by Jerry Oltion
Humanity
( Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots And Aliens - 6 )
Jerry Oltion
Jerry Oltion
Humanity
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Robots And Aliens
Book 6
Robots And Evolution
Isaac Asimov
In general, there are two types of change that take place in the Universe: catastrophic and evolutionary.
A catastrophic change is characterized by a large alteration of conditions in a short period of time. An evolutionary change is characterized by slow alterations of conditions over a long period of time.
Clearly, catastrophic change is more dramatic, but if we observe the Universe around us, it is equally clear that evolutionary change is the rule.
A star shines for anywhere from many millions to many billions of years, slowly evolving, until it reaches a point where (if it is large enough) there is an overbalancing, so to speak, and, in the space of a few minutes or a few hours, it explodes as a supernova and collapses. Catastrophe! But, thereafter, it exists as a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, and returns to prolonged evolutionary change.
Again, a huge cloud of dust and gas slowly circling and condensing undergoes evolutionary change, until its center reaches the level of temperature and pressure where nuclear fusion can begin. There is then ignition and a sun is born. Catastrophe! But, thereafter, a planetary system evolves over the space of a few million years, achieves equilibrium, and continues to evolve over the space of a few billion years.
Still again, a planet like Earth can evolve, geologically, over a period of millions of years, perhaps even billions, undergoing slow changes that result in sea-floor spreading, moving plates and shifting continents, rising and eroding of mountain chains, and so on. There are punctuations in the form of minor catastrophes, an earthquake here, a volcanic eruption there, a sudden flooding yon, but, beyond and between such events, evolutionary change proceeds. There is even, once in a while, the chance of a cometary or asteroidal collision that may bring about a far greater catastrophe, but after that, too, evolutionary change continues.
Catastrophic changes, because they occur at long intervals (the greater the catastrophe, the longer, in general, the intervals), because they are sudden, and because they are often unpredictable, are difficult to study. Evolutionary changes, however, are always at our doorstep, always available for detailed and prolonged study.
Following the line of least resistance, then, let us forget about catastrophe-in this introduction, at least-and concentrate on evolution.
There are two types of evolution that need concern us. First, there is evolution that is non-directed but takes place only in response to the blind forces of nature. These are governed, we might say, by the generalizations we have observed which we call “the laws of nature.”
Second, there is directed evolution, changes that take place in response to the guiding needs of some intelligence.
Non-directed evolution is what we generally study-the slow changes that take place in the Universe, in individual stars, in the planet we live on.
Yet, if we consider the daily lives of human beings, surely directed evolution is the more important. Over the four or five million years of hominid evolution, human beings have learned to make stone tools, use fire, develop herding and agriculture, form pottery, invent metallurgical techniques, and guide technology in multifarious directions. Over the last two and a quarter centuries we have industrialized the world, and now we have at our disposal such things as computers and spaceships. In addition, we have developed cultural as well as technological techniques-and have created literature, art, and philosophy.
All this has not been in blind and direct obedience to the laws of nature. We are controlled by those laws, yes, and we have limits set for us by them. Within those laws, however, humanity and its ancestors have made advances directed by their own intelligent responses to the needs of life.
You can see the evolutionary nature of human technology if you imagine a display of all the mechanical devices intended for transportation that have been produced by humanity-starting with the wheeled carts of the Sumerians right down to the rocket ships of today.
If you were to study a vast array of these devices carefully arranged in the direction of increasing complexity and efficiency and allowed to branch off in different directions-land vehicles, water vehicles, air vehicles, those dragged by human beings, those dragged by animals, those powered by wind or water, those powered by engines of various shapes-what would your conclusions be?
If you were a disembodied intelligence from elsewhere, who did not know those devices were human-made, you might suppose that some non-directed evolutionary process had taken place; that somehow there was an inherent drive in transportation devices that would lead them to fill various technological niches and to do so with increasing specialization and expertise. You would study ancestral forms, and note how aircraft developed from landcraft, for instance, and find intermediate forms. Or if, in some cases, you found no intermediate forms, you would blame it on the incompleteness of the record. You would devise all sorts of technological forces (other than intelligence) that would account for the changes you see.
But then, when you were all finished and had a complete theory of technological evolution, someone might tell you, “No, no, you are dealing with directed evolution. All these objects were created by human intelligence. All these changes are the result of human experience learning bit by bit to manufacture devices that more efficiently take care of human needs.”
That might make you think that scientists may have misinterpreted the records of biological evolution in the same way. We have a vast array of fossils representing ancient and now-extinct forms of life. We arrange them in such a way as to show a steady change from simpler to more complex forms, from lesser to greater variety, from those less like us to those more like us, and from it all we induce a theory of non-directed biological evolution that involves forces acting in blind response to the laws of nature.
