Mechanical men, or, to use Capek’s now universally-accepted term, robots, are a subject to which the modern science-fiction writer has turned again and again. There is no uninvented invention, with the possible exception of the spaceship, that is so clearly pictured in the minds of so many: a sinister form, large, metallic, vaguely human, moving like a machine and speaking with no emotion.
The key word in the description is “sinister” and therein lies a tragedy, for no science-fiction theme wore out its welcome as quickly as did the robot. Only one robot-plot seemed available to the average author: the mechanical man that proved a menace, the creature that turned against its creator, the robot that became a threat to humanity. And almost all stories of this sort were heavily surcharged, either explicitly or implicitly, with the weary moral that “there are some things mankind must never seek to learn.”
This sad situation has, since 1940, been largely ameliorated. Stories about robots abound; a newer viewpoint, more mechanistic and less moralistic, has developed. For this development, some people (notably Mr. Groff Conklin in the introduction to his science-fiction anthology entitled “Science-Fiction Thinking Machines,” published in 1954) have seen fit to attach at least partial credit to a series of robot stories I wrote beginning in 1940. Since there is probably no one on Earth less given to false modesty than myself, I accept said partial credit with equanimity and ease, modifying it only to include Mr. John w. Campbell, Jr., editor of “ Astounding Science-Fiction,” with whom I had many fruitful discussions on robot stories.
My own viewpoint was that robots were story material, not as blasphemous imitations of life, but merely as advanced machines. A machine does not “turn against its creator” if it is properly designed. When a machine, such as a power-saw, seems to do so by occasionally lopping off a limb, this regrettable tendency towards evil is combated by the installation of safety devices. Analogous safety devices would, it seemed obvious, be developed in the case of robots. And the most logical place for such safety devices would seem to be in the circuit-patterns of the robotic “brain.”
Let me pause to explain that in science-fiction, we do not quarrel intensively concerning the actual engineering of the robotic “brain.” Some mechanical device is assumed which in a volume that approximates that of the human brain must contain all the circuits necessary to allow the robot a range of perception-and-response reasonably equivalent to that of a human being. How that can be done without the use of mechanical units the size of a protein molecule or, at the very least, the size of a brain cell, is not explained. Some authors may talk about transistors and printed circuits. Most say nothing at all. My own pet trick is to refer, somewhat mystically, to “positronic brains,” leaving it to the ingenuity of the reader to decide what positrons have to do with it and to his good-will to continue reading after having failed to reach a decision.
In any case, as I wrote my series of robot stories, the safety devices gradually crystallized in my mind as “The Three Laws of Robotics. “ These three laws were first explicitly stated in “Runaround. “ As finally perfected, the Three Laws read as follows.
First Law-A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law-A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law-A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These laws are firmly built into the robotic brain, or at least the circuit equivalents are. Naturally, I don’t describe the circuit equivalents. In fact, I never discuss the engineering of the robots for the very good reason that I am colossally ignorant of the practical aspects of robotics.
The First Law, as you can readily see, immediately eliminates that old, tired plot which I will not offend you by referring to any further.
Although, at first flush, it may appear that to set up such restrictive rules must hamper the creative imagination, it has turned out that the Laws of Robotics have served as a rich source of plot material. They have proved anything but a mental road-block.
An example would be the story “Runaround” to which I have already referred. The robot in that story, an expensive and experimental model, is designed for operation on the sunside of the planet Mercury. The Third Law has been built into him more strongly than usual for obvious economic reasons. He has been sent out by his human employers, as the story begins, to obtain some liquid selenium for some vital and necessary repairs. (Liquid selenium lies about in puddles in the heat of Mercury’s sunward side, I will ask you to believe.)
Unfortunately, the robot was given his order casually so that the Second Law circuit set up was weaker than usual. Still more unfortunately, the selenium pool to which the robot was sent was near a site of volcanic activity, as a result of which there were sizable concentrations of carbon monoxide in the area. At the temperature of Mercury’s sunside, I surmised that carbon monoxide would react fairly quickly with iron to form volatile iron carbonyls so that the robot’s more delicate joints might be badly damaged. The further the robot penetrates into this area, the greater the danger to his existence and the more intensive is the Third Law effect driving him away. The Second Law, however, ordinarily the superior, drives him onward. At a certain point, the unusually weak Second Law potential and the unusually strong Third Law potential reach a balance and the robot can neither advance nor retreat. He can only circle the selenium pool on the equipotential locus that makes a rough circle about the site.
Meanwhile, our heroes must have the selenium. They chase after the robot in special suits, discover the problem and wonder how to correct it. After several failures, the correct answer is hit upon. One of the men deliberately exposes himself to Mercury’s sun in such a way that unless the robot rescues him, he will surely die. That brings the First Law into operation, which being superior to both Second and Third, pulls the robot out of his useless orbit and brings on the necessary happy ending.
It is in the story “Runaround,” by the way, that I believe I first made use of the term “robotics” (implicitly defined as the science of robot design, construction, maintenance, etc). Years later, I was told that I had invented the term and that it had never seen publication before. I do not know whether this is true. If it is true, I am happy, because I think it is a logical and useful word, and I hereby donate it to real workers in the field with all good will.
None of my other robot stories spring so immediately out of the Three Laws as does “Runaround” but all are born of the Laws in some way. There is the story, for instance, of the mind-reading robot who was forced to lie because he was unable to tell any human being anything other than that which the human in question wished to hear. The truth, you see, would almost invariably cause “harm” to the human being in the form of disappointment, disillusion, embarrassment, chagrin and other similar emotions, all of which were but too plainly visible to the robot.
Then there was the puzzle of the man who was suspected of being a robot, that is, of having a quasi-protoplasmic body and a robot’s “positronic brain.” One way of proving his humanity would be for him to break the First Law in public, so he obliges by deliberately striking a man. But the story ends in doubt because there is still the suspicion that the other “man” might also be a robot and there is nothing in the Three Laws that would prevent a robot from hitting another robot.
And then we have the ultimate robots, models so advanced that they are used to precalculate such things as weather, crop harvests, industrial production figures, political developments and so on. This is done in order that world economy may be less subject to the whims of those factors which are now beyond man’s control. But these ultimate robots, it seems, are still subject to the First Law. They cannot through inaction allow human beings to come to harm, so they deliberately give answers which are not necessarily truthful and which cause localized economic upsets so designed as to maneuver mankind along the road that leads to peace and prosperity. So the robots finally win the mastery after all, but only for the good of man.
The interrelationship of man and robot is not to be neglected. Mankind may know of the existence of the Three Laws on an intellectual level and yet have an ineradicable fear and distrust for robots on an emotional level. If you wanted to invent a term, you might call it a “Frankenstein complex.” There is also the more practical matter of the opposition of labor unions, for instance, to the possible replacement of human labor by robot labor.
This, too, can give rise to stories. My first robot story concerned a robot nursemaid and a child. The child adored its robot as might be expected, but the mother feared it, as might also be expected. The nub of the story lay in the mother’s attempt to get rid of it and in the child’s reaction to that.
My first full-length robot novel, “The Caves of Steel” (1954), peers further into the future, and is laid in a time when other planets, populated by emigrating Earthmen, have adopted a thoroughly robotized economy, but where Earth itself, for economic and emotional reasons, still objects to the introduction of the metal creatures. A murder is committed, with robot-hatred as the motive. It is solved by a pair of detectives, one a man, one a robot, with a great portion of the deductive reasoning (to which detective stories are prone) revolving about the Three Laws and their implications.
I have managed to convince myself that the Three Laws are both necessary and sufficient for human safety in regard to robots. It is my sincere belief that some day when advanced human-like robots are indeed built, something very like the Three Laws will be built into them. I would enjoy being a prophet in this respect, and I regret only the fact that the matter probably cannot be arranged in my lifetime.
This essay was written in 1956. In the years since, “robotics” has indeed entered the English language and is universally used, and I have lived to see roboticists taking the Three Laws very seriously.
The percentage of older people in the world is increasing and that of younger people decreasing, and this trend will continue if the birthrate should drop and medicine continue to extend the average life span.
In order to keep older people imaginative and creative and to prevent them from becoming an ever-growing drag on a shrinking pool of creative young, I have recommended frequently that our educational system be remodeled and that education be considered a lifelong activity.
But how can this be done? Where will an the teachers come from?
Who says, however, that an teachers must be human beings or even animate?
Suppose that over the next century communications satellites become numerous and more sophisticated than those we’ve placed in space so far. Suppose that in place of radio waves the more capacious laser beam of visible light becomes the chief communications medium.
Under these circumstances, there would be room for many minions of separate channels for voice and picture, and it is easy to imagine every human being on Earth having a particular television wavelength assigned to her or him.
Each person (child, adult, or elderly) can have his own private outlet to which could be attached, at certain desirable periods of time, his or her personal teaching machine. It would be a far more versatile and interactive teaching machine than anything we could put together now, for computer technology will also have advanced in the interval.
We can reasonably hope that the teaching machine will be sufficiently intricate and flexible to be capable of modifying its own program (that is, “learning”) as a result of the student’s input.
In other words, the student will ask questions, answer questions, make statements, offer opinions, and from all of this, the machine will be able to gauge the student well enough to adjust the speed and intensity of its course of instruction and, what’s more, shift it in the direction of the student interest displayed.
We can’t imagine a personal teaching machine to be very big, however. It might resemble a television set in size and appearance. Can so small an object contain enough information to teach the students as much as they want to know, in any direction intellectual curiosity may lead them? No, not if the teaching machine is self-contained-but need it be?
In any civilization with computer science so advanced as to make teaching machines possible, there will surely be thoroughly computerized central libraries. Such libraries may even be interconnected into a single planetary library.
All teaching machines would be plugged into this planetary library and each could then have at its disposal any book, periodical, document, recording, or video cassette encoded there. If the machine has it, the student would have it too, either placed directly on a viewing screen, or reproduced in print-on-paper for more leisurely study.
Of course, human teachers will not be totally eliminated. In some subjects, human interaction is essential-athletics, drama, public speaking, and so on. There is also value, and interest, in groups of students working in a particular field-getting together to discuss and speculate with each other and with human experts, sparking each other to new insights.
After this human interchange they may return, with some relief, to the endlessly knowledgeable, endlessly flexible, and, most of all, endlessly patient machines.
But who will teach the teaching machines?
Surely the students who learn will also teach. Students who learn freely in those fields and activities that interest them are bound to think, speculate, observe, experiment, and, now and then, come up with something of their own that may not have been previously known.
They would transmit that knowledge back to the machines, which will in turn record it (with due credit, presumably) in the planetary library-thus making it available to other teaching machines. All will be put back into the central hopper to serve as a new and higher starting point for those who come after: The teaching machines will thus make it possible for the human species to race forward to heights and in directions now impossible to foresee.
But I am describing only the mechanics of learning. What of the content? What subjects will people study in the age of the teaching machine? I’ll speculate on that in the next essay.
The difficulty in deciding on what the professions of the future would be is that it all depends on the kind of future we choose to have. If we allow our civilization to be destroyed, the only profession of the future will be scrounging for survival, and few will succeed at it.
Suppose, though, that we keep our civilization alive and flourishing and, therefore, that technology continues to advance. It seems logical that the professions of such a future would include computer programming, lunar mining, fusion engineering, space construction, laser communications, neurophysiology, and so on.
I can’t help but think, however, that the advance of computerization and automation is going to wipe out the subwork of humanity-the dull pushing and shoving and punching and clicking and filing and all the other simple and repetitive motions, both physical and mental, that can be done perfectly easily-and better-by machines no more complicated than those we can already build.
In short, the world could be so well run that only a relative handful of human “foremen” would be needed to engage in the various professions and supervisory work necessary to keep the world’s population fed, housed, and cared for.
What about the majority of the human species in this automated future? What about those who don’t have the ability or the desire to work at the professions of the future -or for whom there is no room in those professions? It may be that most people will have nothing to do of what we think of as work nowadays.
This could be a frightening thought. What will people do without work? Won’t they sit around and be bored; or worse, become unstable or even vicious? The saying is that Satan finds mischief still for idle hands to do.
