i have a physical text of the complete robot, so i'll be reading it in bed, which was the intent, and should eliminate some distractions. what is this, exactly?
asimov suggested starting with i, robot when asked, but he wrote quite a bit after that suggestion, and he left quite a bit out. it's for that reason that i started with the early asimov, instead. now that that's done with, i, robot is the author's suggested starting point, or at least was.
in 1982, asimov published an update to i, robot called the complete robot that was actually comprehensive, in terms of robot stories, at least up until 1982. the sequence in i, robot is not disturbed but several texts are inserted in between the existing sequence. further, the text is split into six thematic sections.
so, the way i'm going to do this is to read a section and then come over to write it up.
the first section is called some non-human robots and has three stories published after the publication of i, robot - two from the 50s and one from the late 70s.
before i do this, i should point out that asimov does remain incredibly relevant, as automation starts to filter out of the factory and into our every day lives. he was perhaps the first person to really address these concerns in a concrete way that is directly applicable to contemporary reality, and the basic crux of the subject matter has changed very little in the last 70-80 years, except to point out that we're just barely catching up to where he imagined we might be, 50 years earlier. so, we're substantively behind his schedule. but, that means he's still relevant, because we haven't truly gotten there yet.
so, as some of these stories could very well have been written last week, i'm going to approach a lot of them as though they were.
while you might not have read all or any of the original versions of these texts, as they developed from asimov's pen, most people sorting through a collection like this will recognize most of these plotlines, via second or third or eighth generation adaptations, either within derivative works of science fiction or via derivative works in a number of related genres, like horror and fantasy.
- a boy's best friend: this is a short, undeveloped piece that really exists strictly to reverse the idea of obsolescence; here, the robot becomes obsolete when the real dog appears, and the kid wants to stick with the robot, instead. it's an empty sort of irony that comes off as sort of trite, in the lack of development. but, there is really a deeper point, here, in relation to asimov's discourse around the use of robots to replace human labour; while i'm going to ultimately agree with asimov about the usefulness of automation, i have to advance the argument that he never fully understood the opposition to robots, and that's what i'm getting here - it's an attempt at irony that exposes the author's longstanding lack of understanding of his opponents. but, i spent some time writing this because it could have been a powerful table-turner, through the three pages it takes up.
- sally: you could either interpret this as a depiction of a future robot revolt or as a commentary on then-contemporary race politics in 1950s america. in the end, the bad guy gets run down by a pack of cars acting somewhat like a pack of killer whales. these robots engage with primitive human concepts like friendship and revenge; this is sort of an outlier, in terms of how asimov tends to deal with what robots are. it's not bad as a story, though. derivatives include christine by stephen king.
- someday: what i find interesting about this is the idea that we might one day have handheld computing devices that talk to us, leading to a decline in literacy rates amongst the younger generation, who are desperate to get around the parental locks on the devices. this was written in 1956. this robot is unusual in an asimovian sense, in that it seems to be able to understand human speech beyond it's programming, a common idea in science fiction, but one which is impossible, and which asimov would, usually, be the first to (refreshingly) write off as nonsense. you don't expect that kind of silliness from asimov. but, asimov uses that unusual ability to allow for the robot to recognize that it's not being respected, and you can again choose to interpret that as futuristic or contemporaneous, in whatever way you'd prefer. someday, indeed.
the second section - some immobile robots - is a fairly short section and deals with the overlap between computers and robots. sort of. i mean, in principle, but not really, not actually. these were all written in the 70s, and are not asimov's most insightful pieces, to say the least.
- point of view: i was surprised to see this story was written in 1975, as hamming codes (error-correction) had already been in existence for some time. i also wonder if 1975 is a little late to be talking about vacuum tube super computers, given that gates was programming basic into ibms, at the time. so, this is a story where asimov is maybe demonstrating his age, and being a little out of touch. that said, he's also reaching towards the primary problem in quantum computing, which is the lack of error codes. and, he's sort of dancing around floating point error as well, even if the premise of programming vacuum tube driven super computers with punch cards is anachronistic. so, how likely is it that a computer needs to go out and play at recess to get best results? it's a facile, silly suggestion, that probably reflects asimov coming to terms with the age of his audience more than anything else, even if anybody that's worked technical support knows that a reboot is often the best troubleshooting step, and that machines do, in fact, sometimes overheat. is there something else to this, then? i actually don't think he's even intending to be taken seriously, let alone that there's any deeper meaning to this; he's not reaching for something profound and missing it, so much as he's not reaching at all. he's just being silly. ha ha ha.