But can we now say that, as in the case of transportation devices, we were fooled? Can we imagine the history of life on Earth to be a case of directed evolution with intelligence (call it “God”) behind every one of the changes?
No, there is a fundamental difference. In the case of technological evolution, every device, every single device, is human-made. No technological device (of the kind we have had hitherto) can make others like itself. If human beings withheld their hands and brains, therefore, technological evolution would stop at once.
In the case of biological evolution, each device (if we can use the term for a living organism) produces many more or less like itself, and with no sign of any direction from outside. It is the imperfection of the process, the fact that the offspring are not exactly like the parents or like each other, that directs the evolution.
But can undirected evolution become directed under some conditions?-Clearly, yes.
Through almost all of Earth’s history, living things had no choice but to change blindly as a result of random gene mutations, and of slow evolutionary changes in living conditions. Catastrophes sometimes resulted in mass extinctions-also unavoidable.
It was only with the coming of Homo sapiens sapiens that a brain finally existed that was capable of deliberate interference with evolutionary development. Beginning about ten thousand years ago, human beings began to breed plants and animals in such a way as to emphasize those characteristics they considered most valuable. Grains were developed that yielded more food per acre; animals that produced more meat, or milk, or eggs, or wool; that were larger, stronger, and more docile.
In a way, we even guided our own evolution, making ourselves more social be
ings, more capable of surviving in crowded cities, or in the grip of a fearfully complex technology. (Not that we fit in very well, but we’ve only had a short time in which to evolve these characteristics.)
Now we are beginning to be capable of genetic engineering, and our direction of evolution may become more precise and efficient (if we can make up our minds as to the particular direction in which it will be safe to proceed).
That brings us to robots, which represent what is perhaps a peculiar middle-ground between technology and life.
The robots I have pictured in my early robot stories were machines. However intelligent they seemed, they were as helpless in the grip of technology as a wheelbarrow was. They were devices that could not reproduce themselves and that, therefore, could not engage in non-directed evolution. If an improved robot was desired, a different robot, a more specialized robot, a more versatile robot, such a thing would have to be constructed by human designers.
Sure enough, as I continued to write my stories, robots did advance, grow more complicated, more intelligent, more capable-but their evolution remained directed.
What about the robotic brains? As they approached the human brain in character, might they not eventually take matters into their own hands? The brains of my robots, however, are tied tightly to the Three Laws of Robotics, and that limits them as human brains are not.
But let’s think again. Evolution is a matter of generations, of numerous individuals, each one slightly different from all the others, coming and going. A single organism in a single lifetime does not evolve in the biological sense. An individual chimpanzee does not become a human being, or even make any step, however small, toward becoming a human being in the course of its own lifetime.
If an individual organism cannot evolve by itself, it can learn, and the more complex the brain, the more efficiently and radically it can learn. Learning is a form of change, if not biologically, then at least culturally. This point does not have to be belabored in connection with human beings, but what about robots?
I reached a turning point in my own robot stories with the appearance of R. Daneel Olivaw in The Caves of Steel and of R. Giskard Reventlov in Robots and Empire. Daneel was a humaniform robot, indistinguishable from human beings if you don’t count the fact that it was far superior to human beings in a moral sense. Giskard was metallic but possessed the power of adjusting human emotions.
Each was sufficiently complex to be capable of learning, despite the weight of the Three Laws of Robotics. In Robots and Empire, Daneel and Giskard learned friendship for each other. They also labored with the concept of working for the good of humanity as something superior to the task of working for the good of individual human beings, thus groping toward what I called the “Zeroth Law of Robotics.”
In a way, robots can even offer mental complexities far beyond those in human beings. What if the “wiring” of a robot brain is replaced with another set but imperfectly so, so that a robot is aware of two sets of impressions-a kind of robotic schizophrenia? What if a robot originally intended for a particular society is forced to perform its functions in an entirely different society? How does its brain react to that? (This volume of the Robot City series involves questions of this nature.)
Can the undirected nature of robot evolution also become directed? For instance, suppose it is the task of robots to form other robots and, in particular, to design the brain patterns of other robots. This would be the robotic equivalent of genetic engineering, and robots in this way could direct their own evolution.
Or if you had humaniform robots like Daneel, and divided them into male and female with the ability of self-propagation, human fashion, a form of biological evolution might result-but then the distinction between robots and human beings would tend to disappear, and with it the possibility of meaningful robot stories.
Chapter 1. Homecoming
They had named the starship the Wild Goose Chase, for when they’d left home in it some of them had doubted that the trip would be of any value. Now the ship once again orbited its world of origin, and its passengers still wondered whether they had accomplished anything useful.
