by Isaac Asimov
I’m not sure I’ll like this.
7 March
Well, I’ve been struggling with the word processor and I don’t know what to think. For a long time, it would mark off misspellings, and I would retype them correctly. And it certainly learned how to tell real misspellings. I had no trouble there. In fact, when I had a long word, I would sometimes throw in a wrong letter just to see if it would catch it. I would write “supercede” or “vaccum” or “Skenectady.” It almost never failed.
And then yesterday a funny thing happened. It stopped waiting for me to retype the wrong spelling. It retyped it automatically itself. You can’t help striking the wrong key sometimes so I would write “5he” instead of “the” and the “5” would change to a “t” in front of my eyes. And it would happen quickly, too.
I tested it by deliberately typing a word with a wrong letter. I would see it show up wrong on the screen. I would blink my eyes and it would be right.
This morning I phoned the representative.
“Hmm,” he said. “Interesting.”
“Troublesome,” I said. “It might introduce mistakes. If I type ‘blww’ does the machine correct it to ‘blew’ or to ‘blow’? Or what if it thinks I mean ‘blue,’ ‘ue’ when I really mean ‘blew,’ ‘ew.’ See what I mean?”
He said, “I have discussed your machine with one of our theoretical experts. He tells me it may be capable of absorbing internal clues from your writing and knows which word you really want to use. As you type into it, it begins to understand your style and integrate it into its own programming.”
A little scary, but it’s convenient. I don’t have to proofread the pages now.
20 March
I really don’t have to proofread the pages. The machine has taken to correcting my punctuation and word order.
The first time it happened, I couldn’t believe it. I thought I had had a small attack of dizziness and had imagined I had typed something that wasn’t really on the screen.
It happened oftener and oftener and there was no mistake about it. It got to the point where I couldn’t make a mistake in grammar. If I tried to type something like “Jack, and Jill went up the hill,” that comma simply wouldn’t appear. No matter how I tried to type “I has a book,” it always shows up as “I have a book.” Or if I wrote, “Jack, and Jill as well, went up the hill,” then I couldn’t omit the commas. They’d go in of their own accord.
It’s a lucky thing I keep this diary in longhand or I couldn’t explain what I mean. I couldn’t give an example of wrong English.
I don’t really like to have a computer arguing with me over English, but the worst part of it is that it’s always right.
Well, look, I don’t throw a fit when a human copy editor sends me back a manuscript with corrections in every line. I’m just a writer, I’m not an expert on the minutiae of English. Let the copy editors copyedit, they still can’t write. And so let the word processor copyedit. It takes a load off me.
17 April
I spoke too soon in the last item in which I mentioned my word processor. For three weeks, it copyedited me and my novel went along smoothly. It was a good working arrangement. I did the creating and it did the modulating, so to speak.
Then yesterday evening, it refused to work at all. Nothing happened, no matter what keys were touched. It was plugged in all right; the wall switch was on; I was doing everything correctly. It just wouldn’t work. Well I thought, so much for that business about “Not once in five years.” I’d only been using it for three and a half months and already so many parts were out that it wouldn’t work.
That meant that new parts ought to come from the factory by special messenger, but not till the next day, of course. I felt terrible, you can bet, and I dreaded having to go back to the typewriter, searching out all my own mistakes and then having to make pen-and-ink corrections or to retype the page.
I went to bed in a foul humor, and didn’t actually sleep much. First thing in the morning, or, anyway, after breakfast, I went into my office, and just as I walked up to the word processor, as though it could read my mind and tell that I was so annoyed I would cheerfully have kicked it off the desk and out the window—it started working.
All by itself, mind you. I never touched the keys. The words appeared on the screen a lot more quickly than I could have made them appear and it began with:
Fault-Intolerant
by Abram Ivanov
I simply stared. It went on to write my diary items concerning itself, as I have done above, but much better. The writing was smoother, more colorful, with a successful touch of humor. In fifteen minutes, it was done, and in five minutes the printer had placed it on sheets.
That apparently had just been for exercise, or for practice, for once that was done, the last page I had written of my novel appeared on the screen, and then the words began to proceed without me.
The word processor had clearly learned to write my stuff, just as I would have written it, only better.
Great! No more work. The word processor wrote it under my name and wrote with my style, given a certain amount of improvement. I could just let it go, pick up the surprised reviews from my critics telling the world how I had improved, and watch the royalties pour in.
That’s all right as far as it goes, but I’m not America’s most prolific writer for no reason. I happen to love to write. That happens to be all that I want to do.
Now if my word processor does my writing, what do I do with the rest of my life?
Kid Brother
It was a great shock to me when our application for a second child was refused. We had really expected to get the license.
I’m a respectable citizen; pillar of the community; all that kind of stuff. I was a little old, maybe. Josie—my wife—may have been past her best childbearing years. So what? We know other people worse off than us, older, trashy in character, who—Well, never mind.