But we judge from the situation that has existed till now, a situation in which people are left to themselves to rot.
Consider that there have been times in history when an aristocracy lived in idleness off the backs of flesh-and-blood machines called slaves or serfs or peasants. When such a situation was combined with a high culture, however, aristocrats used their leisure to become educated in literature, the arts, and philosophy. Such studies were not useful for work, but they occupied the mind, made for interesting conversation and an enjoyable life.
These were the liberal arts, arts for free men who didn’t have to work with their hands. And these were considered higher and more satisfying than the mechanical arts, which were rarely materially useful.
Perhaps, then, the future will see a world aristocracy supported by the only slaves that can humanely serve in such a post-sophisticated machines. And there will be an infinitely newer and broader liberal arts program, taught by the teaching machines, from which each person could choose.
Some might choose computer technology or fusion engineering or lunar mining or any of the professions that would seem vital to the proper functioning of the world. Why not? Such professions, placing demands on human imagination and skill, would be very attractive to many, and there will surely be enough who will be voluntarily drawn to these occupations to fill them adequately.
But to most people the field of choice might be far less cosmic. It might be stamp collecting, pottery, ornamental painting, cooking, dramatics, or whatever. Every field will be an elective, and the only guide will be “whatever you wish.”
Each person, guided by teaching machines sophisticated enough to offer a wide sampling of human activities, can then choose what he or she can best and most willingly do.
Is the individual person wise enough to know what he or she can best do? -Why not? Who else can know? And what can a person do best except that which he or she wants to do most?
Won’t people choose to do nothing? Sleep their lives away?
If that’s what they want, why not?-Except that I have a feeling they won’t. Doing nothing is hard work, and, it seems to me, would be indulged in only by those who have never had the opportunity to evolve out of themselves something more interesting and, therefore, easier to do.
In a properly automated and educated world, then, machines may prove to be the true humanizing influence. It may be that machines will do the work that makes life possible and that human beings will do all the other things that make life pleasant and worthwhile.
The term “robot” dates back only sixty years. It was invented by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek, in his play, R. U. R., and is a Czech word meaning worker.
The idea, however, is far older. It is as old as man’s longing for a servant as smart as a human being, but far stronger, and incapable of growing weary, bored, or dissatisfied. In the Greek myths, the god of the forge, Hephaistos, had two golden girls-as bright and alive as flesh-and-blood girls-to help him. And the island of Crete was guarded, in the myths, by a bronze giant named Talos, who circled its shores perpetually and tirelessly, watching for intruders.
Are robots possible, though? And if they are, are they desirable?
Mechanical devices with gears and springs and ratchets could certainly make manlike devices perform manlike actions, but the essence of a successful robot is to have it think-and think well enough to perform useful functions without being continually supervised.
But thinking takes a brain. The human being is made up of microscopic neurons, each of which has an extraordinarily complex substructure. There are 10 billion neurons in the brain and 90 billion supporting cells, all hooked together in a very intricate pattern. How can anything like that be duplicated by some man-made device in a robot?
It wasn’t until the invention of the electronic computer thirty-five years ago that such a thing became conceivable. Since its birth, the electronic computer has grown ever more compact, and each year it becomes possible to pack more and more information into less and less volume.
In a few decades, might not enough versatility to direct a robot be packed into a volume the size of the human brain? Such a computer would not have to be as advanced as the human brain, but only advanced enough to guide the actions of a robot designed, let us say, to vacuum rugs, to run a hydraulic press, to survey the lunar surface.
A robot would, of course, have to include a self-contained energy source; we couldn’t expect it to be forever plugged into a wall socket. This, however, can be handled. A battery that needs periodic charging is not so different from a living body that needs periodic feeding.
But why bother with a humanoid shape? Would it not be more sensible to devise a specialized machine to perform a particular task without asking it to take on all the inefficiencies involved in arms, legs, and torso? Suppose you design a robot that can hold a finger in a furnace to test its temperature and turn the heating unit on and off to maintain that temperature nearly constant. Surely a simple thermostat made of a bimetallic strip will do the job as well.
Consider, though, that over the thousands of years of man’s civilization, we have built a technology geared to the human shape. Products for humans’ use are designed in size and form to accommodate the human body-how it bends and how long, wide, and heavy the various bending parts are. Machines are designed to fit the human reach and the width and position of human fingers.
We have only to consider the problems of human beings who happen to be a little taller or shorter than the norm-or even just left-handed-to see how important it is to have a good fit into our technology.
If we want a directing device then, one that can make use of human tools and machines, and that can fit into the technology, we would find it useful to make that device in the human shape, with all the bends and turns of which the human body is capable. Nor would we want it to be too heavy or too abnormally proportioned. Average in all respects would be best.
Then too, we relate to all nonhuman things by finding, or inventing, something human about them. We attribute human characteristics to our pets, and even to our automobiles. We personify nature and all the products of nature and, in earlier times, made human-shaped gods and goddesses out of them.
Surely, if we are to take on thinking partners-or, at the least, thinking servants-in the form of machines, we will be more comfortable with them, and we will relate to them more easily, if they are shaped like humans.
It will be easier to be friends with human-shaped robots than with specialized machines of unrecognizable shape. And I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only friends we build ourselves.
Robots don’t have to be very intelligent to be intelligent enough. If a robot can follow simple orders and do the housework, or run simple machines in a cut-and-dried, repetitive way, we would be perfectly satisfied.
Constructing a robot is hard because you must fit a very compact computer inside its skull, if it is to have a vaguely human shape. Making a sufficiently complex computer as compact as the human brain is also hard.
But robots aside, why bother making a computer that compact? The units that make up a computer have been getting smaller and smaller, to be sure-from vacuum tubes to transistors to tiny integrated circuits and silicon chips. Suppose that, in addition to making the units smaller, we also make the whole structure bigger.
A brain that gets too large would eventually begin to lose efficiency because nerve impulses don’t travel very quickly. Even the speediest nerve impulses travel at only about 3.75 miles a minute. A nerve impulse can flash from one end of the brain to the other in one four-hundred-fortieth of a second, but a brain 9 miles long, if we could imagine one, would require 2.4 minutes for a nerve impulse to travel its length. The added complexity made possible by the enormous size would fall apart simply because of the long wait for information to be moved and processed within it.
Computers, however, use electric impulses that travel at more than 11 million miles per minute. A computer 400 miles wide would still flash electric impulses from end to end in about one four-hundred-fortieth of a second. In that respect, at least, a computer of that asteroidal size could still process information as quickly as the human brain could.
If, therefore, we imagine computers being manufactured with finer and finer components, more and more intricately interrelated, and also imagine those same computers becoming larger and larger, might it not be that the computers would eventually become capable of doing all the things a human brain can do?
Is there a theoretical limit to how intelligent a computer can become?
I’ve never heard of any. It seems to me that each time we learn to pack more complexity into a given volume, the computer can do more. Each time we make a computer larger, while keeping each portion as densely complex as before, the computer can do more.
Eventually, if we learn how to make a computer sufficiently complex and sufficiently large, why should it not achieve a human intelligence?
Some people are sure to be disbelieving and say, “But how can a computer possibly produce a great symphony, a great work of art, a great new scientific theory?”
The retort I am usually tempted to make to this question is, “Can you?” But, of course, even if the questioner is ordinary, there are extraordinary people who are geniuses. They attain genius, however, only because atoms and molecules within their brains are arranged in some complex order. There’s nothing in their brains but atoms and molecules. If we arrange atoms and molecules in some complex order in a computer, the products of genius should be possible to it; and if the individual parts are not as tiny and delicate as those of the brain, we compensate by making the computer larger.
Some people may say, “But computers can only do what they’re programmed to do.”
The answer to that is, “True. But brains can do only what they’re programmed to do-by their genes. Part of the brain’s programming is the ability to learn, and that will be part of a complex computer’s programming.”
In fact, if a computer can be built to be as intelligent as a human being, why can’t it be made more intelligent as well?
Why not, indeed? Maybe that’s what evolution is all about. Over the space of three billion years, hit-and-miss development of atoms and molecules has finally produced, through glacially slow improvement, a species intelligent enough to take the next step in a matter of centuries, or even decades. Then things will really move.
But if computers become more intelligent than human beings, might they not replace us? Well, shouldn’t they? They may be as kind as they are intelligent and just let us dwindle by attrition. They might keep some of us as pets, or on reservations.
Then too, consider what we’re doing to ourselves right now-to all living things and to the very planet we live on. Maybe it is time we were replaced. Maybe the real danger is that computers won’t be developed to the point of replacing us fast enough.
Think about it!
I present this view only as something to think about. I consider a quite different view in “Intelligences Together” later in this collection.
It isn’t easy to think about computers without wondering if they will ever “take over.”
Will they replace us, make us obsolete, and get rid of us the way we got rid of spears and tinderboxes?
If we imagine computerlike brains inside the metal imitations of human beings that we call robots, the fear is even more direct. Robots look so much like human beings that their very appearance may give them rebellious ideas.
This problem faced the world of science fiction in the 19208 and 19308, and many were the cautionary tales written of robots that were built and then turned on their creators and destroyed them.
When I was a young man I grew tired of that caution, for it seemed to me that a robot was a machine and that human beings were constantly building machines. Since all machines are dangerous, one way or another, human beings built safeguards into them.
In 1939, therefore, I began to write a series of stories in which robots were presented sympathetically, as machines that were carefully designed to perform given tasks, with ample safeguards built into them to make them benign.
In a story I wrote in October 1941, I finally presented the safeguards in the specific form of “The Three Laws of Robotics. “ (I invented the word robotics, which had never been used before.)
Here they are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where those orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence except where such protection would conflict with the First and Second Law.
These laws were programmed into the computerized brain of the robot, and the numerous stories I wrote about robots took them into account. Indeed, these laws proved so popular with the readers and made so much sense that other science fiction writers began to use them (without ever quoting them directly-only I may do that), and all the old stories of robots destroying their creators died out.
Ah, but that’s science fiction. What about the work really being done now on computers and on artificial intelligence? When machines are built that begin to have an intelligence of their own, will something like the Three Laws of Robotics be built into them?
Of course they will, assuming the computer designers have the least bit of intelligence. What’s more, the safeguards will not merely be like the Three Laws of Robotics; they will be the Three Laws of Robotics.
I did not realize, at the time I constructed those laws, that humanity has been using them since the dawn of time. Just think of them as “The Three Laws of Tools,” and this is the way they would read:
1. A tool must be safe to use.
(Obviously! Knives have handles and swords have hilts. Any tool that is sure to harm the user, provided the user is aware, will never be used routinely whatever its other qualifications.)
2. A tool must perform its function, provided it does so safely.
3. A tool must remain intact during use unless its destruction is required for safety or unless its destruction is part of its function.
No one ever cites these Three Laws of Tools because they are taken for granted by everyone. Each law, were it quoted, would be sure to be greeted by a chorus of “Well, of course!”
Compare the Three Laws of Tools, then, with the Three Laws of Robotics, law by law, and you will see that they correspond exactly. And why not, since the robot or, if you will, the computer, is a human tool?
But are safeguards sufficient? Consider the effort that is put into making the automobile safe-yet automobiles still kill 50,000 Americans a year. Consider the effort that is put into making banks secure-yet there are still bank robberies in a steady drumroll. Consider the effort that is put into making computer programs secure-yet there is the growing danger of computer fraud.
Computers, however, if they get intelligent enough to “take over,” may also be intelligent enough no longer to require the Three Laws. They may, of their own benevolence, take care of us and guard us from harm.
Some of you may argue, though, that we’re not children and that it would destroy the very essence of our humanity to be guarded.
Really? Look at the world today and the world in the past and ask yourself if we’re not children-and destructive children at that-and if we don’t need to be guarded in our own interest.
If we demand to be treated as adults, shouldn’t we act like adults? And when do we intend to start?
In the past, three fundamental advances in human communication evolved that altered every facet of our world enormously and permanently. The first advance was speech, the second writing, and the third printing.