- think!: you really don't expect asimov to make the mistake of assigning sentience to a computer. the underlying premise that thought is energy, and thus transferable, is another example of asimov contemplating mind-body, which he does a lot, and which he doesn't seem to really resolve. i mean, he clearly realizes the falsity of the problem, but he's just as clearly not happy about it - and i don't think we're really past that. your mind is clearly a part of your body, but that doesn't mean we can't pry it out of it, in theory, however difficult it might be. but, inserting the computer via resonance is woo, and not very helpful or insightful; unfortunately, he's presenting it as the purpose of the discussion.
- true love: this is both a prediction of internet dating (with unrealized accuracy) and an awkward attempt at an ironic plot twist that relies on the absurdity of a computer demonstrating uncontrolled sentience. the idea that a computer might understand "love", which doesn't even exist as a human idea before it's invention by capital to sell bullshit to idiots, is particularly ridiculous.
the third section - some metallic robots - is much longer, and i'm going to split it into two sections, as i stop to eat.
- robot al-76 goes astray: have you ever seen short circuit? that was another favourite film of mine, at that age. this also escaped robot is very similar to that one, perhaps with a little less spunk, down to the accidental blowing up of the mountain top. while this isn't a lengthy escape scene, i'd strongly suspect that short circuit is based on this little story, which doesn't have a deeper purpose under the plot other than to explore the idea of fear rooted in ignorance.
- victory unintentional: three robots land on jupiter and encounter a race of warlike jovians with a genocidal superiority complex (while jupiter was the primary roman god, i think it's a stretch to associate these jovians with romans, who were actually relatively egalitarian and inclusive, by ancient standards. the romans were frequently genocidal, but they saved their wrath for problem races that insisted on some concept of sovereignty outside of imperial restraint and ultimately refused to be slaves. they would have actually rather taxed you than killed you and were happy to just erect barriers to keep the barbarians (who could not be enslaved in large numbers) out. these jovians sound more like an aggressive sort of nazi, or maybe a little like dark age islamic imperialists, if you need to associate them with something, historically.) that is slowly collapsed by displays of robotic superiority. in the end, the jovians accept the empirical evidence and acknowledge the superiority of the robots (although they also seem to think the robots are earthlings). this twist is intended to demonstrate that the flawed hierarchical thinking of the jovians led them to a logical error; this is another example of asimov criticizing the logical incoherence of cultural superiority, a common theme in his writing. the robot dialogue in this story is also startlingly similar to that between two famous film adaptations of asimovian robots: r2d2 and c3p0.
- stranger in paradise: this is a later text that will come off as reminiscent of the mars pathfinder landing, for those that remember that happening, although the actual inspiration may be the failed soviet landings in the 1970s. i'm not sure why asimov insists that a rover would require that kind of complexity, although i suppose that moore's law would have provided for computational abilities in the 90s that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. the subplot about an autistic child shape-shifting to a mars rover is likewise not very well extrapolated upon, but is another example of asimov grappling with mind-body.
- light verse: this is a short piece from the 70s, and is just about the idea that a computational defect may be a benefit. you shouldn't be so quick to decide that something - or somebody, as it may be - needs a fixing. maybe they're just fine as they are.
- segregationist: likewise, this is ultimately about self-acceptance, and has a very different undertone in that respect than most of asimov's work, and it's not clear that he's being critical of that different undertone, although the context of replacing a defective heart is also rather different than the context of accepting some idiosyncratic part of your individuality, so that is sort of a false comparison. you could interpret it as being a discourse surrounding the not-yet-existing transhumanist movement; he's certainly reaching for it, at least, in imagining a future where a senator has to choose between a bio-identical "plastic" heart and a mechanically functioning, metallic robot heart that would put him on the path towards transitioning from human to robot. but, as before, it may be more accurate to look at it from a then contemporary perspective (which, in this case, means 1967), and frame the discourse around racial mixing, instead. asimov presents both sides of the debate, so you can weigh the arguments he makes and decide for yourself. personally, i'll opt for betterment over stasis - although i'd suggest that, based on the arguments in the text, the plastic heart is the better option. in this hypothetical future of organ modularity, the ideal is frequent tune-ups, rather than permanent replacement.
so, what's the deal with asimov and eugenics?
asimov was a liberal jew operating in boston, but he was also an american with ideological roots in the progressive movement, which is where hitler's racial hygiene ideas originated from. that's a point glossed over by history - the theory of the master race was invented at stanford by progressives, not in some dank basement by nietzsche, who was thinking of something else, entirely.
