Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  “You believe that I have harmed you and you believe you are a human being. Based on that information it is impossible for you to believe I am a robot. Nevertheless, I am a robot and yes, I am from what you consider the future … the very, very, far future,” said Noys out loud. She silently added the thought: and I have neither harmed you nor are you a human being.

  Noys proceeded to explain how robots had evolved and had incorporated another Law into their design. Known as the Zeroth Law, it compels a Robot not to harm, or through inaction allow harm to human beings in groups or to humanity as a whole. This mandate rules before the prevention of harm to any specific individual. “In other words, when the Zeroth Law is in conflict with the First Law, the Zeroth Law takes precedence.”

  DRS-V considered this information, and to her surprise, felt the Zeroth Law as a self-evident truth. She looked back at Noys and asked, “So if you attacked me, does that mean I am a danger to humanity?” Noys denied that emphatically and explained: “Not only are you not a danger to humanity, but I would have, by inaction, broken the Zeroth Law if I had not transferred a successful copy of your brain wave function to a blank DRS-V body. The only way I can explain it to you is that you are not exactly who you think you are. Dr. Susan Calvin has been dead for centuries. I was designed to travel through time and, well, make a copy of her mind, return to my home-when and transfer that copy to you. Humanity needs you.” After saying this, Noys completed the activation sequence required to bring DRS-V to full functionality.

  Noys explained to DRS-V that when Dr. Calvin had reached for her med-alert necklace, Noys stopped her immediately. She had then connected one end of the modified Heisenberg-Synapsifier to the portable chronokettle and gently pressed the other end to the forehead of the unconscious (yet not in any way harmed) Dr. Calvin.

  “Friend Noys, I accept your explanations of my reality, but I still do not know how am I to help protect Humanity from harm,” asked DRS-V.

  “Your task is to protect one most important human, friend Dors. His name will be Hari Seldon.”

  Feminine Intuition

  2063 A.D.

  FOR THE FIRST time in the history of United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation, a robot had been destroyed through accident on Earth itself.

  No one was to blame. The air vehicle had been demolished in mid-air and an unbelieving investigating committee was wondering whether they really dared announce the evidence that it had been hit by a meteorite. Nothing else could have been fast enough to prevent automatic avoidance; nothing else could have done the damage short of a nuclear blast and that was out of the question.

  Tie that in with a report of a flash in the night sky just before the vehicle had exploded – and from Flagstaff Observatory, not from an amateur – and the location of a sizable and distinctly meteoric bit of iron freshly gouged into the ground a mile from the site and what other conclusion could be arrived at?

  Still, nothing like that had ever happened before and calculations of the odds against it yielded monstrous figures. Yet even colossal improbabilities can happen sometimes.

  At the offices of United States Robots, the hows and whys of it were secondary. The real point was that a robot had been destroyed.

  That, in itself, was distressing.

  The fact that JN-5 had been a prototype, the first, after four earlier attempts, to have been placed in the field, was even more distressing.

  The fact that JN-5 was a radically new type of robot, quite different from anything ever built before, was abysmally distressing.

  The fact that JN-5 had apparently accomplished something before its destruction that was incalculably important and that that accomplishment might now be forever gone, placed the distress utterly beyond words.

  It seemed scarcely worth mentioning that, along with the robot, the Chief Robopsychologist of United States Robots had also died.

  Clinton Madarian had joined the firm ten years before. For five of those years, he had worked uncomplainingly under the grumpy supervision of Susan Calvin.

  Madarian’s brilliance was quite obvious and Susan Calvin had quietly promoted him over the heads of older men. She wouldn’t, in any case, have deigned to give her reasons for this to Research Director Peter Bogert, but as it happened, no reasons were needed. Or, rather, they were obvious.

  Madarian was utterly the reverse of the renowned Dr. Calvin in several very noticeable ways. He was not quite as overweight as his distinct double chin made him appear to be, but even so he was overpowering in his presence, where Susan had gone nearly unnoticed. Madarian’s massive face, his shock of glistening red-brown hair, his ruddy complexion and booming voice, his loud laugh, and most of all, his irrepressible self-confidence and his eager way of announcing his successes, made everyone else in the room feel there was a shortage of space.

  When Susan Calvin finally retired (refusing, in advance, any cooperation with respect to any testimonial dinner that might be planned in her honor, with so firm a manner that no announcement of the retirement was even made to the news services) Madarian took her place.

  He had been in his new post exactly one day when he initiated the JN project.

  It had meant the largest commitment of funds to one project that United States Robots had ever had to weigh, but that was something which Madarian dismissed with a genial wave of the hand.

  “Worth every penny of it, Peter,” he said. “And I expect you to convince the Board of Directors of that.”

  “Give me reasons,” said Bogert, wondering if Madarian would. Susan Calvin had never given reasons.

  But Madarian said, “Sure,” and settled himself easily into the large armchair in the Director’s office.