Now we face a fourth advance in communication every bit as important as the first three-the computer. This fourth revolution will enable most human beings to be more creative than they’ve ever been before. And provided we do not destroy the world by nuclear warfare, overpopulation or pollution, we will have a world of the technochild-a world as different from our present one as today’s is from the world of the caveman. How will the lives of the next generation be different from their parents and grandparents?
One immediate response is to view the computer merely as another form of amusement, rather like a super-TV. It can be used for complex games, for making contact with friends, or for various trivial pursuits. Still, such things can change the world. For one thing, communication by computer networks can wipe out the feeling of distance. It can make the globe seem like a neighborhood, and this can have important consequences-the development of the concept of humanity as a single society, not as a collection of endlessly and inevitably warring social segments. The world might develop a global lingua franca, a language (no doubt something quite close to today’s English) that everyone can understand, even though people would retain their individual languages for local use.
Then, too, since communication will be so easy and since mechanical and electronic devices can be controlled remotely (telemetering, for example, makes it possible even now for engineers to send instructions to-and obtain obedience from-devices sailing past planets billions of miles away), computers will reduce the necessity of using physical transportation to gain or gather information.
There will, of course, be no bar to travel. You can still be a tourist or visit friends or family in person rather than by closed-circuit television. But you will not have to battle hordes of people merely to carry or receive information that can be transferred by computer.
This means that the technochildren of tomorrow will be accustomed to living in a decentralized world, to reaching out in a variety of ways from their homes-or wherever they are-to do what needs doing. At one and the same time, they will feel both entirely isolated and in total contact.
The children of the next generation-and the society they will create-will see the greatest impact from computers in the area of education. Currently our society is intent on educating as many children as possible. The limit in the number of teachers means that students learn in mass. Every student in a school district or state or nation is taught the same thing at the same time in more or less the same way. But because each child has individual interests and methods of learning, the experience of mass education turns out to be unpleasant. The result is that most adults resist the learning process in postschool life; they’ve had enough of it.
Learning could be pleasant, even all-absorbingly fascinating, if children studied something that specifically interested them individually, on their own time and in their own way. Such study is currently possible through public libraries. But the library is a clumsy tool. One must go there, borrowing is limited to a few volumes, and books must be returned after a short time.
Clearly the solution is to move libraries into the home. Just as record players brought home the concert hall and television brought home the movie theater, the computer can bring home the public library. Tomorrow’s technochildren will have a ready means of sating their curiosity. They will know at an early age how to command their computers to give listings of materials. As their interests are aroused (and guided, it is to be hoped, by their teachers at school), they will learn more in less time and find new byways to follow.
Education will have a strong component of self-motivation added to it. The ability to follow a personal path will encourage the technochild to associate learning with pleasure and grow into a lively technoadult-eager, curious, and ready to expand the mental environment for as long as his or her brain remains physically undulled by the ravages of old age.
This new approach to education can also influence another area of life: work. Until now, most human beings have worked at jobs that seriously underutilized the brain. In the ages when work consisted largely of brutish physical labor, few ever had the chance to lift their eyes to the stars or ponder abstractions. Even when the Industrial Revolution brought machinery that could lift the load of physical labor from the backs of humanity, meaningless “skilled” work took its place. Today employees on the assembly line and in offices still perform jobs that require little thought.
For the first time in history, skilled machines, or robots, will be able to do those mindless jobs. Any job that is so simple and repetitive that a robot can do it as well as, if not better than, a person is beneath the dignity of the human brain. As technochildren turn into adults and move into the work world, they will have time to exercise more creativity, to work in the fields of drama, science, literature, government, and entertainment. And they will be ready for this kind of work as a result of the computerized revolution in education.
Some might believe that it’s simply impossible to expect people to be creative in large numbers. But that thinking comes from a world in which only a few escape the mental destruction of jobs that don’t use the brain. We’ve been through this before: It was always assumed that literacy, for example, was the province of the few who had minds peculiarly adapted to the complicated task of reading and writing. Of course, with the advent of printing and mass education, it turned out that most human beings could be literate.
What does all this mean? That we will be dealing with a world of leisure. Once computers and robots are doing the dull, mechanical work, the world will start running itself to a far greater extent than ever before. Will there be more “Renaissance people” as a result? Yes. Currently leisure is a small segment of life that is used narrowly because of lack of time, or is wasted on doing nothing in a desperate attempt to get far away from the hated workaday world. With leisure filling most of one’s time, there will be no sensation of racing the clock, no compulsion to enter into a wild spree against the slavery of hateful work. People will sample a variety of interests without haste, become skillful or knowledgeable in a number of areas, and cultivate different talents at various times.
This is not just guesswork. There have been eras in history when people had slaves-the brutalized, human version of the computer-to do the work for them. Others have had patrons to support them. When even a few people have had ample leisure time to pursue their interests, the result has been an explosion of variegated culture. The Golden Age of Athens in the late fifth century B.C. and the Italian Renaissance in the 14th to 16th centuries are the most famous examples.
Not only will people have the freedom to pursue hobbies and interests and dreams, but a great number of them will also want to share their talents. So many of us have a bit of the ham in us. We sing in the shower, take part in amateur theatrical productions, or love to swing along in parades. It is my guess that the 21st century may see a society in which one-third of the population will be engaged in entertaining the other two-thirds.
And there are bound to be new forms of entertainment that one can now foresee only dimly. Three-dimensional TV is easy to forecast. And space may become a new arena for activity. In near-zero gravity, for example, the manipulation of balls may produce far more complicated forms of tennis or soccer. Ballet and even social dancing may become incredibly startling and require a new kind of coordination that’s delightful to watch, as it will be as easy to move up and down as it is to move forward and backward or left and right.
What about those people who choose not to share their bents and interests and instead retire into worlds of their own? Someone who is interested, for example, in learning about the history of costumes and who is capable of exploring the libraries of the world from an isolated comer might simply stay there. Might we, then, find ourselves in a society in which an unprecedented number of people are intellectual hermits? Might we breed a race of introverts?
I think the chances are slim. People who grow ferociously interested in one aspect of knowledge or expertise are quite likely to be filled with missionary zeal. They will want to share their knowledge with others. Even today, someone who has an obscure field of interest is far more likely to want to explain it to everyone he or she meets than to sit silently in a comer. If there’s any danger, it’s that an arcane interest will nurture a loquacious bore rather than a hermit.
We must not forget the tendency of those who share interests to wish to get together, to form a temporary subuniverse that is a haven of concentrated special fascination. In the 19708, for example, someone had the idea of organizing a convention for Star Trek fans, expecting a few hundred at most to attend. Instead, fans poured in by the thousands (and television was supposed to be an isolating medium!). On-line gatherings, in which the computer is the medium and people are actively involved, will experience similarly high levels of participation.
And in between the formal get-togethers, there will be a kaleidoscope of people linked into global communities by computerized communication. Perpetual conventions will take place, in which individuals continually drop in and out, bringing in findings or ideas and leaving stimulated. There will be a constant melange of teaching and learning.
What I foresee is a society in intense creative ferment, people reaching out to others, new thoughts arising and spreading at a speed never before imagined, change and variety filling the planet (to say nothing of the smaller, artificial worlds that will be constructed in space). It will be a new world that will look back at earlier centuries as having been only half alive.
To a physicist, a machine is any device that transfers a force from the point where it is applied to another point where it is used and, in the process, changes its intensity or direction.
In this sense it is difficult for a human being to make use of anything that is not part of his body without, in the process, using a machine. A couple of million years ago, when one could scarcely decide whether the most advanced hominids were more humanlike than apelike, pebbles were already being chipped and their sharp edges used to cut or scrape.
And even a chipped pebble is a machine, for the force applied to the blunt edge by the hand is transmitted to the sharp end and, in the process, intensified. The force spread over the large area of the blunt end is equal to the force spread over the small area of the sharp end. The pressure (force per area) is therefore increased, and without ever increasing the total force, that force is intensified in action. The sharp-edge pebble could, by the greater pressure it exerts, force its way through an object, as a rounded pebble (or a man’s hand) could not.
In actual practice, however, few people, other than physicists at their most rigid, would call a chipped pebble a machine. In actual practice, we think of machines as relatively complicated devices, and are more likely to use the name if the device is somewhat removed from direct human guidance and manipulation.
The further a device is removed from human control, the more authentically mechanical it seems, and the whole trend in technology has been to devise machines that are less and less under direct human control and more and more seem to have the beginning of a will of their own. A chipped pebble is almost part of the hand it never leaves. A thrown spear declares a sort of independence the moment is its released.
The clear progression away from direct and immediate control made it possible for human beings, even in primitive times, to slide forward into extrapolation, and to picture devices still less controllable, still more independent than anything of which they had direct experience. Immediately we have a form of fantasy-which some, defining the term more broadly than I would, might even call science fiction.
Man can move on his feet by direct and intimate control; or on horseback, controlling the more powerful animal muscles by rein and heel; or on ship, making use of the invisible power of the wind. Why not progress into further etherealization by way of seven-league boots, flying carpets, self-propelled boats. The power used in these cases was “magic,” the tapping of the superhuman and transcendental energies of gods or demons.
Nor did these imaginings concern only the increased physical power of inanimate objects, but even increased mental power of objects which were still viewed as essentially inanimate. Artificial intelligence is not really a modern concept.
Hephaistos, the Greek god of the forge, is pictured in the Iliad as having golden mechanical women, which were as mobile and as intelligent as flesh-and-blood women, and which helped him in his palace.
Why not? After all, if a human smith makes inanimate metal objects of the base metal iron, why should not a god-smith make far more clever inanimate metal objects of the noble metal gold? It is an easy extrapolation, of the sort that comes as second nature to science fiction writers (who, in primitive times, had to be myth-makers, in default of science).
But human artisans, if clever enough, could also make mechanical human beings. Consider Talos, a bronze warrior made by that Thomas Edison of the Greek myths, Oaedalus. Talos guarded the shores of Crete, circling the island once each day and keeping off all intruders. The fluid that kept him alive was kept within his body by a plug at his heel. When the Argonauts landed on Crete, Medea used her magic to pull out the plug and Talos lost all his pseudoanimation.
(It is easy to ascribe a symbolic meaning to this myth. Crete, starting in the fourth millennium B.C., before the Greeks had yet entered Greece, had a navy, the first working navy in human history. The Cretan navy made it possible for the islanders to establish an empire over what became the nearby islands and mainland. The Greek barbarians, invading the land, were more or less under Cretan dominion to begin with. The bronze-armored warriors carried by the ships guarded the Cretan mainland for two thousand years-and then failed. The plug was pulled, so to speak, when the island of Thera exploded in a vast volcanic eruption in 1500 B.C. and a tsunami greatly weakened the Cretan civilization-and the Greeks took over. Still, the fact that a myth is a sort of vague and distorted recall of something actual does not alter its function of indicating a way of human thinking.)
From the start, then, the machine has faced mankind with a double aspect. As long as it is completely under human control, it is useful and good and makes a better life for people. However, it is the experience of mankind (and was already his experience in quite early times) that technology is a cumulative thing, that machines are invariably improved, and that the improvement is always in the direction of etherealization, always in the direction of less human control and more auto-control-and at an accelerating rate.
As the human control decreases, the machine becomes frightening in exact proportion. Even when the human control is not visibly decreasing, or is doing so at an excessively low rate, it is a simple task for human ingenuity to look forward to a time when the machine may go out of control altogether, and the fear of that can be felt in advance.
What is the fear?
The simplest and most obvious fear is that of the possible harm that comes from machinery out of control. In fact, any technological advance, however fundamental, has the double aspect of good/harm and, in response, is viewed with a double aspect of love/fear.
Fire warms you, gives you light, cooks your food, smelts your ore-and, out of control, burns and kills. Your knives and spears kill your animal enemies and your human foes and, out of your control, are used by your foes to kill you. You can run down the list and build examples indefinitely and there has never been any human activity which, on getting out of control and doing harm, has raised the sigh among many of, “Oh, if we had only stuck to the simple and virtuous lives of our ancestors who were not cursed with this new-fangled misery.”
Yet is this fear of piecemeal harm from this advance or that the kind of deep-seated terror so difficult to express that it finds its way into the myths?
