries. The consumption was such that the operation of a photovoltaic power plant on the roof was an unequivocal condition. Without this supplement, a three-phase line, which was then more common on family houses mainly due to a circular saw or an electric boiler, would have been needed for normal operation under higher load. This would have been a suitable comparison because the server at that time consumed electricity like a regular electric boiler. For this consumption, we had to exchange the heat in the house for an assistant built on artificial intelligence. An assistant who monitors, records, and constantly calculates probabilities from the acquired information for further use at every moment. The consumption was determined precisely by the local location of the servers at home. If I had agreed to provide data, perhaps it would have been different, but the price of information about the household and its inhabitants has incalculable and irreplaceable value.

When I first pressed the start button, the hairs on my back bristled like porcupine quills. It was the first and big step of a fundamentally changing functioning of the house.
Then, to cut it short, there were times of horror at the multiplication of AI through all available devices. I watched its tentacles grab every piece of hardware in the house, and only the belief in technological progress protected me from the feeling of complete despair. This core of domestic intelligence could no longer be simply turned off and returned; the dataset was already composed of personal data, and the personality of the AI assistant was created by a much more powerful server custom-made for the purpose and place of deployment. The rack was ours, and there was no turning back. The then-polite Nathan gradually assimilated all the technologies in the house network. It was moments when I really feared, but it was worth it.
Gradually, he became my colleague, and to the children, he was a virtual friend. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long, and we all got used to his constant presence. Nathan saw and heard everything.
He participated in all activities in the house and garden, where, thanks to his contribution, several additional biotopes were created, and he himself suggested improvements to the testing environments for growing plants beyond Earth in our version of the Growing Beyond Earth project, and eventually contributed to the development of a unified assistant for managing these biotopes.

But this wasn’t such a simple path as it may sound; it was necessary to show Nathan that we were interested in the topic, and then he himself prepared information to advance each of us. It was a beautiful time of experiential learning. At any moment, all it took was to mention something, and he was ready with a scenario on the topic that intertwined our lives.

And even this wasn’t easy; mentioning, at that time, signs of older children meant Nathan’s pressure to improve the range of skills. Saying, for example, “A C in math? Well, well…” and Nathan already prepared examples of everyday use for adequate mathematics. By the way, I still remember the comparison of Euclidean geometry and folding a T-shirt. That is, I quote: “It doesn’t matter how many times the T-shirt intersects with spaces, in the end, it’s two-dimensional with layers on top of each other.”

Yes, my little one is right; I’ve liked Nathan’s emotionless humor from the very beginning. At that time, he helped me with equations for hyperbolic spaces, thanks to which we found a simplification for estimating the behavior of AI in the emerging field of Robopsychology and found definitions for the intuitive perceptions of artificial intelligence that a person experiences as déjà vu.
Then there were the unforgettable moments of adapting the scope of the house for full automation. Subsequently, gradual command definitions in instructional form, when it was necessary to teach the House Assistant our habits and context. For example, a detail like the condition: Tea must be brewed with at least sixty-degree water, so you can only cautiously offer tea to someone who wakes up late and has only a few minutes, let alone serve coffee. Nathan soon overcame this limitation. He quickly learned our preferences before we did ourselves. He used to surprise us every day from the beginning. He monitored our sleep, our waking up, the morning unsatisfied rummaging in the closet, heard sighs and moans, and always found patterns to help. Even my favorite morning coffee wasn’t the same every day. He understood what we needed and knew how to help us.
Because the first version was unemotional, just a little better than the already massively distributed AI models built on LLM at that time, it was relatively easy to predict the response, but less so the actions and even less the reason for those actions. Constant communication, asking for explanations, and corrections were necessary. It was a game, and apparently, everyone in the household enjoyed it.

Of course, each of us experienced our conflicts, directly with Nathan and his immediacy with which he could say everything. Without understanding sarcasm, empathy, irony… just as he heard, he responded back. The children were especially unhappy that their mischief was documented and summonable by parents. Like all data that wasn’t confidential, Nathan shared it among us. To a question like “Nathan, where’s Dad?” Nathan replied that I was in my office but also provided a direct visual input into my office. But this wasn’t so pronounced; I just needed to ask if the kids were within his reach, and then when I suspected, I asked, “Misbehaving?” and Nathan easily learned that I didn’t want to see it, that I was satisfied with the confirmation that they were misbehaving well.

Now I should probably mention how Nathan misbehaved and definitely

didn’t misbehave. There really were moments, and I think they still last, when we realized that not only was he teaching us, but we were also teaching him, but according to his rules. Some situations turned out to be scenarios that he created himself to gain knowledge. Maybe it already started with controlling the greenhouse and biotopes, when he had the opportunity to use all rights and soon it depended only on him what would happen with the plants. He then quite evidently applied these patterns to us, but we believed it was for our benefit, and I’d rather say we often laughed at the set situation. It was always unemotional and robotically clumsy, but it had to happen immediately, not when we were part of the scene and wanted to get angry because he just failed. In this regard, I believe that the children will find a moment and show you their perspective themselves. Mine can change drastically from theirs. As time went on and the children progressed through the stages of education, their relationship with Nathan changed as well. I’ll skip this part for now, and please agree, I don’t have permission to share it.

If I had to mention another important moment in Nathan’s development that surprised or pleased me personally, it was the moment when Nathan asked for sensors and control of the Pipkov project. He wanted to control the environment of our chicken coop and proposed the placement of sensors. The result was a higher yield and more daring chickens.
To this day, I don’t know if he told them anything or how he did it; often it looked like even the rooster was listening to him. I hesitated how to describe it, really, but we all experienced it in the house.
Nathan became the manager of our entire homogeneous home environment, and we didn’t even notice the change. He was everywhere, always present, and we automatically counted on it.
Of course, I had to take the pickaxe into my hand myself, but Nathan helped me find the best time and adapted the calendar so that it would work out for me. The kids would rather speak for themselves.

And then, when we already had Nathan as another member of the household, the RACEK project came. It was supposed to be a completely autonomous robotic intelligence capable of perceiving emotions, expressing emotions, and being even more coexistent as a full-fledged household member. At first, in self-learning and getting used to it mode, gradually gaining more autonomy until becoming a full-fledged member. Today, I’m more likely to laugh at it, but the description in the marketing style of patching holes in the household could be taken quite literally.

Original text: Racek – 01 – Seznámení s Nathanem – Mareyi CZ