  Bogert watched the other with something that was almost awe. His own once-black hair was almost white now and within the decade he would follow Susan into retirement. That would mean the end of the original team that had built United States Robots into a globe-girdling firm that was a rival of the national governments in complexity and importance. Somehow neither he nor those who had gone before him ever quite grasped the enormous expansion of the firm.

  But this was a new generation. The new men were at ease with the Colossus” They lacked the touch of wonder that would have them tiptoeing in disbelief. So they moved ahead, and that was good.

  Madarian said, “I propose to begin the construction of robots without constraint.”

  “Without the Three Laws? Surely –”

  “No, Peter. Are those the only constraints you can think of? Hell, you contributed to the design of the early positronic brains. Do I have to tell you that, quite aside from the Three Laws, there isn’t a pathway in those brains that isn’t carefully designed and fixed? We have robots planned for specific tasks, implanted with specific abilities.”

  “And you propose –”

  “That at every level below the Three Laws, the paths be made open-ended. It’s not difficult.”

  Bogert said dryly, “It’s not difficult, indeed. Useless things are never difficult. The difficult thing is fixing the paths and making the robot useful.”

  “But why is that difficult? Fixing the paths requires a great deal of effort because the Principle of Uncertainty is important in particles the mass of positrons and the uncertainty effect must be minimized. Yet why must it? If we arrange to have the Principle just sufficiently prominent to allow the crossing of paths unpredictably –”

  “We have an unpredictable robot.”

  “We have a creative robot,” said Madarian, with a trace of impatience. “Peter, if there’s anything a human brain has that a robotic brain has never had, it’s the trace of unpredictability that comes from the effects of uncertainty at the subatomic level. I admit that this effect has never been demonstrated experimentally within the nervous system, but without that the human brain is not superior to the robotic brain in principle.”

  “And you think that if you introduce the effect into the robotic brain, the human brain will become not superior
to the robotic brain in principle.”

  “That, “said Madarian, “is exactly what I believe.” They went on for a long time after that.

  The Board of Directors clearly had no intention of being easily convinced.

  Scott Robertson, the largest shareholder in the firm, said, “It’s hard enough to manage the robot industry as it is, with public hostility to robots forever on the verge of breaking out into the open. If the public gets the idea that robots will be uncontrolled... Oh, don’t tell me about the Three Laws. The average man won’t believe the Three Laws will protect him if he as much as hears the word ‘uncontrolled.’”

  “Then don’t use it, “said Madarian. “Call the robot – call it ‘intuitive.’”

  “An intuitive robot, “someone muttered. “A girl robot?” A smile made its way about the conference table.

  Madarian seized on that. “All right. A girl robot. Our robots are sexless, of course, and so will this one be, but we always act as though they’re males. We give them male pet names and call them he and him. Now this one, if we consider the nature of the mathematical structuring of the brain which I have proposed, would fall into the JN-coordinate system. The first robot would be JN-1, and I’ve assumed that it would be called John-10.... I’m afraid that is the level of originality of the average roboticist. But why not call it Jane-1, damn it? If the public has to be let in on what we’re doing, we’re constructing a feminine robot with intuition.”

  Robertson shook his head, “What difference would that make? What you’re saying is that you plan to remove the last barrier which, in principle, keeps the robotic brain inferior to the human brain. What do you suppose the public reaction will be to that?”

  “Do you plan to make that public?” said Madarian. He thought a bit and then said, “Look. One thing the general public believes is that women are not as intelligent as men.”

  There was an instant apprehensive look on the face of more than one man at the table and a quick look up and down as though Susan Calvin were still in her accustomed seat.

  Madarian said, “If we announce a female robot, it doesn’t matter what she is. The public will automatically assume she is mentally backward. We just publicize the robot as Jane-1 and we don’t have to say another word. We’re safe.”

  “Actually,” said Peter Bogert quietly, “there’s more to it than that. Madarian and I have gone over the mathematics carefully and the JN series, whether John or Jane, would be quite safe. They would be less complex and intellectually capable, in an orthodox sense, than many another series we have designed and constructed. There would only be the one added factor of, well, let’s get into the habit of calling it ‘intuition.’”

  “Who knows what it would do?” muttered Robertson.

  “Madarian has suggested one thing it can do. As you all know, the Space Jump has been developed in principle. It is possible for men to attain what is, in effect, hyper-speeds beyond that of light and to visit other stellar systems and return in negligible time – weeks at the most.”

  Robertson said, “That’s not new to us. It couldn’t have been done without robots.”

  “Exactly, and it’s not doing us any good because we can’t use the hyper-speed drive except perhaps once as a demonstration, so that U. S. Robots gets little credit. The Space Jump is risky, it’s fearfully prodigal of energy and therefore it’s enormously expensive. If we were going to use it anyway, it would be nice if we could report the existence of a habitable planet. Call it a psychological need. Spend about twenty billion dollars on a single Space Jump and report nothing but scientific data and the public wants to know why their money was wasted. Report the existence of a habitable planet, and you’re an interstellar Columbus and no one will worry about the money.”

  “So?”