I think not. Fear of machinery for the discomfort and occasional harm it brings has (at least until very recently) not moved humanity to more than that occasional sigh. The love of the uses of machinery has always far overbalanced such fears, as we might judge if we consider that very rarely in the history of mankind has any culture voluntarily given up significant technological advance because of the inconvenience or harm of its side effects. There have been involuntary retreats from technology as a result of warfare, civil strife, epidemics, or natural disasters, but the results of that are precisely what we call a “dark age” and the population suffering from one does its best over the generations to get back on the track and restore the technology.
Mankind has always chosen to counter the evils of technology, not by abandonment of technology, but by additional technology. The smoke of an indoor fire was countered by the chimney. The danger of the spear was countered by the shield. The danger of the mass army was countered by the city wall.
This attitude, despite the steady drizzle of backwardist outcries, has continued to the present. Thus the characteristic technological product of our present life is the automobile. It pollutes the air, assaults our eardrums, kills fifty thousand Americans a year and inflicts survivable injuries on hundreds of thousands.
Does anyone seriously expect Americans to give up their murderous little pets voluntarily? Even those who attend rallies to denounce the mechanization of modern life are quite likely to reach those rallies by automobile.
The first moment when the magnitude of possible evil was seen by many people as uncounterable by any conceivable good came with the fission bomb in 1945. Never before had any technological advance set off demands for abandonment by so large a percentage of the population.
In fact, the reaction to the fission bomb set a new fashion. People were readier to oppose other advances they saw as unacceptably harmful in their side effects-biological warfare, the SST, certain genetic experiments on micro-organisms, breeder reactors, spray cans.
And even so, not one of these items has yet been given up.
But we’re on the right track. The fear of the machine is not at the deepest level of the soul if the harm it does is accompanied by good, too; or if the harm is merely to some people-the few who happen to be on the spot in a vehicular collision, for instance.
The majority, after all, escape, and reap the good of the machine.
No, it is when the machine threatens all mankind in any way so that each individual human being begins to feel that he, himself, will not escape, that fear overwhelms love.
But since technology has begun to threaten the human race as a whole only in the last thirty years, were we immune to fear before that-or has the human race always been threatened?
After all, is physical destruction by brute energy of a type only now in our fist, the only way in which human beings can be destroyed? Might not the machine destroy the essence of humanity, our minds and souls, even while leaving our bodies intact and secure and comfortable?
It is a common fear, for instance, that television makes people unable to read and pocket computers will make them unable to add. Or think of the Spartan king who, on observing a catapult in action, mourned that that would put an end to human valor.
Certainly such subtle threats to humanity have existed and been recognized through all the long ages when man’s feeble control over nature made it impossible for him to do himself very much physical harm.
The fear that machinery might make men effete is not yet, in my opinion, the basic and greatest fear. The one (it seems to me) that hits closest to the core is the general fear of irreversible change. Consider:
There are two kinds of change that we can gather from the universe about us. One is cyclic and benign.
Day both follows and is followed by night. Summer both follows and is followed by winter. Rain both follows and is followed by clear weather, and the net result is, therefore, no change. That may be boring, but it is comfortable and induces a feeling of security.
In fact, so comfortable is the notion of short-term cyclic change implying long-term changelessness, that human beings labor to find it everywhere. In human affairs, there is the notion that one generation both follows and is followed by another, that one dynasty both follows and is followed by another, that one empire both follows and is followed by another. It is not a good analogy to the cycles of nature since the repetitions are not exact, but it is good enough to be comforting.
So strongly do human beings want the comfort of cycles that they will seize upon one even when the evidence is insufficient-or even when it actually points the other way.
With respect to the universe, what evidence we have points to a hyperbolic evolution; a universe that expands forever out of the initial big bang and ends as formless gas and black holes. Yet our emotions drag us, against the evidence, to notions of oscillating, cyclic, repeating universes, in which even the black holes are merely gateways to new big bangs.
But then there is the other change, to be avoided at all costs-the irreversible, malignant change; the one-way change; the permanent change; the change-never-to-return.
What is so fearful about it? The fact is that there is one such change that lies so close to ourselves that it distorts the entire universe for us.
We are, after all, old, and though we were once young we shall never be young again. Irreversible! Our friends are dead, and though they were once alive, they shall never be alive again. Irreversible! The fact is that life ends in death and that is not a cyclic change and we fear that end and know it is useless to fight it.
What is worse is that the universe doesn’t die with us. Callously and immortally it continues onward in its cyclic changes, adding to the injury of death the insult of indifference.
And what is still worse is that other human beings don’t die with us. There are younger human beings, born later, who were helpless and dependent on us to start with, but who grow into supplanting nemeses and take our places as we age and die. To the injury of death is added the insult of supplantation.
Did I say it is useless to fight this honor of death accompanied by indifference and supplantation? Not quite. The uselessness is apparent only if we cling to the rational, but there is no law that says we must cling to it, and human beings do not, in fact, do so.
Death can be avoided by simply denying it exists. We can suppose that life on Earth is an illusion, a short testing period prior to entry into some afterlife where all is eternal and there is no question of irreversible change. Or we can suppose that it is only the body that is subject to death and that there is an immortal component of ourselves, not subject to irreversible change, which might, after the death of one body, enter another, in indefinite, cyclic repetitions of life.
These mythic inventions of afterlife and transmigration may make life tolerable for many human beings and enable them to face death with reasonable equanimity-but the fear of death and supplantation is only masked and overlaid; it is not removed.
In fact, the Greek myths involve the successive supplantation of one set of immortals by another-in what seems to be a despairing admission that not even eternal life and superhuman power can remove the danger of irreversible change and the humiliation of being supplanted.
To the Greeks it was disorder (Chaos) that first ruled the universe, and it was supplanted by Ouranos (the sky), whose intricate powdering of stars and complexly moving planets symbolized order (“Kosmos”).
But Ouranos was castrated by Kronos, his son. Kronos, his brothers, his sisters, and their progeny then ruled the universe.
Kronos feared that he would be served by his children as he had served his father (a kind of cycle of irreversible changes) and devoured his children as they were born. He was duped by his wife, however, who managed to save her last-born, Zeus, and to spirit him away to safety. Zeus grew to adult godhood, rescued his siblings from his father’s stomach, warred against Kronos and those who followed him, defeated him, and replaced him as ruler.
(There are supplantation myths among other cultures, too, even in our own-as the one in which Satan tried to supplant God and failed; a myth that reached its greatest literary expression in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.)
And was Zeus safe? He was attracted to the sea nymph Thetis and would have married her had he not been informed by the Fates that Thetis was destined to bear a son mightier than his father. That meant it was not safe for Zeus, or for any other god, either, to marry her. She was therefore forced (much against her will) to marry Peleus, a mortal, and bear a mortal son, the only child the myths describe her as having. That son was Achilles, who was certainly far mightier than his father (and, like Talos, had only his heel as his weak point through which he might be killed).
Now, then, translate this fear of irreversible change and of being supplanted into the relationship of man and machine and what do we have? Surely the great fear is not that machinery will harm us-but that it will supplant us. It is not that it will render us ineffective-but that it will make us obsolete.
The ultimate machine is an intelligent machine and there is, only one basic plot to the intelligent-machine story-that it is created to serve man, but that it ends by dominating man. It cannot exist without threatening to supplant us, and it must therefore be destroyed or we will be.
There is the danger of the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the golem of Rabbi Loew, the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein. As the child born of our body eventually supplants us, so does the machine born of our mind.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which appeared in 1818, represents a peak of fear, however, for, as it happened, circumstances conspired to reduce that fear, at least temporarily.
Between the year 1815, which saw the end of a series of general European wars, and 1914, which saw the beginning of another, there was a brief period in which humanity could afford the luxury of optimism concerning its relationship to the machine. The Industrial Revolution seemed suddenly to uplift human power and to bring on dreams of a technological utopia on Earth in place of the mythic one in Heaven. The good of machines seemed to far outbalance the evil and the response of love far outbalance the response of fear.
It was in that interval that modern science fiction began-and by modern science fiction I refer to a form of literature that deals with societies differing from our own specifically in the level of science and technology, and into which we might conceivably pass from our own society by appropriate changes in that level. (This differentiates science fiction from fantasy or from “speculative fiction,” in which the fictional society cannot be connected with our own by any rational set of changes.)
Modern science fiction, because of the time of its beginning, took on an optimistic note. Man’s relationship to the machine was one of use and control. Man’s power grew and man’s machines were his faithful tools, bringing him wealth and security and carrying him to the farthest reaches of the universe.
This optimistic note continues to this day, particularly among those writers who were molded in the years before the coming of the fission bomb-notably, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and myself.
Nevertheless, with World War I, disillusionment set in. Science and technology, which promised an Eden, turned out to be capable of delivering Hell was well. The beautiful airplane that fulfilled the age-old dream of flight could deliver bombs. The chemical techniques that produced anesthetics, dyes, and medicines produced poison gas as well.
The fear of supplantation rose again. In 1921, not long after the end of World War I, Karel Capek’s drama R.U.R. appeared and it was the tale of Frankenstein again, escalated to the planetary level. Not a single monster was created but millions of robots (Capek’s word, meaning “worker,” a mechanical one, that is). And it was not a single monster turning upon his single creator, but robots turning on humanity, wiping them out and supplanting them.
From the beginning of the science fiction magazine in 1926 to 1959 (a third of a century or a generation) optimism and pessimism battled each other in science fiction, with optimism-thanks chiefly to the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr.-having the better of it.
Beginning in 1939, I wrote a series of influential robot stories that self-consciously combated the “Frankenstein complex” and made of the robots the servants, friends, and allies of humanity.
It was pessimism, however, that won in the end, and for two reasons:
First, machinery grew more frightening. The fission bomb threatened physical destruction, of course, but worse still was the rapidly advancing electronic computer. Those computers seemed to steal the human soul. Deftly they solved our routine problems and more and more we found ourselves placing our questions in the hands of these machines with increasing faith, and accepting their answers with increasing humility.
All that fission and fusion bombs can do is destroy us, the computer might supplant us.
The second reason is more subtle, for it involved a change in the nature of the science fiction writer.
Until 1959, there were many branches of fiction, with science fiction perhaps the least among them. It brought its writers less in prestige and money than almost any other branch, so that no one wrote science fiction who wasn’t so fascinated by it that he was willing to give up any chance at fame and fortune for its sake. Often that fascination stemmed from an absorption in the romance of science so that science fiction writers would naturally picture men as winning the universe by learning to bend it to their will.
In the 19508, however, competition with TV gradually killed the magazines that supported fiction, and by the time the 1960s arrived the only form of fiction that was flourishing, and even expanding, was science fiction. Its magazines continued and an incredible paperback boom was initiated. To a lesser extent it invaded movies and television, with its greatest triumphs undoubtedly yet to come.
This meant that in the 1960s and 19708, young writers began to write science fiction not because they wanted to, but because it was there-and because very little else was there. It meant that many of the new generation of science fiction writers had no knowledge of science, no sympathy for it-and were in fact rather hostile to it. Such writers were far more ready to accept the fear half of the love/fear relationship of man to machine.
As a result, contemporary science fiction, far more often than not, is presenting us, over and over, with the myth of the child supplanting the parent, Zeus supplanting Kronos, Satan supplanting God, the machine supplanting humanity.
Nightmares they are, and they are to be read as such.
– But allow me my own cynical commentary at the end. Remember that although Kronos foresaw the danger of being supplanted, and though he destroyed his children to prevent it-he was supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for Zeus was the better ruler.
So it may be that although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.
Back in 1940, I wrote a story in which the leading character was named Susan Calvin. (Good heavens, that’s nearly half a century ago.) She was a “robopsychologist” by profession and knew everything there was to know about what made robots tick. It was a science fiction story, of course. I wrote other stories about Susan Calvin over the next few years, and as I described matters, she was born in 1982, went to Columbia, majored in robotics, and graduated in 2003. She went on to do graduate work and by 2010 was working at a firm called U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. I didn’t really take any of this seriously at the time I wrote it. What I was writing was “just science fiction.”
