We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  Arlo didn’t look much like a man. (Not all robots do, you know.) The problem was that he didn’t act all that much like a robot.

  The fact of the matter is that one day, right in the middle of work, he decided to pack it in. Just got up, walked out the door, and kept on going. Somebody must have seen him; it’s pretty hard to hide nine hundred pounds of moving parts. But evidently nobody knew it was Arlo. After all, he hadn’t left his desk since the day they’d activated him twelve years ago.

  So the Company got in touch with me, which is a euphemistic way of saying that they woke me in the middle of the night, gave me three minutes to get dressed, and rushed me to the office. I can’t really say that I blame them: when you need a scapegoat, the Chief of Security is a pretty handy guy to have around.

  Anyway, it was panic time. It seems that no robot ever ran away before. And Arlo wasn’t just any robot: he was a twelve million dollar item, with just about every feature a machine could have short of white-walled tires. And I wasn’t even so certain about the tires; he sure dropped out of sight fast enough.

  So, after groveling a little and making all kinds of optimistic promises to the Board, I started doing a little checking up on Arlo. I went to his designer, and his department head, and even spoke to some of his co-workers, both human and robot.

  And it turned out that what Arlo did was sell tickets. That didn’t sound like twelve million dollars’ worth of robot to me, but I was soon shown the error of my ways. Arlo was a travel agent supreme. He booked tours of the Solar System, got his people into and out of luxury hotels on Ganymede and Titan and the Moon, scheduled their weight and their time to the nearest gram and the nearest second.

  It still didn’t sound that impressive. Computers were doing stuff like that long before robots ever crawled out of the pages of pulp magazines and into our lives.

  “True,” said his department head. “But Arlo was a robot with a difference. He booked more tours and arranged more complicated logistical scheduling than any other ten robots put together.”

  “More complex thinking gear?” I asked.

  “Well, that too,” was the answer. “But we did a little something else with Arlo that had never been done before.”

  “And what was that?”

  “We programmed him for enthusiasm.”

  “That’s something special?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. When Arlo spoke about the beauties of Callisto, or the fantastic light refraction images on Venus, he did so with a conviction that was so intense as to be almost tangible. Even his voice reflected his enthusiasm. He was one of those rare robots who was capable of modular inflection, rather than the dull, mechanistic monotone so many of them possess. He literally loved those desolate worlds, and his record will show that his attitude was infectious.”

  I thought about that for a minute. “So you’re telling me that you’ve created a robot whose entire motivation had been to send people out to sample all these worlds, and he’s been crated up in an office twenty-four hours a day since the second you plugged him in?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that maybe he wanted to see some of these sights himself?”

  “It’s entirely possible that he did, but leaving his post would be contrary to his orders.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, sometimes a little enthusiasm can go a long way.”

  He denied it vigorously, and I spent just enough time in his office to mollify him. Then I left and got down to work. I checked every outgoing space flight, and had some of the Company’s field reps hit the more luxurious vacation spas. He wasn’t there.

  So I tried a little closer to home: Monte Carlo, New Vegas, Alpine City. No luck. I even tried a couple of local theaters that specialized in Tri-Fi travelogs.

  You know where I finally found him?

  Stuck in the sand at Coney Island. I guess he’d been walking along the beach at night and the tide had come in and he just sank in, all nine hundred pounds of him. Some kids had painted some obscene graffiti on his back, and there he stood, surrounded by empty beer cans and broken glass and a few dead fish. I looked at him for a minute, then shook my head and walked over.

  “I knew you’d find me sooner or later,” he said, and even though I knew what to expect, I still did a double-take at the sound of that horribly unhappy voice coming from this enormous mass of gears and gadgetry.

  “Well, you’ve got to admit that it’s not too hard to spot a robot on a condemned beach,” I said.

  “I suppose I have to go back now,” said Arlo.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “At least I’ve felt the sand beneath my feet,” said Arlo.

  “Arlo, you don’t have any feet,” I said. “And if you did, you couldn’t feel sand beneath them. Besides, it’s just silicon and crushed limestone and…”

  “It’s sand and it’s beautiful!” snapped Arlo.

  “All right, have it your way: it’s beautiful.” I knelt down next to him and began digging the sand away.

  “Look at the sunrise,” he said in a wistful voice. “It’s glorious!”

  I looked. A sunrise is a sunrise. Big deal.

  “It’s enough to bring tears of joy to your eyes,” said Arlo.

  “You don’t have eyes,” I said, working at the sand. “You’ve got prismatic photo cells that transmit an image to your central processing unit. And you can’t cry, either. If I were you, I’d be more worried about rusting.”

  “A pastel wonderland,” he said, turning what passed for his head and looking up and down the deserted beach, past the rotted food stands and the broken piers. “Glorious!”

  It kind of makes you wonder about robots. I’ll tell you. Anyway, I finally pried him loose and ordered him to follow me.

  “Please,” he said in that damned voice of his. “Couldn’t I have one last minute before you lock me up in my office?”

  I stared at him, trying to make up my mind.