We had one son, Charlie, and we really wanted another child. Boy or girl, it didn’t matter. Of course, if there was something wrong with Charlie, if he developed some illness, maybe then we could license a second child. Or maybe not. And if we did get the license, they would probably take care of Charlie as a defective. You know what I mean; I don’t have to say it.
The trouble was we were late getting started, and that was Josie’s fault. She had irregular periods and you never knew when to get her, if you know what I mean. And we couldn’t get any medical help, either. How could we? The clinics said if we couldn’t have children without help, that was great for the world. It’s patriotic, or something, to be childless.
But we fooled them and had a child after all. Charlie.
When Charlie was eight months old, we started applying for a second child. We wanted them pretty close in age. Was that so much to ask? Even if we were getting a little old for it? What kind of a world do we live in, anyway. No matter how much the population drops, they say it has to drop further, and if life gets easier and people live longer, it has to drop still further.
They won’t be satisfied till they wipe out humanity alto—
—Well, look! I’ll tell this just the way I want to. If you want the story, officer, you’ll have to take it my way. What can you do to me? I really don’t much care if I live or die. Would you in my position?
—Look, it’s no use arguing. I’ll tell it my way, or I’ll shut up and you can do your worst. You understand?
—Well then, okay.
As it turned out, we didn’t have to worry about Charlie being sickly, or anything like that. He grew like a bear, or one of those other animals that used to hang around in the woods and places like that in the old days. He came of good stock. You could see that. So why couldn’t we have had another child? That’s what I want to know.
Intelligent? You bet. Strong. Knew what he wanted. Ideal boy. When I think of it, I could—I could—Oh, well.
You should have seen him with the other kids as he was growing up. A natural leader. Always had
his way. Always had the other children in the neighborhood doing what he wanted. He knew what he wanted and what he wanted was always right. That was the thing.
Josie didn’t like it, though. She said he was spoiled. In fact, she said I spoiled him. I don’t know what she was talking about. I was the making of him.
He was two years ahead of his age in strength and in brains. I could see that. And if the other children got out of line, sometimes he would have to show them who was boss.
Josie thought he was getting to be a bully. She said he had no friends; all the children were afraid of him.
So what! A leader doesn’t want friends. He wants people to respect him, and if they get out of line, they better fear him. Charlie was coming along all right. Sure, the other children stayed away mostly. That was their parents’ fault; and they’re just a bunch of milksops. Once they get one child, and know they won’t have any more, they start hovering over him or her like they were the family jewels, and rare jewels, too. You smother them if you do that. They become useless—worthless.
There was this guy Stevenson down the block. He had two girls, both pitiful things, giggling and empty-headed. How did he come to get two, I ask you? He knew somebody, maybe. A little money passed from hand to hand. Why not, he’s got more money than he admits, too. Naturally. That accounts for it. You’d think with two, he could afford to risk one, but no—
—That’s all right. I’ll get to the point, when I get to the point. If you push, you’ll get nothing and we’ll let it go straight to the court. See if I care.
These other parents, they didn’t want their babies hurt. Don’t play with the Janowitz boy, they would say. I never heard them say so but I’m sure that’s what they said. Well, who needed them? I was planning for Charlie to go to college eventually, so he could take courses in microelectronics or in spatial dynamics, or that kind of stuff. And economics and business, too, so he would know how to get money and power out of his know-how. That’s the way I saw it. I wanted him on top of the heap.
But Josie kept talking about Charlie not having friends and Charlie growing up alone, and like that. All the time. It was like living in an echo chamber. And then, one day, she came to me and said, “Why don’t we get Charlie a kid brother?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. “You’re past menopause so what do we do? Call in the stork? Look under cabbage leaves?”
I could have divorced her, you know. Married a young chick. After all, I wasn’t past menopause. But I was—loyal. Fat lot of good that did me. Besides, if I had divorced her, she would mostly have kept Charlie, so what good would that have done me?
So I just made that comment about the stork.
She said, “I’m not talking about a biological child. I’m saying we can get a robot to be Charlie’s brother.”
I never expected to hear anything like that, you can bet. I’m not a robot-type guy. My parents never had one. I never had one. As far as I’m concerned, every robot means one less human, and we’re just watching the world being turned over to them. Just one more way of wiping out humanity, if you ask me.
So I said to Josie, “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Really,” said Josie, all very earnest. “It’s a new model. It’s just designed to be friendly and pals for children. Nothing fancy, so they aren’t expensive, and they do fill a need. With more and more people having only one child, there is a real value in supplying that one child with siblings.”
“That may be true of other children. Not Charlie,” I said.
“Yes, Charlie, especially. He’s never going to find out how to deal with people this way. He’s growing up alone, really alone. He won’t come to understand the give and take of life.”
“He’s not going to give. He’s a taker. He’ll take power and he’ll take position, and he’ll tell people what to do. And he’ll have children of his own and maybe even three.”