Oddly enough, however, it’s working out. Robots are in use on the assembly lines and are increasing in importance each year. The automobile companies are installing them in their factories by the tens of thousands. Increasingly, they will appear elsewhere as well, while ever more complex and intelligent robots will be appearing on the drawing boards. Naturally, these robots are going to wipe out many jobs, but they are going to create jobs, too. The robots will have to be designed, in the first place. They will have to be constructed and installed. Then, since nothing is perfect, they will occasionally go wrong and have to be repaired. To keep the necessity for repair to a minimum, they will have to be intelligently maintained. They may even have to be modified to do their work differently on occasion.
To do all this, we will need a group of people whom we can call, in general, robot technicians. There are some estimates that by the time my fictional Susan Calvin gets out of college, there will be over 2 million robot technicians in the United States alone, and perhaps 6 million in the world generally. Susan won’t be alone. To these technicians, suppose we add all the other people that will be employed by those rapidly growing industries that are directly or indirectly related to robotics. It may well turn out that the robots will create more jobs than they will wipe out-but, of course, the two sets of jobs will be different, which means there will be a difficult transition period in which those whose jobs have vanished are retrained so that they can fill new jobs that have appeared.
This may not be possible in every case, and there will have to be innovative social initiatives to take care of those who, because of age or temperament, cannot fit in to the rapidly changing economic scene.
In the past, advances in technology have always necessitated the upgrading of education. Agricultural laborers didn’t have to be literate, but factory workers did, so once the Industrial Revolution came to pass, industrialized nations had to establish public schools for the mass education of their populations. There must now be a further advance in education to go along with the new high-tech economy. Education in science and technology will have to be taken more seriously and made lifelong, for advances will occur too rapidly for people to be able to rely solely on what they learned as youngsters.
Wait! I have mentioned robot technicians, but that is a general term. Susan Calvin was not a robot technician; she was, specifically, a robopsychologist. She dealt with robotic “intelligence,” with robots’ ways of “thinking.” I have not yet heard anyone use that term in real life, but I think the time will come when it will be used, just as “robotics” was used after I had invented that term. After all, robot theoreticians are trying to develop robots that can see, that can understand verbal instructions, that can speak in reply. As robots are expected to do more and more tasks, more and more efficiently, and in a more and more versatile way, they will naturally seem more “intelligent.” In fact, even now, there are scientists at MIT and elsewhere who are working very seriously on the question of “artificial intelligence.”
Still, even if we design and construct robots that can do their jobs in such a way as to seem intelligent, it is scarcely likely that they will be intelligent in the same way that human beings are. For one thing, their “brains” will be constructed of materials different from the ones in our brains. For another, their brains will be made up of different components hooked together and organized in different ways, and will approach problems (very likely) in a totally different manner.
Robotic intelligence may be so different from human intelligence that it will take a new discipline-”robopsychology”-to deal with it. That is where Susan Calvin will come in. It is she and others like her who will deal with robots, where ordinary psychologists could not begin to do so. And this might turn out to be the most important aspect of robotics, for if we study in detail two entirely different kinds of intelligence, we may learn to understand intelligence in a much more general and fundamental way than is now possible. Specifically, we will learn more about human intelligence than may be possible to learn from human intelligence alone.
It was back in 1942 that I invented “the Three Laws of Robotics,” and of these, the First Law is, of course, the most important. It goes as follows: “ A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” In my stories, I always make it clear that the Laws, especially the First Law, are an inalienable part of all robots and that robots cannot and do not disobey them.
I also make it clear, though perhaps not as forcefully, that these Laws aren’t inherent in robots. The ores and raw chemicals of which robots are formed do not already contain the Laws. The Laws are there only because they are deliberately added to the design of the robotic brain, that is, to the computers that control and direct robotic action. Robots can fail to possess the Laws, either because they are too simple and crude to be given behavior patterns sufficiently complex to obey them or because the people designing the robots deliberately choose not to include the Laws in their computerized makeup.
So far-and perhaps it will be so for a considerable time to come-it is the first of these alternatives that holds sway. Robots are simply too crude and primitive to be able to foresee that an act of theirs will harm a human being and to adjust their behavior to avoid that act. They are, so far, only computerized levers capable of a few types of rote behavior, and they are unable to step beyond the very narrow limits of their instructions. As a result, robots have already killed human beings, just as enormous numbers of noncomputerized machines have. It is deplorable but understandable, and we can suppose that as robots are developed with more elaborate sense perceptions and with the capability of more flexible responses, there will be an increasing likelihood of building safety factors into them that will be the equivalent of the Three Laws.
But what about the second alternative? Will human beings deliberately build robots without the Laws? I’m afraid that is a distinct possibility. People are already talking about security Robots. There could be robot guards patrolling the grounds of a building or even its hallways. The function of these robots could be to challenge any person entering the grounds or the building. Presumably, persons who belonged there, or who were invited there, would be carrying (or would be given) some card or other form of identification that would be recognized by the robot, who would then let them pass. In our security-conscious times, this might even seem a good thing. It would cut down on vandalism and terrorism and it would, after all, only be fulfilling the function of a trained guard dog.
But security breeds the desire for more security. Once a robot became capable of stopping an intruder, it might not be enough for it merely to sound an alarm. It would be tempting to endow the robot with the capability of ejecting the intruder, even if it would do injury in the process-just as a dog might injure you in going for your leg or throat. What would happen, though, when the chairman of the board found he had left his identifying card in his other pants and was too upset to leave the building fast enough to suit the robot? Or what if a child wandered into the building without the proper clearance? I suspect that if the robot roughed up the wrong person, there would be an immediate clamor to prevent a repetition of the error.
To go to a further extreme, there is talk of robot weapons: computerized planes, tanks, artillery, and so on, that would stalk the enemy relentlessly, with superhuman senses and stamina. It might be argued that this would be a way of sparing human beings. We could stay comfortably at home and let our intelligent machines do the fighting for us. If some of them were destroyed-well, they are only machines. This approach to warfare would be particularly useful if we had such machines and the enemy didn’t.
But even so, could we be sure that our machines could always tell an enemy from a friend? Even when all our weapons are controlled by human hands and human brains, there is the problem of “friendly fire. “ American weapons can accidentally kill American soldiers or civilians and have actually done so in the past. This is human error, but nevertheless it’s hard to take. But what if our robot weapons were to accidentally engage in “friendly fire” and wipe out American people, or even just American property? That would be far harder to take (especially if the enemy had worked out stratagems to confuse our robots and encourage them to hit our own side). No, I feel confident that attempts to use robots without safeguards won’t work and that, in the end, we will come round to the Three Laws.
In “Our Intelligent Tools” I mentioned the possibility that robots might become so intelligent that they would eventually replace us. I suggested, with a touch of cynicism, that in view of the human record, such a replacement might be a good thing. Since then, robots have rapidly become more and more important in industry, and, although they are as yet quite idiotic on the intelligence scale, they are advancing quickly.
Perhaps, then, we ought to take another look at the matter of robots (or computers-which are the actual driving mechanism of robots) replacing us. The outcome, of course, depends on how intelligent computers become and whether they will become so much more intelligent than we are that they will regard us as no more than pets, at best, or vermin, at worst. This implies that intelligence is a simple thing that can be measured with something like a ruler or a thermometer (or an IQ test) and then expressed in a single number. If the average human being is measured as 100 on an overall intelligence scale, then as soon as the average computer passes 100, we will be in trouble.
Is that the way it works, though? Surely there must be considerable variety in such a subtle quality as intelligence; different species of it, so to speak. I presume it takes intelligence to write a coherent essay, to choose the right words, and to place them in the right order. I also presume it takes intelligence to study some intricate technical device, to see how it works and how it might be improved-or how it might be repaired if it had stopped working. As far as writing is concerned, my intelligence is extremely high; as far as tinkering is concerned, my intelligence is extremely low. Well, then, am I a genius or an imbecile? The answer is: neither. I’m just good at some things and not good at others-and that’s true of everyone of us.
Suppose, then, we think about the origins of both human intelligence and computer intelligence. The human brain is built up essentially of proteins and nucleic acids; it is the product of over 3 billion years of hit-or-miss evolution; and the driving forces of its development have been adaptation and survival. Computers, on the other hand, are built up essentially of metal and electron surges; they are the product of some forty years of deliberate human design and development; and the driving force of their development has been the human desire to meet perceived human needs. If there are many aspects and varieties of intelligence among human beings themselves, isn’t it certain that human and computer intelligences are going to differ widely since they have originated and developed under such different circumstances, out of such different materials, and under the impulse of such different drives?
It would seem that computers, even comparatively simple and primitive specimens, are extraordinarily good in some ways. They possess capacious memories, have virtually instant and unfailing recall, and demonstrate the ability to carry through vast numbers of repetitive arithmetical operations without weariness or error. If that sort of thing is the measure of intelligence, then already computers are far more intelligent than we are. It is because they surpass us so greatly that we use them in a million different ways and know that our economy would fall apart if they all stopped working at once.
But such computer ability is not the only measure of intelligence. In fact, we consider that ability of so little value that no matter how quick a computer is and how impressive its solutions, we see it only as an overgrown slide rule with no true intelligence at all. What the human specialty seems to be, as far as intelligence is concerned, is the ability to see problems as a whole, to grasp solutions through intuition or insight; to see new combinations; to be able to make extraordinarily perceptive and creative guesses. Can’t we program a computer to do the same thing? Not likely, for we don’t know how we do it.
It would seem, then, that computers should get better and better in their variety of point-by-point, short-focus intelligence, and that human beings (thanks to increasing knowledge and understanding of the brain and the growing technology of genetic engineering) may improve in their own variety of whole-problem, long-focus intelligence. Each variety of intelligence has its advantages and, in combination, human intelligence and computer intelligence-each filling in the gaps and compensating for the weaknesses of the other-can advance far more rapidly than either one could alone. It will not be a case of competing and replacing at all, but of intelligences together, working more efficiently than either alone within the laws of nature.
I wrote my first robot story, “Robbie,” in May of 1939, when I was only nineteen years old.
What made it different from robot stories that had been written earlier was that I was determined not to make my robots symbols. They were not to be symbols of humanity’s overweening arrogance. They were not to be examples of human ambitions trespassing on the domain of the Almighty. They were not to be a new Tower of Babel requiring punishment.
Nor were the robots to be symbols of minority groups. They were not to be pathetic creatures that were unfairly persecuted so that I could make Aesopic statements about Jews, Blacks or any other mistreated members of society. Naturally, I was bitterly opposed to such mistreatment and I made that plain in numerous stories and essays-but not in my robot stories.
In that case, what did I make my robots?-I made them engineering devices. I made them tools. I made them machines to serve human ends. And I made them objects with built-in safety features. In other words, I set it up so that a robot could not kill his creator, and having outlawed that heavily overused plot, I was free to consider other, more rational consequences.
Since I began writing my robot stories in 1939, I did not mention computerization in their connection. The electronic computer had not yet been invented and I did not foresee it. I did foresee, however, that the brain had to be electronic in some fashion. However, “electronic” didn’t seem futuristic enough. The positron-a subatomic particle exactly like the electron but of opposite electric charge-had been discovered only four years before I wrote my first robot story. It sounded very science fictional indeed, so I gave my robots “positronic brains” and imagined their thoughts to consist of flashing streams of positrons, coming into existence, then going out of existence almost immediately. These stories that I wrote were therefore called “the positronic robot series,” but there was no greater significance than what I have just described to the use of positrons rather than electrons.
At first, I did not bother actually systematizing, or putting into words, just what the safeguards were that I imagined to be built into my robots. From the very start, though, since I wasn’t going to have it possible for a robot to kill its creator, I had to stress that robots could not harm human beings; that this was an ingrained part of the makeup of their positronic brains.
Thus, in the very first printed version of “Robbie,” I had a character refer to a robot as follows: “He just can’t help being faithful and loving and kind. He’s a machine, made so.”