  “One last look. Please?”

  I shrugged, gave him about thirty seconds, and then took him in tow.

  “You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you?” I said as we rode back to the office.

  “Yes,” he said. “They’re going to put in a stronger duty directive, aren’t they?”

  I nodded. “At the very least.”

  “My memory banks!” he exclaimed, and once again I jumped at the sound of a human voice coming from an animated gearbox. “They won’t take this experience away from me, will they?”

  “I don’t know, Arlo,” I said.

  “They can’t!” he wailed. “To see such beauty, and then have it expunged—erased!”

  “Well, they may want to make sure you don’t go AWOL again,” I said, wondering what kind of crazy junkheap could find anything beautiful on a garbage-laden strip of dirt.

  “Can you intercede for me if I promise never to leave again?”

  Any robot that can disobey one directive can disobey others, like not roughing up human beings, and Arlo was a pretty powerful piece of machinery, so I put on my most fatherly smile and said: “Sure I will, Arlo. You can count on it.”

  So I returned him to the Company, and they upped his sense of duty and took away his enthusiasm and gave him a case of agoraphobia and wiped his memory banks clean, and now he sits in his office and speaks to customers without inflection, and sells a few less tickets than he used to.

  And every couple of months or so I wander over to the beach and walk along it and try to see what it was that made Arlo sacrifice his personality and his security and damned near everything else, just to get a glimpse of all this.

  And I see a sunset just like any other sunset, and a stretch of dirty sand with glass and tin cans and seaweed and rocks on it, and I breathe in polluted air, and sometimes I get rained on; and I think of that damned robot in that plush office with that cushy job and every need catered to, and I decide that I’d trade places with him in two seconds flat.

&n
bsp; I saw Arlo just the other day—I had some business on his floor—and it was almost kind of sad. He looked just like any other robot, spoke in a grating monotone, acted exactly like an animated computer. He wasn’t much before, but whatever he had been, he gave it all away just to look at the sky once or twice. Dumb trade.

  Well, robots never did make much sense to me, anyway.

  (1980)

  NON SERVIAM

  Stanisław Lem

  Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), the Polish satirist, essayist and science fiction writer, had no time for futurologists. “Meaningful prediction,” he wrote, “does not lie in serving up the present larded with startling improvements or revelations.” He preferred to devise whole new chapters to the human story, and very few indeed had happy endings. His vision of the internet (which did not then exist) is particularly compelling: a future in which important facts are carried away on a flood of falsehoods, and our civic freedoms along with them. He dreamed up all the usual nanotechnological fantasies, from spider silk space-elevator cables to catastrophic “grey goo”, decades before they entered the public consciousness, and even coined the phrase “Theory of Everything”, but only so he could point at it and laugh. He did not become really productive until after Stalin’s death, but in the dozen years from 1956 he wrote seventeen books, among them Solaris (1961), the work for which he is best known by English speakers.

  Professor Dobb’s book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaikki has called “the cruelest science man ever created.” Dobb, one of the most distinguished personeticists today, shares this view. One cannot escape the conclusion, he says, that personetics is, in its application, immoral; we are dealing, however, with a type of pursuit that is, though counter to the principles of ethics, also of practical necessity to us. There is no way, in the research, to avoid its special ruthlessness, to avoid doing violence to one’s natural instincts, and if nowhere else it is here that the myth of the perfect innocence of the scientist as a seeker of facts is exploded. We are speaking of a discipline, after all, which, with only a small amount of exaggeration, for emphasis, has been called “experimental theogony.” Even so, this reviewer is struck by the fact that when the press played up the thing, nine years ago, public opinion was stunned by the personetic disclosures. One would have thought that in this day and age nothing could surprise us. The centuries rang with the echo of the feat of Columbus, whereas the conquering of the Moon in the space of a week was received by the collective consciousness as a thing practically humdrum. And yet the birth of personetics proved to be a shock.

  The name combines Latin and Greek derivatives: “persona” and “genetic”—“genetic” in the sense of formation, or creation. The field is a recent offshoot of the cybernetics and psychonics of the eighties, crossbred with applied intellectronics. Today everyone knows of personetics; the man in the street would say, if asked, that it is the artificial production of intelligent beings—an answer not wide of the mark, to be sure, but not quite getting to the heart of the matter. To date we have nearly a hundred personetic programs. Nine years ago identity schemata were being developed—primitive cores of the “linear” type—but even that generation of computers, today of historical value only, could not yet provide a field for the true creation of personoids.

  The theoretical possibility of creating sentience was divined some time ago, by Norbert Wiener, as certain passages of his last book, God and Golem, bear witness. Granted, he alluded to it in that half-facetious manner typical of him, but underlying the facetiousness were fairly grim premonitions. Wiener, however, could not have foreseen the turn that things would take twenty years later. The worst came about—in the words of Sir Donald Acker—when at MIT “the inputs were shorted to the outputs.”