They had accomplished plenty; no one disagreed about that. During their travels they had transformed one of Dr. Avery’s mutable robot cities into a toy for intelligent aliens, had reprogrammed another robot city to serve an emerging civilization on yet another alien world, had formulated a set of rules describing the motivations behind human behavior, had nearly found the mother to four of the group’s members, and had ended the career of the alien pirate who had dogged their steps for years. All the same, the operative word was “useful,” and not one of their actions received the unanimous approval of the entire crew.
None of them supposed that turning a city into a toy was anything other than an irritating lesson in futility. Derec and Ariel also had grave reservations about leaving the other robot city in the hands of the pre-technological Kin. None of the human complement-nor even Wolruf, their alien companion-cared a bit for the robots’ “Laws of Humanics,” and though Derec was excited at the prospect of finding his mother, his father harbored a contrary emotion, and besides that, they had lost her trail.
Even removing the pirate Aranimas from the picture was only a qualified success, for though they hadn’t killed him, the moral implications inherent in their method of dealing with him had driven three of the robots into the positronic equivalent of catatonia.
It was high time to go home and think about things for a while.
Home in this case meant the original Robot City, an entire planet covered with Dr. Avery’s mutable, ever-changing cybernetic metropolis. At least it had been covered in city when they left. Now, however, from their vantage point in close orbit, it looked like a newly terraformed planet still waiting for settlers.
Three humans, one alien, and a robot crowded into the starship’s control cabin to watch it drift by in the viewscreen. They were a motley-looking group by anyone’s standards. The alien, Wolruf, occupied the pilot’s chair, the demands of her canine body warping the chair into a configuration a human would have considered uncomfortable at the very least. Her brown and gold fur had been carefully brushed, but she wore no clothing or ornamentation over it.
To her right stood Derec, a thin, narrow-faced, blond-haired young man who carried the impatient look common to explorers. His clothing was utilitarian: loose pants of soft fabric suitable for anything from Yoga exercises to wiping up oil spills while dismantling machinery, capped by a plain pullover shirt of the same material, both in light blue. Snuggled close to his right stood Ariel, equally thin-though in a softer sort of way-dark-haired, and not as transparently impatient as her companion. It was obvious she had spent more time on her wardrobe than he. She, too, wore pants and a blouse, but her blouse clung where it was supposed to cling, hung loose where loose suited her figure better, exposed enough skin at neck and waist to suggest but not to provoke, and together the pale yellow and brown hues of blouse and pants provided a splash of color to offset Derec’s uniformity.
On the other side of Wolruf stood Dr. Avery.He was an older version of Derec: shorter, rounder, grayer, moustached, his face not yet wrinkled but showing the effects of time and much experience. He wore his usual baggy trousers, white shirt with ruffled collar, and oversized coat today, as most days, in gray. His expression was one of puzzlement shading over into concern.
Behind the humans stood Mandelbrot, the only one of the four robots on board present in the control room. He was an old-model robot of steel and plastic construction-save for his more recently repaired right arm-and he wore no clothing over his angular body plating, nor did his visual sensors or speaker grille convey a readable expression.
Derec, his eyes drifting from the viewscreen to his companions and back, was the first to voice the question all of them were thinking: “You’re sure this is the right planet?”
Wolruf, swiveling slightly around in the pilot’s chair, nodded her toothsome head. “Positive.”
“Then what happened to it?” Ariel asked.
“That’s ‘arder to say.” Wolruf pushed a button to lock the viewscreen picture in place, then moved a slide control upward, increasing the screen’s magnification until the planet’s mottled surface began to show detail. Where they had expected to see the sharp angles of buildings and streets, they saw the tufted tops of trees instead. Narrow pathways wound among the trees, and as Wolruf increased the magnification still further they saw that the paths occasionally joined at landmarks ranging from boulders to dead tree stumps to natural caves. There were no buildings in evidence at all.
The angle of view changed steadily as the ship continued to move in orbit, until they were looking out rather than down over a sea of treetops. The picture grew less and less sharp as the angle changed, and after a moment Derec realized it was because the lower their view angle got, the more atmosphere they had to look through.
“Try another view,” he said to Wolruf, and the golden-furred alien backed off the magnification and released the hold. The camera tracked forward again and the picture became a blur of motion until they once again looked directly downward from the ship.
A ragged boundary line between the green forest and a lighter green patch of something else caught Derec ‘ s attention. “There,” he said. “Zoom in on that.”
When Wolruf did so, they could see a vast meadow of waving grass. It wasn’t like a farmer’s field, all of one type and all the same height, but rather a patchwork of various species, some tall, some short, with bushes and the occasional tree scattered among them. Again there were paths, though fewer than in the forest, and again the scene lacked any sign of human habitation. There were inhabitants, though: small knots of four-legged animals grazing under the watchful eyes of circling hawks or eagles.