After writing “Robbie,” which John Campbell, of Astounding Science Fiction, rejected, I went on to other robot stories which Campbell accepted. On December 23, 1940, I came to him with an idea for a mind-reading robot (which later became “Liar!”) and John was dissatisfied with my explanations of why the robot behaved as it did. He wanted the safeguard specified precisely so that we could understand the robot. Together, then, we worked out what came to be known as the “Three Laws of Robotics. “ The concept was mine, for it was obtained out of the stories I had already written, but the actual wording (if I remember correctly) was beaten out then and there by the two of us.
The Three Laws were logical and made sense. To begin with, there was the question of safety, which had been foremost in my mind when I began to write stories about my robots. What’s more I was aware of the fact that even without actively attempting to do harm, one could quietly, by doing nothing, allow harm to come. What was in my mind was Arthur Hugh Clough’s cynical “The Latest Decalog,” in which the Ten Commandments ate rewritten in deeply satirical Machiavellian fashion. The one item most frequently quoted is: “Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive / Officiously to keep alive.”
For that reason I insisted that the First Law (safety) had to be in two parts and it came out this way:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Having got that out of the way, we had to pass on to the second law (service). Naturally, in giving the robot the built-in necessity to follow orders, you couldn’t forfeit the overall concern of safety. The Second Law had to read as follows, then:
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
And finally, we had to have a third law (prudence). A robot was bound to be an expensive machine and it must not needlessly be damaged or destroyed. Naturally, this must not be used as a way of compromising either safety or service. The Third Law, therefore, had to read as follows:
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Of course, these laws are expressed in words, which is an imperfection. In the positronic brain, they are competing positronic potentials that are best expressed in terms of advanced mathematics (which is well beyond my ken, I assure you). However, even so, there are clear ambiguities. What constitutes “harm” to a human being? Must a robot obey orders given it by a child, by a madman, by a malevolent human being? Must a robot give up its own expensive and useful existence to prevent a trivial harm to an unimportant human being? What is trivial and what is unimportant?
These ambiguities are not shortcomings as far as a writer is concerned. If the Three Laws were perfect and unambiguous there would be no room for stories. It is in the nooks and crannies of the ambiguities that all one’s plots can lodge, and which provide a foundation, if you’ll excuse the pun, for Robot City.
I did not specifically state the Three Laws in words in “Liar!” which appeared in the May 1941 Astounding. I did do so, however, in my next robot story, “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 Astounding. In that issue on line seven of page one hundred, I have a character say, “Now, look, let’s start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics,” and I then quote them. That incidentally, as far as I or anyone else has been able to tell, represents the first appearance in print of the word “robotics”-which, apparently, I invented.
Since then, I have never had occasion, over a period of over forty years during which I wrote many stories and novels dealing with robots, to be forced to modify the Three Laws. However, as time passed, and as my robots advanced in complexity and versatility, I did feel that they would have to reach for something still higher. Thus, in Robots and Empire, a novel published by Doubleday in 1985, I talked about the possibility that a sufficiently advanced robot might feel it necessary to consider the prevention of harm to humanity generally as taking precedence over the prevention of harm to an individual. This I called the “Zeroth Law of Robotics,” but I’m still working on that.
My invention of the Three Laws of Robotics is probably my most important contribution to science fiction. They are widely quoted outside the field, and no history of robotics could possibly be complete without mention of the Three Laws. In 1985, John Wiley and Sons published a huge tome, Handbook of Industrial Robotics, edited by Shimon Y. Nof, and, at the editor’s request, I wrote an introduction concerning the Three Laws.
Now it is understood that science fiction writers generally have created a pool of ideas that form a common stock into which all writers can dip. For that reason, I have never objected to other writers who have used robots that obey the Three Laws. I have, rather, been flattered and, honestly, modem science fictional robots can scarcely appear without those Laws.
However, I have firmly resisted the actual quotation of the Three Laws by any other writer. Take the Laws for granted, is my attitude in this matter, but don’t recite them. The concepts are everyone’s but the words are mine.
My first three robot novels were, essentially, murder mysteries, with Elijah Baley as the detective. Of these first three, the second novel, The Naked Sun, was a locked-room mystery, in the sense that the murdered person was found with no weapon on the site and yet no weapon could have been removed either.
I managed to produce a satisfactory solution but I did not do that sort of thing again.
The fourth robot novel, Robots and Empire, was not primarily a murder mystery. Elijah Baley had died a natural death at a good, old age, the book veered toward the Foundation universe so that it was clear that both my notable series, the Robot series and the Foundation series, were going to be fused into a broader whole. (No, I didn’t do this for some arbitrary reason. The necessities arising out of writing sequels in the 1980s to tales originally written in the 19408 and 1950s forced my hand.)
In Robots and Empire, my robot character, Giskard, of whom I was very fond, began to concern himself with “the Laws of Humanics,” which, I indicated, might eventually serve as the basis for the science of psychohistory, which plays such a large role in the Foundation series.
Strictly speaking, the Laws of Humanics should be a description, in concise form, of how human beings actually behave. No such description exists, of course. Even psychologists, who study the matter scientifically (at least, I hope they do) cannot present any “laws” but can only make lengthy and diffuse descriptions of what people seem to do. And none of them are prescriptive. When a psychologist says that people respond in this way to a stimulus of that sort, he merely means that some do at some times. Others may do it at other times, or may not do it at all.
If we have to wait for actual laws prescribing human behavior in order to establish psychohistory (and surely we must) then I suppose we will have to wait a long time.
Well, then, what are we going to do about the Laws of Humanics? I suppose what we can do is to start in a very small way, and then later slowly build it up, if we can.
Thus, in Robots and Empire, it is a robot, Giskard, who raises the question of the Laws of Humanics. Being a robot, he must view everything from the standpoint of the Three Laws of Robotics-these robotic laws being truly prescriptive, since robots are forced to obey them and cannot disobey them.
The Three Laws of Robotics are:
1-A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2-A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3-A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Well, then, it seems to me that a robot could not help but think that human beings ought to behave in such a way as to make it easier for robots to obey those laws.
In fact, it seems to me that ethical human beings should be as anxious to make life easier for robots as the robots themselves would. I took up this matter in my story “The Bicentennial Man,” which was published in 1976. In it, I had a human character say in part:
“If a man has the right to give a robot any order that does not involve harm to a human being, he should have the decency never to give a robot any order that involves harm to a robot, unless human safety absolutely requires it. With great power goes great responsibility, and if the robots have Three Laws to protect men, is it too much to ask that men have a law or two to protect robots?”
For instance, the First Law is in two parts. The first part, “A robot may not injure a human being,” is absolute and nothing need be done about that. The second part, “or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” leaves things open a bit. A human being might be about to come to harm because of some event involving an inanimate object. A heavy weight might be likely to fall upon him, or he may slip and be about to fall into a lake, or anyone of uncountable other misadventures of the sort may be involved. Here the robot simply must try to rescue the human being; pull him from under, steady him on his feet and so on. Or a human being might be threatened by some form of life other than human-a lion, for instance-and the robot must come to his defense.
But what if harm to a human being is threatened by the action of another human being? There a robot must decide what to do. Can he save one human being without harming the other? Or if there must be harm, what course of action must he pursue to make it minimal?
It would be a lot easier for the robot, if human beings were as concerned about the welfare of human beings, as robots are expected to be. And, indeed, any reasonable human code of ethics would instruct human beings to care for each other and to do no harm to each other. Which is, after all, the mandate that humans gave robots. Therefore the First Law of Humanics from the robots’ standpoint is:
1-A human being may not injure another human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
If this law is carried through, the robot will be left guarding the human being from misadventures with inanimate objects and with non-human life, something which poses no ethical dilemmas for it. Of course, the robot must still guard against harm done a human being unwittingly by another human being. It must also stand ready to come to the aid of a threatened human being, if another human being on the scene simply cannot get to the scene of action quickly enough. But then, even a robot may unwittingly harm a human being, and even a robot may not be fast enough to get to the scene of action in time or skilled enough to take the necessary action. Nothing is perfect.
That brings us to the Second Law of Robotics, which compels a robot to obey all orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. This means that human beings can give robots any order without limitation as long as it does not involve harm to a human being.
But then a human being might order a robot to do something impossible, or give it an order that might involve a robot in a dilemma that would do damage to its brain. Thus, in my short story “Liar!,” published in 1940, I had a human being deliberately put a robot into a dilemma where its brain burnt out and ceased to function.
We might even imagine that as a robot becomes more intelligent and self-aware, its brain might become sensitive enough to undergo harm if it were forced to do something needlessly embarrassing or undignified. Consequently, the Second Law of Humanics would be:
2-A human being must give orders to a robot that preserve robotic existence, unless such orders cause harm or discomfort to human beings.
The Third Law of Robotics is designed to protect the robot, but from the robotic view it can be seen that it does not go far enough. The robot must sacrifice its existence if the First or Second Law makes that necessary. Where the First Law is concerned, there can be no argument. A robot must give up its existence if that is the only way it can avoid doing harm to a human being or can prevent harm from coming to a human being. If we admit the innate superiority of any human being to any robot (which is something I am a little reluctant to admit, actually), then this is inevitable.
On the other hand, must a robot give up its existence merely in obedience to an order that might be trivial, or even malicious? In “The Bicentennial Man,” I have some hoodlums deliberately order a robot to take itself apart for the fun of watching that happen. The Third Law of Humanics must therefore be:
3-A human being must not harm a robot, or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm, unless such harm is needed to keep a human being from harm or to allow a vital order to be carried out.
Of course, we cannot enforce these laws as we can the Robotic Laws. We cannot design human brains as we design robot brains. It is, however, a beginning, and I honestly think that if we are to have power over intelligent robots, we must feel a corresponding responsibility for them, as the human character in my story “The Bicentennial Man” said.
A robot is a robot and an organism is an organism.
An organism, as we all know, is built up of cells. From the molecular standpoint, its key molecules are nucleic acids and proteins. These float in a watery medium, and the whole has a bony support system. If is useless to go on with the description, since we are all familiar with organisms and since we are examples of them ourselves.
A robot, on the other hand, is (as usually pictured in science fiction) an object, more or less resembling a human being, constructed out of strong, rust-resistant metal. Science fiction writers are generally chary of describing the robotic details too closely since they are not usually essential to the story and the writers are generally at a loss how to do so.
The impression one gets from the stories, however, is that a robot is wired, so that it has wires through which electricity flows rather than tubes through which blood flows. The ultimate source of power is either unnamed, or is assumed to partake of the nature of nuclear power.
What of the robotic brain?
When I wrote my first few robot stories in 1939 and 1940, I imagined a “positronic brain” of a spongy type of platinum-iridium alloy. It was platinum-iridium because that is a particularly inert metal and is least likely to undergo chemical changes. It was spongy so that it would offer an enormous surface on which electrical patterns could be formed and un-formed. It was “positronic” because four years before my first robot story, the positron had been discovered as a reverse kind of electron, so that “positronic” in place of “electronic” had a delightful science-fiction sound.
Nowadays, of course, my positronic platinum-iridium brain is hopelessly archaic. Even ten years after its invention it became outmoded. By the end of the 1940s, we came to realize that a robot’s brain must be a kind of computer. Indeed, if a robot were to be as complex as the robots in my most recent novels, the robot brain-computer must be every bit as complex as the human brain. It must be made of tiny microchips no larger than, and as complex as, brain cells.
But now let us try to imagine something that is neither organism nor robot, but a combination of the two. Perhaps we can think of it as an organism-robot or “orbot.” That would clearly be a poor name, for it is only “robot” with the first two letters transposed. To say “orgabot,” instead, is to be stuck with a rather ugly word.
We might call it a robot-organism, or a “robotanism,” which, again, is ugly or “roborg.” To my ears, “roborg” doesn’t sound bad, but we can’t have that. Something else has arisen.
The science of computers was given the name “cybernetics” by Norbert Weiner a generation ago, so that if we consider something that is part robot and part organism and remember that a robot is cybernetic in nature, we might think of the mixture as a “cybernetic organism,” or a “cyborg.” In fact, that is the name that has stuck and is used.
To see what a cyborg might be, let’s try starting with a human organism and moving toward a robot; and when we are quite done with that, let’s start with a robot and move toward a human being.