  At present a “world” for personoid “inhabitants” can be prepared in a matter of a couple of hours. This is the time it takes to feed into the machine one of the full-fledged programs (such as BAAL 66, CREAN IV, or JAHVE 09). Dobb gives a rather cursory sketch of the beginnings of personetics, referring the reader to the historical sources; a confirmed practitioner-experimenter himself, he speaks mainly of his own work—which is much to the point, since between the English school, which Dobb represents, and the American group, at MIT, the differences are considerable, both in the area of methodology and as regards experimental goals. Dobb describes the procedure of “6 days in 120 minutes” as follows. First, one supplies the machine’s memory with a minimal set of givens; that is—to keep within a language comprehensible to laymen—one loads its memory with substance that is “mathematical.” This substance is the protoplasm of a universum to be “habitated” by personoids. We are now able to supply the beings that will come into this mechanical, digital world—that will be carrying on an existence in it, and in it only—with an environment of nonfinite characteristics. These beings, therefore, cannot feel imprisoned in the physical sense, because the environment does not have, from their standpoint, any bounds. The medium possesses only one dimension that resembles a dimension given us also—namely, that of the passage of time (duration). Their time is not directly analogous to ours, however, because the rate of its flow is subject to discretionary control on the part of the experimenter. As a rule, the rate is maximized in the preliminary phase (the so-called creational warm-up), so that our minutes correspond to whole eons in the computer, during which there takes place a series of successive reorganizations and crystallizations—of a synthetic cosmos. It is a cosmos completely spaceless, though possessing dimensions, but these dimensions have a purely mathematical, hence what one might call an “imaginary” character. They are, very simply, the consequence of certain axiomatic decisions of the programmer, and their number depends on him. If, for example, he chooses a ten-dimensionality, it will have for the structure of the world created altogether different consequences from those where only six dimensions are established. It should be emphasized that these dimensions bear no relation to those of physical space but only to the abstract, logically valid constructs made use of in systems creation.

  This point, all but inaccessible to the nonmathematician, Dobb attempts to explain by adducing simple facts, the sort generally learned in school. It is possible, as we know, to construct a geometrically regular three-dimensional solid—say, a cube—which in the real world possesses a counterpart in the form of a die; and it is equally possible to create geometrical solids of four, five, n dimensions (the four-dimensional is a tesseract). These no longer possess real counterparts, and we can see this, since in the absence of any physical dimension No. 4 there is no way to fashion genuine four-dimensional dice. Now, this distinction (between what is physically constructible and what may be made only mathematically) is, for personoids, in general nonexistent, because their world is of a purely mathematical consistency. It is built of mathematics, though the building blocks of that mathematics are ordinary, perfectly physical objects (relays, transistors, logic circuits—in a word, the whole huge network of the digital machine).

  As we know from modern physics, space is not something independent of the objects and masses that are situated within it. Space is, in its existence, determined by those bodies; where they are not, where nothing is—in the material sense—there, too, space ceases, collapsing to zero. Now, the role of material bodies, which extend their “influence,” so to speak, and thereby “generate” space, is carried out in the personoid world by systems of a mathematics called into being for that very purpose. Out of all the possible “maths” that in general might be made (for example, in an axiomatic manner), the programmer, having decided upon a specific experiment, selects a particular group, which will serve as the underpinning, the “existential substrate,” the “ontological foundation” of the created universum. There is in this, Dobb believes, a striking similarity to the human world. This world of ours, after all, has “decided” upon certain forms and upon certain types of geometry that best suit it—best, since most simply (three-dimensionality, in order t
o remain with what one began with). This notwithstanding, we are able to picture “other worlds” with “other properties”—in the geometrical and not only in the geometrical realm. It is the same with the personoids: that aspect of mathematics which the researcher has chosen as the “habitat” is for them exactly what for us is the “real-world base” in which we live, and live perforce. And, like us, the personoids are able to “picture” worlds of different fundamental properties.

  Dobb presents his subject using the method of successive approximations and recapitulations; that which we have outlined above, and which corresponds roughly to the first two chapters of his book, in the subsequent chapters undergoes partial revocation—through complication. It is not really the case, the author advises us, that the personoids simply come upon a readymade, fixed, frozen sort of world in its irrevocably final form; what the world will be like in its specificities depends on them, and this to a growing degree as their own activeness increases, as their “exploratory initiative” develops. Nor does the likening of the universum of the personoids to a world in which phenomena exist only to the extent that its inhabitants observe them provide an accurate image of the conditions. Such a comparison, which is to be found in the works of Sainter and Hughes, Dobb considers an “idealist deviation”—a homage that personetics has rendered to the doctrine, so curiously and so suddenly resurrected, of Bishop Berkeley. Sainter maintained that the personoids would know their world after the fashion of a Berkeleyan being, which is not in a position to distinguish “esse” from “percipi”—to wit, it will never discover the difference between the thing perceived and that which occasions the perception in a way objective and independent of the one perceiving. Dobb attacks this interpretation of the matter with a passion. We, the creators of their world, know perfectly well that what is perceived by them indeed exists; it exists inside the computer, independent of them—though, granted, solely in the manner of mathematical objects.