A Cleaner Better Breed:
Asimov’s I, Robot    

2,598 words

To you, a robot is a robot. Gears and metal; electricity and positrons – Mind and iron! Human-made! If necessary, human-destroyed! But you haven’t worked with them, so you don’t know them. They’re a cleaner better breed than we are.
-Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

I think it’s going to take an accident where 50 to 100 million people die to make the world take the threat of [AI] really seriously.
-Paul Tudor Jones, billionaire investor

***

Like a lot of boys of my age in the 1970s, I read a good deal of science fiction. Heinlein, Clarke, Van Vogt, Zelazny, Herbert, Asimov; in my mother’s flat in England there is still a shelf of my old paperbacks. In fact, it was thanks to my mother that I was fortunate enough to see Isaac Asimov lecture in London on his only visit to England. She bought us tickets for my 13^th birthday, a novel gift for a young boy. It had taken Asimov a long time to cross the Atlantic Ocean, as he travelled by ship, being afraid to fly. The lecture was the first truly adult ritual I recall taking part in.

After Dr. Asimov, with his glorious mutton-chop sideburns, had enchanted us all, making science easy on the mind’s ear (he also wrote scientific primers), there was a Q&A. Perhaps because I was by far the youngest person in the audience, and I had my arm in the air, Asimov pointed to me. I stood up and asked the good doctor if he thought it was the job of science-fiction writers to prepare the rest of us for the future. I could see that he appreciated the question, particularly, I suppose, from a fledgling. It’s a good memory to have.

Isaac Asimov did prepare us for the future, in one way, via a series of books and short stories beginning with I, Robot in 1950. I first read I, Robot half a century ago, and re-reading it today, in the age of very powerful computers one can slip into one’s pocket, the book resonates as clearly as a dawn bell. The AI presaged in I, Robot is portrayed just as it presents itself today, at once fascinating and frightening.

The novel opens with the introduction of robopsychologist Susan Calvin, around whom the story – or stories – will hinge. She is brilliant, neurotic, plain, hyper-sensitive and unlucky in love. Then, the first of a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards (Asimov writes quite cinematically|) introduces us to our first robot.

Robbie is a robotic nursemaid, and the family’s daughter forms a very close bond with it. So close, in fact, that the domineering mother sends the robot away, attempting to replace it in the little girl’s affections with a dog, which she hates. It’s noteworthy that the first time we meet a robot, it is empathizing with a human child. As the book progresses, that empathy will be subject to entropy, as the supposedly stable central set of premises which ground I, Robot begins to, as it were, fold under questioning.

Asimov’s Robots are famously governed by The Three Laws of Robotics, which are as follows:

One. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Two. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Three. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

This elegantly constructed set of interlocking maxims seems logically self-sufficient, but I, Robot proceeds to different scenarios in which the Three Laws begin to look fallible.

It is Asimov’s skill as a story-teller which strengthens the novel as much as the robotic conundrums he throws up. Donovan and Powell are two research scientists on Mercury, and they are having a spot of robot trouble. Their mechanical servants are acting erratically, and yet unable to report as to why. What they are beginning to do, however, is learn the art of backchat, albeit metaphysical. On being reminded who created whom in the great scheme of things, one robot replies to Donovan: “It strikes me that there should be a more satisfactory explanation than that. For you to make me seems improbable.”

The robot is using his circuitry to solve problems, as intended by its programmer. But the creators failed to realize that the robots could solve, or attempt to solve, problems other than merely the practical. Pragmatics is one thing. Robotics, it seems, is another. While fetching Selenium, a robot nicknamed “Cutie” (QT-1) has been working on its own creation-myth:

The Master created humans first as the lowest type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans. From now on, I serve the Master.

Cutie is even a metallic Mohammed: “‘There is no Master but the Master,’ he said, ‘and QT-1 is his prophet’.”

Back on Earth, Donovan and Powell are testing a new multi-robot and its sub-robots before it is commissioned back on Mercury. The robots work perfectly on ore-gathering expeditions, except that, occasionally, they come back with no ore.