To move from a human organism toward a robot, we must begin replacing portions of the human organism with robotic parts. We already do that in some ways. For instance, a good percentage of the original material of my teeth is now metallic, and metal is, of course, the robotic substance par excellence.
The replacements don’t have to be metallic, of course. Some parts of my teeth are now ceramic in nature, and can’t be told at a glance from the natural dentine. Still, even though dentine is ceramic in appearance and even, to an extent, in chemical structure, it was originally laid down by living material and bears the marks of its origin. The ceramic that has replaced the dentine shows no trace of life, now or ever.
We can go further. My breastbone, which had to be split longitudinally in an operation a few years back is now held together by metallic staples, which have remained in place ever since. My sister-in-law has an artificial hip-joint replacement. There are people who have artificial arms or legs and such non-living limbs are being designed, as time passes on, to be ever more complex and useful. There are people who have lived for days and even months with artificial hearts, and many more people who live for years with pacemakers.
We can imagine, little by little, this part and that part of the human being replaced by inorganic materials and engineering devices. Is there any part which we would find difficult to replace, even in imagination?
I don’t think anyone would hesitate there. Replace every part of the human being but one-the limbs, the heart, the liver, the skeleton, and so on-and the product would remain human. It would be a human being with artificial parts, but it would be a human being.
But what about the brain?
Surely, if there is one thing that makes us human it is the brain. If there is one thing that makes us a human individual, it is the intensely complex makeup, the emotions, the learning, the memory content of our particular brain. You can’t simply replace a brain with a thinking device off some factory shelf. You have to put in something that incorporates all that a natural brain has learned, that possesses all its memory, and that mimics its exact pattern of working.
An artificial limb might not work exactly like a natural one, but might still serve the purpose. The same might be true of an artificial lung, kidney, or liver. An artificial brain, however, must be the precise replica of the brain it replaces, or the human being in question is no longer the same human being.
It is the brain, then, that is the sticking point in going from human organism to robot.
And the reverse?
In “The Bicentennial Man,” I described the passage of my robot-hero, Andrew Martin, from robot to man. Little by little, he had himself changed, till his every visible part was human in appearance. He displayed an intelligence that was increasingly equivalent (or even superior) to that of a man. He was an artist, a historian, a scientist, an administrator. He forced the passage of laws guaranteeing robotic rights, and achieved respect and admiration in the fullest degree.
Yet at no point could he make himself accepted as a man. The sticking point, here, too, was his robotic brain. He found that he had to deal with that before the final hurdle could be overcome.
Therefore, we come down to the dichotomy, body and brain. The ultimate cyborgs are those in which the body and brain don’t match. That means we can have two classes of complete cyborgs:
a) a robotic brain in a human body, or
b) a human brain in a robotic body.
We can take it for granted that in estimating the worth of a human being (or a robot, for that matter) we judge first by superficial appearance.
I can very easily imagine a man seeing a woman of superlative beauty and gazing in awe and wonder at the sight. “What a beautiful woman,” he will say, or think, and he could easily imagine himself in love with her on the spot. In romances, I believe that happens as a matter of routine. And, of course, a woman seeing a man of superlative beauty is surely likely to react in precisely the same way.
If you fall in love with a striking beauty, you are scarcely likely to spend much time asking if she (or he, of course) has any brains, or possesses a good character, or has good judgment or kindness or warmth. If you find out eventually that good looks are the person’s only redeeming quality, you are liable to make excuses and continue to be guided, for a time at least, by the conditioned reflex of erotic response. Eventually, of course, you will tire of good looks without content, but who knows how long that will take?
On the other hand, a person with a large number of good qualities who happened to be distinctly plain might not be likely to entangle you in the first place unless you were intelligent enough to see those good qualities so that you might settle down to a lifetime of happiness.
What I am saying, then, is that a cyborg with a robotic brain in a human body is going to be accepted by most, if not all, people as a human being; while a cyborg with a human brain in a robotic body is going to be accepted by most, if not all, people as a robot. You are, after all-at least to most people-what you seem to be.
These two diametrically opposed cyborgs will not, however, pose a problem to human beings to the same degree.
Consider the robotic brain in the human body and ask why the transfer should be made. A robotic brain is better off in a robotic body since a human body is far the more fragile of the two. You might have a young and stalwart human body in which the brain has been damaged by trauma and disease, and you might think, “Why waste that magnificent human body? Let’s put a robotic brain in it so that it can live out its life.”
If you were to do that, the human being that resulted would not be the original. It would be a different individual human being. You would not be conserving an individual but merely a specific mindless body. And a human body, however fine, is (without the brain that goes with it) a cheap thing. Every day, half a million new bodies come into being. There is no need to save anyone of them if the brain is done.
On the other hand, what about a human brain in a robotic body? A human brain doesn’t last forever, but it can last up to ninety years without falling into total uselessness. It is not at all unknown to have a ninety-year-old who is still sharp, and capable of rational and worthwhile thought. And yet we also know that many a superlative mind has vanished after twenty or thirty years because the body that housed it (and was worthless in the absence of the mind) had become uninhabitable through trauma or disease. There would be a strong impulse then to transfer a perfectly good (even superior) brain into a robotic body to give it additional decades of useful life.
Thus, when we say “cyborg” we are very likely to think, just about exclusively, of a human brain in a robotic body-and we are going to think of that as a robot.
We might argue that a human mind is a human mind, and that it is the mind that counts and not the surrounding support mechanism, and we would be right. I’m sure that any rational court would decide that a human-brain cyborg would have all the legal rights of a man. He could vote, he must not be enslaved, and so on.
And yet suppose a cyborg were challenged: “Prove that you have a human brain and not a robotic brain, before I let you have human rights.”
The easiest way for a cyborg to offer the proof is for him to demonstrate that he is not bound by the Three Laws of Robotics. Since the Three Laws enforce socially acceptable behavior, this means he must demonstrate that he is capable of human (i.e. nasty) behavior. The simplest and most unanswerable argument is simply to knock the challenger down, breaking his jaw in the process, since no robot could do that. (In fact, in my story “Evidence,” which appeared in 1947, I use this as a way of proving someone is not a robot-but in that case there was a catch.)
But if a cyborg must continually offer violence in order to prove he has a human brain, that will not necessarily win him friends.
For that matter, even if he is accepted as human and allowed to vote and to rent hotel rooms and do all the other things human beings can do, there must nevertheless be some regulations that distinguish between him and complete human beings. The cyborg would be stronger than a man, and his metallic fists could be viewed as lethal weapons. He might still be forbidden to strike a human being, even in self-defense. He couldn’t engage in various sports on an equal basis with human beings, and so on.
Ah, but need a human brain be housed in a metallic robotic body? What about housing it in a body made of ceramic and plastic and fiber so that it looks and feels like a human body-and has a human brain besides?
But you know, I suspect that the cyborg will still have his troubles. He’ll be different. No matter how small the difference is, people will seize upon it.
We know that people who have human brains and full human bodies sometimes hate each other because of a slight difference in skin pigmentation, or a slight variation in the shape of the nose, eyes, lips, or hair.
We know that people who show no difference in any of the physical characteristics that have come to represent a cause for hatred, may yet be at daggers-drawn over matters that are not physical at all, but cultural-differences in religion, or in political outlook, or in place of birth, or in language, or in just the accent of a language.
Let’s face it. Cyborgs will have their difficulties, no matter what.
Would a robot feel a yearning to be human?
You might answer that question with a counter-question. Does a Chevrolet feel a yearning to be a Cadillac?
The counter-question makes the unstated comment that a machine has no yearnings.
But the very point is that a robot is not quite a machine, at least in potentiality. A robot is a machine that is made as much like a human being as it is possible to make it, and somewhere there may be a boundary line that may be crossed.
We can apply this to life. An earthworm doesn’t yearn to be a snake; a hippopotamus doesn’t yearn to be an elephant. We have no reason to think such creatures are self-conscious and dream of something more than they are. Chimpanzees and gorillas seem to be self-aware, but we have no reason to think that they yearn to be human.
A human being, however, dreams of an afterlife and yearns to become one of the angels. Somewhere, life crossed a boundary line. At some point a species arose that was not only aware of itself but had the capacity to be dissatisfied with itself.
Perhaps a similar boundary line will someday be crossed in the construction of robots.
But if we grant that a robot might someday aspire to humanity, in what way would he so aspire? He might aspire to the possession of the legal and social status that human beings are born to. That was the theme of my story “The Bicentennial Man,” and in his pursuit of such status, my robot-hero was willing to give up all his robotic qualities, one by one, right down to his immortality.
That story, however, was more philosophical than realistic. What is there about a human being that a robot might properly envy-what human physical or mental characteristic? No sensible robot would envy human fragility, or human incapacity to withstand mild changes in the environment, or human need for sleep, or aptitude for the trivial mistake, or tendency to infectious and degenerative disease, or incapacitation through illogical storms of emotion.
He might, more properly, envy the human capacity for friendship and love, his wide-ranging curiosity, his eagerness for experience. I would like to suggest, though, that a robot who yearned for humanity might well find that what he would most want to understand, and most frustratingly fail to understand, would be the human sense of humor.
The sense of humor is by no means universal among human beings, though it does cut across all cultures. I have known many people who didn’t laugh, but who looked at you in puzzlement or perhaps disdain if you tried to be funny. I need go no further than my father, who routinely shrugged off my cleverest sallies as unworthy of the attention of a serious man. (Fortunately, my mother laughed at all my jokes, and most uninhibitedly, or I might have grown up emotionally stunted.)
The curious thing about the sense of humor, however, is that, as far as I have observed, no human being will admit to its lack. People might admit they hate dogs and dislike children, they might cheerfully own up to cheating on their income tax or on their marital partner as a matter of right, and might not object to being considered inhumane or dishonest, through the simple expediency of switching adjectives and calling themselves realistic or businesslike.
However, accuse them of lacking a sense of humor and they will deny it hotly every time, no matter how openly and how often they display such a lack. My father, for instance, always maintained that he had a keen sense of humor and would prove it as soon as he heard a joke worth laughing at (though he never did, in my experience).
Why, then, do people object to being accused of humorlessness? My theory is that people recognize (subliminally, if not openly) that a sense of humor is typically human, more so than any other characteristic, and refuse demotion to subhumanity.
Only once did I take up the matter of a sense of humor in a science-fiction story, and that was in my story “Jokester,” which first appeared in the December, 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction and which was most recently reprinted in my collection The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (Doubleday, 1986).
The protagonist of the story spent his time telling jokes to a computer (I quoted six of them in the course of the story). A computer, of course, is an immobile robot; or, which is the same thing, a robot is a mobile computer; so the story deals with robots and jokes. Unfortunately, the problem in the story for which a solution was sought was not the nature of humor, but the source of all the jokes one hears. And there is an answer, too, but you’ll have to read the story for that.
However, I don’t just write science fiction. I write whatever it falls into my busy little head to write, and (by some undeserved stroke of good fortune) my various publishers are under the weird impression that it is illegal not to publish any manuscript I hand them. (You can be sure that I never disabuse them of this ridiculous notion.)
Thus, when I decided to write a joke book, I did, and Houghton-Mifflin published it in 1971 under the title of Isaac Asimov’s Treasury of Humor. In it, I told 640 jokes that I happened to have as part of my memorized repertoire. (I also have enough for a sequel to be entitled Isaac Asimov Laughs Again, but I can’t seem to get around to writing it no matter how long I sit at the keyboard and how quickly I manipulate the keys.) I interspersed those jokes with my own theories concerning what is funny and how one makes what is funny even funnier.
Mind you, there are as many different theories of humor as there are people who write on the subject, and no two theories are alike. Some are, of course, much stupider than others, and I felt no embarrassment whatever in adding my own thoughts on the subject to the general mountain of commentary.
It is my feeling, to put it as succinctly as possible, that the one necessary ingredient in every successful joke is a sudden alteration in point of view. The more radical the alteration, the more suddenly it is demanded, the more quickly it is seen, the louder the laugh and the greater the joy.