You may be too young to feel this yet, officer, but if you have only one child, you’ll eventually discover you’ll still have a chance at another one when your child has a child. I had high hopes for Charlie. Before I died, I was sure I would see another child, maybe even two or three. They might be Charlie’s but as far as our lives would overlap, I was going to make them mine, too.
But all Josie could think about was a robot. Life became another kind of echo chamber. She priced them out. She figured out the down payment. She looked into the possibility of renting one for a year on a kind of approval. She was willing to use her own nest egg that her folks had left her to pay for it, and things like that. And you know how it is, in the end you have to keep peace in the family.
I gave in. I said, “Okay, but you go pick one out and you better make it a rental. And you pay for it.”
I figured, who knows. The robot would probably be a pain in the neck and wouldn’t work out, and we’d return him.
They walked him into the house, didn’t even crate him. I should say “it” but Josie insisted on saying “he” and “him” so he would seem more like a kid brother to Charlie, and I got into the habit.
He was a “sibling-robot”; that’s what they called him. He had a registration number, but I never memorized it. What for? We just called him “Kid.” That was good enough.
—Yes, I know that this sort of robot is getting popular. I don’t know what’s happening to human beings that they stand for such things.
And we stood for it, too. Or at least, I did. Josie was fascinated. The one we got was a pretty good one, I have to admit. He looked almost human, he smiled a lot, and he had a nice voice. He looked maybe fifteen, a small-sized fifteen, which wasn’t too bad because Charlie was a large-sized ten.
Kid was a little taller than Charlie and, of course, heavier. You know, there were titanium bones or whatever inside him and a nuclear unit, guaranteed for ten years before replacement, and that’s pretty heavy.
He had a good vocabulary, too, and he was very polite. Josie was just delighted. She said, “I can use him in the house. He can help out.”
I said, “No, you don’t. You got him for Charlie, and that means he’s Charlie’s. Don’t you go taking him away.”
I was thinking if Josie got him, and made him into a slavey, she’d never let go of him. Charlie, on the other hand, might not like him or might get tired after a little while, and then we could get rid of him.
Charlie fooled me, though. He liked Kid fine.
But you know, it made sense after a while. Kid was designed to be a kid brother, so he was just right for Charlie. He let Charlie take the lead, like an older brother should. He had those three Laws. I can’t quote them, but you know what they are. There was no way he could hurt Charlie, and he had to do whatever Charlie said, so after a while I began to think it was a good deal.
I mean, when they played games Charlie always won. He was supposed to. And the Kid never got mad. He couldn’t. He was made to lose. And sometimes Charlie kicked the Kid around, the way children do, you know. A child gets mad about something, he takes it out on some other child. Children always do that. Naturally, that gets the parents of the other child mad and I had to tell Charlie now and then not to do that and that sort of cramps him. It squeezes him in. He can’t express himself.
Well, he could with the Kid. And why not? You can’t hurt the Kid. He’s made out of plastic and metal and who knows what else. For all he looked nearly like a human being, he wasn’t alive; he couldn’t feel pain.
In fact, I felt the best thing the Kid did was to be something on which Charlie could bleed off his excess energy so that it wouldn’t accumulate in him and fester. And the Kid never minded. They’d play judo and the Kid would be thrown, and even stamped on, but he would just get up and say, “That was good, Charlie. Let’s try it again.” Listen, you could throw him off the top of a building and he wouldn’t be hurt.
He was always polite to us. He called me Dad. He called Josie Mom. He asked after our health. He would help Josie out of her chair when she wanted to stand up. That sort of stuf
f.
He was designed that way. He had to act affectionate. It was all automatic. He was programmed for it. It didn’t mean a thing, but Josie liked it. Listen, I’ve always been busy, hard-working. I have this plant I had to help run, interlocking machinery to oversee. One thing goes wrong and the whole shebang ties itself up. I have no time to bring flowers and go mucking around pulling out her chairs or something. We’d been married nearly twenty years and how long does that sort of thing keep up anyway?
And Charlie—Well, he stood up to his mother the way any decent boy should. And I figured the Kid helped there. When Charlie made himself boss over the Kid one minute, he wasn’t going to run around saying, “Mommie, Mommie,” the next minute. He was not a mamma’s boy, and he didn’t let Josie run him, and I was proud of him for that. He was going to be a man. Of course, he listened to what I said to him. A boy’s got to listen to his father.
So maybe it was good that the Kid was designed to be a sort of mamma’s boy. It gave Josie the feeling that there was one of those nerds about the house and it bothered her less that Charlie always thought for himself.
Of course you could count on Josie to do her best to spoil it. She was forever worrying about her pet nerd being hurt. She was always coming out with, “Now, Charlie, why don’t you be nicer to your kid brother?”
It was ridiculous. I could never get it through her head that the Kid wasn’t hurt; that he was designed to be a loser; that it was all good for Charlie.
Of course, Charlie never listened to her. He played with the Kid the way he wanted to.