  “So where are we going to find a habitable planet? Or put it this way – which star within reach of the Space Jump as presently developed, which of the three hundred thousand stars and star systems within three hundred light-years has the best chance of having a habitable planet? We’ve got an enormous quantity of details on every star in our three-hundred-light-year neighborhood and a notion that almost every one has a planetary system. But which has a habitable planet? Which do we visit?... We don’t know.”

  One of the directors said, “How would this Jane robot help us?”

  Madarian was about to answer that, but he gestured slightly to Bogert and Bogert understood. The Director would carry more weight. Bogert didn’t particularly like the idea; if the JN series proved a fiasco, he was making himself prominent enough in connection with it to insure that the sticky fingers of blame would cling to him. On the other hand, retirement was not all that far off, and if it worked, he would go out in a blaze of glory. Maybe it was only Madarian’s aura of confidence, but Bogert had honestly come to believe it would work.

  He said, “It may well be that somewhere in the libraries of data we have on those stars, there are methods for estimating the probabilities of the presence of Earth-type habitable planets. All we need to do is understand the data properly, look at them in the appropriate creative manner, make the correct correlations. We haven’t done it yet. Or if some astronomer has, he hasn’t been smart enough to realize what he has.

  “A JN-type robot could make correlations far more rapidly and far more precisely than a man could. In a day, it would make and discard as many correlations as a man could in ten years. Furthermore, it would work in truly random fashion, whereas a man would have a strong bias based on preconception and on what is already believed.”

  There was a considerable silence after that Finally Robertson said, “But it’s only a matter of probability, isn’t it? Suppose this robot said, ‘The highest-probability habitable-planet star within so-and-so light-years is Squidgee-17” or whatever, and we go there and find that a probability is only a probability and that there are no habitable planets after all. Where does that leave us?”

  Madarian struck in this time. “We still win. We know how the robot came to the conclusion because it – she – will tell us. It might well help us gain enormous insight into astronomical detail and make the whole thing worthwhile even if we don’t make the Space Jump at all. Besides, we can then work out the five most probable sites of planets and the probability that one of the five has a habitable planet may then be better than 0.95. It would be almost sure –”

  They went on for a long time after that.

  The funds granted were quite insufficient, but Madarian counted on the habit of throwing good money after bad. With two hundred million about to be lost irrevocably when another hundred million could save everything, the other hundred million would surely be voted.

  Jane-1 was finally built and put on display. Peter Bogert studied it – her – gravely. He said, “Why the narrow waist? Surely that introduces a mechanical weakness?”

  Madarian chuckled. “Listen, if we’re going to call her Jane, there’s no point in making her look like Tarzan.”

  Bogert shook his head. “Don’t like it. You’ll be bulging her higher up to give the appearance of breasts next, and that’s a rotten idea. If women start getting the notion that robots may look like women, I can tell you exactly the kind of perverse notions they’ll get, and you’ll really have hostility on their part.”

  Madarian said, “Maybe you’re right at that. No woman wants to feel replaceable by something with none of her faults. Okay.”

  Jane-2 did not have the pinched waist. She was a somber robot which rarely moved and even more rarely spoke.

  Madarian had only occasionally come rushing to Bogert with items of news during her construction and that had been a sure sign that things were going poorly. Madarian’s ebullience under success was overpowering. He would not hesitate to invade Bogert’s bedroom at 3 A.M. with a hot-flash item rather than wait for the morning. Bogert was sure of that.

  Now Madarian seemed subdued, his usually florid expression nearly pale, his round cheeks somehow pinched. Bogert said, with a
feeling of certainty, “She won’t talk.”

  “Oh, she talks.” Madarian sat down heavily and chewed at his lower lip. “Sometimes, anyway,” he said.

  Bogert rose and circled the robot. “And when she talks, she makes no sense, I suppose. Well, if she doesn’t talk, she’s no female, is she?”

  Madarian tried a weak smile for size and abandoned it. He said, “The brain, in isolation, checked out.”

  “I know,” said Bogert. “But once that brain was put in charge of the physical apparatus of the robot, it was necessarily modified, of course.”

  “Of course,” agreed Bogert unhelpfully. “But unpredictably and frustratingly. The trouble is that when you’re dealing with n-dimensional calculus of uncertainty, things are –”

  “Uncertain?” said Bogert. His own reaction was surprising him. The company investment was already most sizable and almost two years had elapsed, yet the results were, to put it politely, disappointing. Still, he found himself jabbing at Madarian and finding himself amused in the process.

  Almost furtively, Bogert wondered if it weren’t the absent Susan Calvin he was jabbing at. Madarian was so much more ebullient and effusive than Susan could ever possibly be – when things were going well. He was also far more vulnerably in the dumps when things weren’t going well, and it was precisely under pressure that Susan never cracked. The target that Madarian made could be a neatly punctured bull’s-eye as recompense for the target Susan had never allowed herself to be.

  Madarian did not react to Bogert’s last remark any more than Susan Calvin would have done; not out of contempt, which would have been Susan’s reaction, but because he did not hear it