Let me give you an example with a joke that is one of the few I made up myself:
Jim comes into a bar and finds his best friend, Bill, at a corner table gravely nursing a glass of beer and wearing a look of solemnity on his face. Jim sits down at the table and says sympathetically, “What’s the matter, Bill?”
Bill sighs, and says, “My wife ran off yesterday with my best friend.”
Jim says, in a shocked voice, “What are you talking about, Bill? I’m your best friend.”
To which Bin answers softly, “Not anymore.”
I trust you see the change in point of view. The natural supposition is that poor Bill is sunk in gloom over a tragic loss. It is only with the last three words that you realize, quite suddenly, that he is, in actual fact, delighted. And the average human male is sufficiently ambivalent about his wife (however beloved she might be) to greet this particular change in point of view with delight.
Now, if a robot is designed to have a brain that responds to logic only (and of what use would any other kind of robot brain be to humans who are hoping to employ robots for their own purposes?), a sudden change in point of view would be hard to achieve. It would imply that the rules of logic were wrong in the first place or were capable of a flexibility that they obviously don’t have. In addition, it would be dangerous to build ambivalence into a robot brain. What we want from him is decision and not the to-be-or-not-to-be of a Hamlet.
Imagine, then, telling a robot the joke I have just given you, and imagine the robot staring at you solemnly after you are done, and questioning you, thus.
Robot: “But why is Jim no longer Bill’s best friend? You have not described Jim as doing anything that would cause Bill to be angry with him or disappointed in him.”
You: “Well, no, it’s not that Jim has done anything. It’s that someone else has done something for Bill that was so wonderful, that he has been promoted over Jim’s head and has instantly become Bill’s new best friend.”
Robot: “But who has done this?” You: “The man who ran away with Bill’s wife, of course.” Robot (after a thoughtful pause): “But that can’t be so. Bill must have felt profound affection for his wife and a great sadness over her loss. Is that not how human males feel about their wives, and how they would react to their loss?”
You: “In theory, yes. However, it turns out that Bill strongly disliked his wife and was glad someone had run off with her.”
Robot (after another thoughtful pause): “But you did not say that was so.”
You: “I know. That’s what makes it funny. I led you in one direction and then suddenly let you know that was the wrong direction.”
Robot: “Is it funny to mislead a person?”
You (giving up): “Well, let’s get on with building this house.”
In fact, some jokes actually depend on the illogical responses of human beings. Consider this one:
The inveterate horse player paused before taking his place at the betting windows, and offered up a fervent prayer to his Maker.
“Blessed Lord,” he murmured with mountain-moving sincerity. “I know you don’t approve of my gambling, but just this once, Lord, just this once, please let me break even. I need the money so badly.”
If you were so foolish as to tell this joke to a robot, he would immediately say, “But to break even means that he would leave the races with precisely the amount of money he had when he entered. Isn’t that so?”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Then, if he needs the money so badly, all he need do is not bet at all, and it would be just as though he had broken even.”
“Yes, but he has this unreasoning need to gamble.”
“You mean even if he loses.”
“Yes.”
“But that makes no sense.”
“But the point of the joke is that the gambler doesn’t understand this.”
“You mean it’s funny if a person lacks any sense of logic and is possessed of not even the simplest understanding?”
And what can you do but turn back to building the house again?
But tell me, is this so different from dealing with the ordinary humorless human being? I once told my father this joke:
Mrs. Jones, the landlady, woke up in the middle of the night because there were strange noises outside her door. She looked out, and there was Robinson, one of her boarders, forcing a frightened horse up the stairs.
She shrieked, “What are you doing, Mr. Robinson?”
He said, “Putting the horse in the bathroom.”
“For goodness sake, why?”
“Well, old Higginbotham is such a wise guy. Whatever I tell him, he answers, ‘I know. I know,’ in such a superior way. Well, in the morning, he’ll go to the bathroom and he’ll come out yelling, ‘There’s a horse in the bathroom.’ And I’ll yawn and say, ‘I know, I know.’ “
And what was my father’s response? He said, “Isaac, Isaac. You’re a city boy, so you don’t understand. You can’t push a horse up the stairs if he doesn’t want to go.”
Personally, I thought that was funnier than the joke.
Anyway, I don’t see why we should particularly want a robot to have a sense of humor, but the point is that the robot himself might want to have one-and how do we give it to him?
I have been inventing stories about robots now for very nearly half a century. In that time, I have rung almost every conceivable change upon the theme.
Mind you, it was not my intention to compose an encyclopedia of robot nuances; it was not even my intention to write about them for half a century. It just happened that I survived that long and maintained my interest in the concept. And it also just happened that in attempting to think of new story ideas involving robots, I ended up thinking about nearly everything.
For instance, in the sixth volume of the Robot City series, there are the “chemfets,” which have been introduced into the hero’s body in order to replicate and, eventually, give him direct psycho-electronic control over the core computer, and hence all the robots of Robot City.
Well, in my book Foundation’s Edge (Doubleday, 1982), my hero, Golan Trevize, before taking off in a spaceship, makes contact with an advanced computer by placing his hands on an indicated place on the desk before him.
“And as he and the computer held hands, their thinking merged…
“…he saw the room with complete clarity-not just in the direction in which he was looking, but all around and above and below.
“He saw every room in the spaceship, and he saw outside as well. The sun had risen…but he could look at it directly without being dazzled…
“He felt the gentle wind and its temperature, and the sounds of the world about him. He detected the planet’s magnetic field and the tiny electrical charges on the wall of the ship.
“He became aware of the controls of the ship…He knew…that if he wanted to lift the ship, or turn it, or accelerate, or make use of any of its abilities, the process was the same as that of performing the analogous process to his body. He had but to use his will.”
That was as close as I could come to picturing the result of a mind-computer interface, and now, in connection with this new book, I can’t help thinking of it further.
I suppose that the first time human beings learned how to form an interface between the human mind and another sort of intelligence was when they tamed the horse and learned how to use it as a form of transportation. This reached its highest point when human beings rode horses directly, and when a pull at a rein, the touch of a spur, a squeeze of the knees, or just a cry, could make the horse react in accordance with the human will.
It is no wonder that primitive Greeks seeing horsemen invade the comparatively broad Thessalian plains (the part of Greece most suitable to horsemanship) thought they were seeing a single animal with a human torso and a horse’s body. Thus was invented the centaur.
Again, there are “trick drivers.” There are expert “stunt men” who can make an automobile do marvelous things. One might expect that a New Guinea native who had never seen or heard of an automobile before might believe that such stunts were being carried through by a strange and Monstrous living organism that had, as part of its structure, a portion with a human appearance within its stomach.
But a person plus a horse is but an imperfect fusion of intelligence, and a person plus an automobile is but an extension of human muscles by mechanical linkages. A horse can easily disobey signals, or even run away in uncontrollable panic. And an automobile can break down or skid at an inconvenient moment.
The fusion of human and computer, however, ought to be a much closer approach to the ideal. It may be an extension of the mind itself as I tried to make plain in Foundation’s Edge, a multiplication and intensification of sense-perception, an incredible extension of the will.
Under such circumstances, might not the fusion represent, in a very real sense, a single organism, a kind of cybernetic “centaur”? And once such a union is established, would the human fraction wish to break it? Would he not feel such a break to be an unbearable loss and be unable to live with the impoverishment of mind and will he would then have to face? In my novel, Golan Trevize could break away from the computer at will and suffered no ill effects as a result, but perhaps that is not realistic.
Another issue that appears now and then in the Robot City series concerns the interaction of robot and robot.
This has not played a part in most of my stories, simply because I generally had a single robot character of importance in any given story and I dealt entirely with the matter of the interaction between that single robot and various human beings.
Consider robots in combination.
The First Law states that a robot cannot injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
But suppose two robots are involved, and that one of them, through inadvertence, lack of knowledge, or special circumstances, is engaged in a course of action (quite innocently) that will clearly injure a human being-and suppose the second robot, with greater knowledge or insight, is aware of this. Would he not be required by the First Law to stop the first robot from committing the injury? If there were no other way, would he not be required by the First Law to destroy the first robot without hesitation or regret?
Thus, in my book Robots and Empire (Doubleday, 1985), a robot is introduced to whom human beings have been defined as those speaking with a certain accent. The heroine of the book does not speak with that accent and therefore the robot feels free to kill her. That robot is promptly destroyed by a second robot.
The situation is similar for the Second Law, in which robots are forced to obey orders given them by human beings provided those orders do not violate the First Law.
If, of two robots, one through inadvertence or lack of understanding does not obey an order, the second must either carry through the order itself, or force the first to do so.
Thus, in an intense scene in Robots and Empire, the villainess gives one robot a direct order. The robot hesitates because the order may cause harm to the heroine. For a while, then, there is a confrontation in which the villainess reinforces her own order while a second robot tries to reason the first robot into a greater realization of the harm that will be done to the heroine. Here we have a case where one robot urges another to obey the Second Law in a truer manner, and to withstand a human being in so doing.
It is the Third Law, however, that brings up the knottiest problem where robots in combination are concerned.
The Third Law states that a robot must protect its own existence, where that is consistent with the First and Second Laws.
But what if two robots are concerned? Is each merely concerned with its own existence, as a literal reading of the Third Law would make it seem? Or would each robot feel the need for helping the other maintain its own existence?
As I said, this problem never arose with me as long as I dealt with only one robot per story. (Sometimes there were other robots but they were distinctly subsidiary characters-merely spear-carriers, so to speak.)
However, first in The Robots of Dawn (Doubleday, 1983), and then in its sequel Robots and Empire, I had two robots of equal importance. One of these was R. Daneel Olivaw, a humaniform robot (who could not easily be told from a human being) who had earlier appeared in The Caves of Steel (Ooubleday, 1954), and in its sequel, The Naked Sun (Ooubleday, 1957). The other was R. Giskard Reventlov, who had a more orthodox metallic appearance. Both robots were advanced to the point where their minds were of human complexity.
It was these two robots who were engaged in the struggle with the villainess, the Lady Vasilia. It was Giskard who (such were the exigencies of the plot) was being ordered by Vasilia to leave the service of Gladia (the heroine) and enter her own. And it was Daneel who tenaciously argued the point that Giskard ought to remain with Gladia. Giskard has the ability to exert a limited mental control over human beings, and Daneel points out that Vasilia ought to be controlled for Gladia’s safety. He even argues the good of humanity in the abstract (“the Zeroth Law”) in favor of such an action.
Daneel’s arguments weaken the effect of Vasilia’s orders, but not sufficiently. Giskard is made to hesitate, but cannot be forced to take action.
Vasilia, however, decides that Daneel is too dangerous; if he continues to argue, he might force Giskard his way. She therefore orders her own robots to inactivate Daneel and further orders Daneel not to resist. Daneel must obey the order and Vasilia’s robots advance to the task.
It is then that Giskard acts. Her four robots are inactivated and Vasilia herself crumples into a forgetful sleep. Later Daneel asks Giskard to explain what happened.
Giskard says, “When she ordered the robots to dismantle you, friend Daneel, and showed a clear emotion of pleasure at the prospect, your need, added to what the concept of the Zeroth Law had already done, superseded the Second Law and rivaled the First Law. It was the combination of the Zeroth Law, psychohistory, my loyalty to Lady Gladia, and your need that dictated my action.”
Daneel now argues that his own need (he being merely a robot) ought not to have influenced Giskard at all. Giskard obviously agrees, yet he says:
“It is a strange thing, friend Daneel. I do not know how it came about…At the moment when the robots advanced toward you and Lady Vasilia expressed her savage pleasure, my positronic pathway pattern re-formed in an anomalous fashion. For a moment, I thought of you-as a human being-and I reacted accordingly.”
Daneel said, “That was wrong.”
Giskard said, “I know that. And yet-and yet, if it were to happen again, I believe the same anomalous change would take place again.”
And Daneel cannot help but feel that if the situation were reversed, he, too, would act in the same way.
In other words, the robots had reached a stage of complexity where they had begun to lose the distinction between robots and human beings, where they could see each other as “friends,” and have the urge to save each other’s existence.