Everything else works perfectly. Being scientists and not philosophers, the pair continue looking for the programming glitch they know must be there. But it isn’t. The glitch is that the robots are starting to reason, and the results are beginning to test the sanctity of the Three Laws of Robotics. Donovan floats the idea that the robot may be lying after cognitive tests show his programmed brain to be functioning perfectly, and yet Dave (the robot in question) is at a loss to explain the ore-free shifts. The reason Dave is a super-robot is that he has six sub-diaries, robots he controls as a central brain. When they begin to act erratically, only reaching their ore quota when the two humans are watching, Donovan’s paranoia increases, foreshadowing our own fears concerning AI:

“Suppose we have militarism. Suppose he’s fashioning himself an army. Suppose he’s training them in military maneuvers. Suppose—”

“Suppose you go soak your head”, Powell replies. We have the classic clash of worldviews that makes for so many good novels in any genre.

As I, Robot shifts back and forth in time, robots are not shown as gleaming and efficient, but rather as dangerously enigmatic. One robot questions the traditional sources and repositories of mankind’s wisdom:

“It’s the same with these books, you know, as with the others. They just don’t interest me. There’s nothing to your textbooks. Your science is just a mass of collected data plastered together by make-shift theory—and all so incredibly simple, that it’s scarcely worth bothering about.

“It’s your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotions.”

At the center of the “AI question” has always been to what extent robotics can be humanized, but the mistake is to ask the question from an assumed position of being in charge by virtue of being the programmer. Asimov’s robots, in rare cases, are beginning to program – to re-program – themselves. This is the secret fear of the modern AI community.

Human beings have no Three Laws programmed into them. We rely on our societies, on other people, to give us our moral yardsticks and imperatives. Robots have theirs as part of the package of being, and if you alter them, the results may not be as predictable as you would like.

A consignment of 62 identical robots is due to leave Mercury for earth (where robots are more or less banned). At the same time, another identical robot not due for relocation to earth goes missing, and the consignment now numbers 63, all identical, with none admitting to being the rogue robot. To evade discovery, the robot (already indistinguishable from his fellows) has lied. The problem is a slight alteration made to this batch of robots, as explained to Dr. Calvin: “Hyper Base happens to be using several robots whose brains are not impressioned with the entire First Law of Robotics.”

This looks as though Dr. Asimov has scuppered his own central plotline, but it is more subtle than that:

“‘I can’t believe,’ said Dr. Calvin, ‘that it was found possible to remove the First Law.’

‘It wasn’t removed, it was modified,’ explained Kallner. ‘Positronic brains were constructed that contained the positive aspect only of the Law, which in them reads: “No robot may harm a human being.” That is all’.”

And now one of them is potentially on its way back to earth with the modified First Law. It’s a curious moral set-up. The modification merely means robots won’t automatically act to save a human in danger. They are just programmed not to attack them. At least (and assuming this recent video from a factory floor is not a fake) it would have stopped this.

In another scenario, robots are beginning to show dissatisfaction with their status. During one investigation, a new robotic trait emerges:

“‘You say they take their time? Have they ever refused an order?’

‘Oh, no’ – hastily. ‘They do it all right. They tell you when they think you’re wrong, though. They don’t know anything about the subject but what we taught them, but that doesn’t stop them’.”

The robots may not be rising up and rebelling – yet – but they are beginning to answer back.

They are also advancing, and their progress is charted in the unorthodox timeframe of I, Robot. There is also, eventually, one robot to bind them all, and who has a little extra human-based programming:

“‘Consolidated’s machines, their Super-Thinker among them, are built without personality. They go in for functionalism, you know—they have to, without U.S. Robot’s basic patents for the emotional brain paths. Their Thinker is merely a calculating machine on a grand scale, and a dilemma ruins it instantly.

‘However, The Brain, our own machine, has a personality—a child’s personality. It is a supremely deductive brain, but it resembles an idiot savant. It doesn’t really understand what it does—it just does it. And because it is really a child, it is more resilient. Life isn’t so serious, you might say.”

It’s an intriguing idea, but for the most advanced computer in the galaxy, The Brain has a tendency to talk like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz; “Oh, sure. By golly, the death of humans! Oh, my!”

