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Robots and Slaves
02/08/2008 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
Our science fiction reading group is discussing a shorter work this month, says Mark. It is Jack Williamson's novelette With Folded Hands, which appeared first in Astounding Stories in 1947. In the story a man who sells in mechanicals - basically robots - finds his business dying when new superior robots come along to compete. The new robots, streamlined black humanoids - are in every way superior to the robots he had been selling. But the new robots have more than superior technology; they have an ideology. Buy Jack Williamson in the USA - or Buy Jack Williamson in the UK  They are "the perfect mechanicals 'To Serve and Obey and Guard Men from Harm.'" In fact their ideology is paternalism carried to an extreme degree. Human work is no longer necessary. They are the same mix of slave and master that a parent is to a very young child. Humans no longer have to work under their rule, but humans also are stuck in a sort of stagnation and uselessness.
This story makes a good pairing with Isaac Asimov's robot stories. Both can be seen as arguments about the institution of slavery about what would make a perfect slave.
The three laws of robotics are, of course:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These are very much the priorities one would want to give a perfect, selfless slave. Asimov makes his robot perfect slaves. And that is not so immoral as it sounds at first since they are, after all, machines that do not suffer or are degraded by servitude. Asimov's laws are just the very rules I would want to give a slave if I wanted to be entirely selfish.
The main intent Williamson had for With Folded Hands is reportedly just to point out that some inventions may seem like a good idea at the time they are created, but may have some very nasty consequences. He was probably thinking of the creation of the nuclear bomb that arguably saved hundreds of thousands lives on each side of the Pacific War. But with nuclear proliferation that invention seems like less and less like a good thing for humanity.
But like the Asimov robot stories, With Folded Hands brings up questions related to those of human slavery. It suggests issues that actually were argued in this country in the Antebellum South. Some in the South wondered if slavery might not be a bad thing, but not because of the negative effect on the slave. The slave was generally considered a beast of burden and rules of justice simply did not apply to him. But some argued that slavery was bad for the master by offloading all responsibility to work.
The challenge of work is good for the soul. People who do not work stagnate. They need challenges to hone their spirit and to keep them from falling into decadence. At the risk of further mixing my metaphor I will point out that the same issue frequently applies to retired employees, some of whom remain active and find new challenges and some of whom rapidly become useless couch potatoes and fall into a pointless and empty existence. Just writing this editorial is part of my campaign to remain in the former category.
But Williamson's concept of machines that will do all human labour is flawed. Perhaps machines could do all menial labour. Intellectual labour is another matter. Suppose I am trying to prove the Goldbach Conjecture in mathematics or to get a better understanding of the Persian Wars. In the first case it is unlikely that machines can be creative enough to do new mathematics. It is one thing to check the millions of cases for the Four-Color Map Conjecture. That is how the conjecture was finally proved. But that is not actually creative work.
To prove the Goldbach conjecture on the other hand seems to require some sort of creativity of which machines are currently incapable. Now that is not as clear as it used to be since computers can now be creative in ways that rival or transcend human creativity.
But whether computers will ever do creative mathematical proof is still an open question.
On the other hand even if a machine could get of good understanding of the Persian wars, that would not be the point. A human would need to get the understanding that that would require human work. Machines could retrieve information. Certainly that is much what Google does today, but to understand and make others understand the Persian Wars to any depth just does not seem to be the kind of labour that one of Williamson's humanoids could do. So I am not entirely certain that Williamson's humanoids would be so bad.
By the way, you can find a radio adaptation of With Folded Hands from Dimension X at http://www.otr.net/?p=dimx
Mark R Leeper
© Mark R Leeper 2008
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