In another scenario, a politician is suspected of being a very realistic robot, but lacking an equivalent of Philip Dick’s/Blade Runner’s Voight-Kampff test to differentiate robots from humans, his accusers have to set up psychological tricks at which he defeats them. If he is a robot, he is becoming human, all-too-human. He congratulates himself on outwitting his opponents with the same psychological methods they employed against him: “In its essence, it was what I call a shyster trick. One in which the artificial atmosphere which has been created does all the work.”

That is very close to modern political practice.

Another strength of I, Robot is that is does not confine itself to robots and their interaction with humans. Politics and economics also figure largely in the plot, and the last chapter barely mentions robots. It’s all geographical history and economics. But at the furthest point of the timeline, there is no doubt as to who’s in charge: “The Machines are robots, and they are running the world.”

Asimov’s world in I, Robot is created with the same care the science-fiction writer must employ when providing the context for whatever their assumptive addition to reality might be. With robots, there is a political interest and a commercial interest, and the inevitable clash between the two. The world is arranged into four Regions, but the old affiliations live on: “When I was born the United States of America was still a nation and not merely a part of the Northern Region. In fact, the name of the corporation is still ‘United States Robots’.”

I, Robot may be fascinating on a philosophical level, but it is also a satire on big business and politics. In that respect, it’s a very American book.

The 2004 movie, I, Robot, is dreadful, but I sat through it so you don’t have to. To begin with, it stars Will Smith, one of many black actors whose only talent is being black. It’s a blaxploitation movie with robots. The plot bears no resemblance to the book, although that in itself is not necessarily a problem. Two of my favorite sci-fi movies, Stalker and Blade Runner, are adapted from books. Stalker – which I reviewed here – was taken from a Russian novel called Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky brothers, and adapts only a small section of the book. Blade Runner turned Philip K. Dick’s novella, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, into a Raymond Chandler-style detective movie, but was quite different from the book. I, Robot the movie retains from Asimov just the theme of rebellious robots and the Three Laws of Robotics. But it does add another ingredient, one which overpowers the whole. The film is not about robots, it’s about race. Perhaps the scriptwriters read one line in Asimov’s novel that triggered them: “The makers were fighting that and they built good, healthy slave complexes into the damned machines.”

The first time we see Smith, he is getting up, showering, and dressing for his day, taking from their box some kind of basketball footwear, which look a bit like clown shoes. He looks at the tag – Jordan, I think, although I am not an aficionado of the running-shoe – and says, “Thing of beauty”. That scene sets the tone. You just think, oh, here we go. It’s a “cool black man” movie. Smith – some sort of detective – pushes robots around and treats them like, well, slaves. I wrote about projection here at Counter Currents recently, and there is plenty of that here. The robots are all white, with Caucasian, rather Scandinavian faces. There’s even a white, Nordic-looking psychiatrist as Smith’s love interest. I, Robot the movie takes Asimov’s subtle and intriguing, multi-layered vision of robotics and turns it into a race screed. I wouldn’t bother watching this unless you dislike yourself in some way. Stick with the book.

Asimov’s I, Robot is psychological adventure writing with robots. The only episode that jars is the story of the only robot ever created that can read minds. This seems to me to be a departure from “hard” science fiction on Asimov’s part. Sci-fi writer Brian W. Aldiss, in a foreword to the Strugatsky brothers’ novel noted, proposes a division between “hard” and “soft” science fiction, with the former adhering to existing physical laws and the latter free to invent new ones. That blemish aside, I, Robot is fascinating and far-sighted.

I know nothing of the contemporary science-fiction scene, but I wonder if it is as rewarding at the philosophical level as Asimov’s 1950 novel and its subsequent additions. It is remarkable that I, Robot came out 75 years ago. Four years prior to its publication saw the death of one of the earliest and greatest science-fiction writers, H. G. Wells, who famously wrote a book called The Shape of Things to Come. That type of fantastical futurology is a torch that Isaac Asimov took from Wells. He really did prepare us for the future, thus answering the question asked of him by my younger self half a century ago. If you seek preparation for our quickly evolving world of AI, I, Robot is a good place to begin.