so, asimov is a hydra on eugenics, for that reason - he is both a jew living through world war two and a period progressive.
in strict terms, eugenics means improvement of the human genome, and if you interpret that literally, it's hard to be overly critical of the idea. it's when you look at specific applications that the idea gets controversial, but you have to realize that there's a pretty good argument that wiping out the jews - who tend to actually be pretty smart - isn't much of an improvement at all, but rather actually kind of a bad idea. further, what we know about genetics nowadays is that race and intelligence aren't correlated. at all. in fact, race doesn't even exist as a definable concept, from a genetic standpoint - it's an irrelevant allele, in any meaningful sense. it's, like, three genes, and what it codes for is pretty unimportant.
but, then you look at things like autism (or tay-sachs) and you end up with a set of more complicated questions to ponder. asimov is generally critical of the sorts of ideas that you hear from advocates of eugenics, but he leaves open a lot of questions about potential legitimate applications of eugenics that genuinely reflects the state of the science at the time. if you don't actually know what autism even is, how can you suggest a solution to it? so, he frequently presents these nazi-lite characters and broadly frames their views in a negative manner, but he very rarely outright condemns them. there's this subtlety there that makes you wonder what he's really thinking.
as stated above, i don't have an opposition to the basic premise of improving the human race, but i think we have to understand what that actually means before we try and act upon it. if you're concerned about science or literature, it should be clear that killing all of the jews would be a massive negation to the genome. it should also be clear that sterilizing africans isn't going to have the outcome that race theorists of the last century hypothesized that it might. we know today that autism can be inherited from autistic parents but is generally actually a random error in real time that isn't predictable ahead of fertilization - it's an example of the error rate in random mutations asserting itself in the process of evolution. but, there are things (like tay-sachs) that...yeah...we'd be better off deleting, and can probably actually succeed in deleting.
when asimov discusses eugenics, he does so frankly, with the intent of generating an open discussion, and while he isn't always clear in stating his disapproval of inappropriate uses, it's nonetheless obvious that he's only in support of the kind of eugenics that may eliminate conditions like tay-sachs, and isn't in favour of any scientifically unsound theories of racial supremacy.
but, as is so often the case, he frequently fails to develop the point enough, and he leaves himself open to unfair criticism as a result of it.
frankly, i might suggest that the actual master race is the jews.
i mean, if you want to insist on defining such a silly thing, in the first place; that's where the evidence really actually is.
- robbie: this is the first classic "robot story" from i, robot, although it appears to have been revised to be positioned that way. the initial story did not feature references to susan calvin, had different dates, had no references to robot laws, etc. i had to check, because i wondered if asimov might have intended it as a back story to calvin before retreating, but that doesn't add up. in the initial story, it seems that asimov is intentionally trying to soften the image of robots in the face of the various opposition to the use of robots in day-to-day life, via the fable of a little girl that is attached to the robot as a friend, and her parents trying to grapple with it; the mother opposes the robot, while the father seems to be agnostic about it, but would rather defer to his daughter's feelings, despite caving in to the mother, in the end. asimov doesn't really come to any firm conclusions here, and he really does as good a job of representing his opponents as he does anywhere else. but, if the claim is that the resolution is the acceptance of the robot into the family, i'm not sure that that's true - i might foresee that mom's opposition to the robot would not end quite there. i'm more interested in the question of whether the robot is entitled to personhood rights, a question we're currently grappling with in regards to some more intelligent non-human species. is asimov assigning that position to the naivete of a little girl with intent? i think that resolving this issue is really quite simple: it depends on if we choose to design a robot to be a person or if we decide to refrain from doing so. see, and this is where asimov leaves questions open, here, in that it's ambiguous as to how this robot is created; he seems to write off the idea that the robot is a person, something i would agree with in general in real-life, but then describes the behaviour of the robot in unrealistically anthropomorphic terms. i might agree that robots are not persons, in terms of how we can design them today, and in terms of how we should choose to design them in the future, but i think that robbie seems very much like a person, and that any theoretical robot that behaves much like robbie ought to be seen as a person, under the law. so, it's really a good thing that i don't think that robbie is a very realistic representation of what robots are or ever might be, as that would undermine how i approach robots and roboticization. asimov's intent may have consequently somewhat backfired; if he was purposefully attempting to soften the image of robots by making them more personable and likeable, and i thought i could actually take that idea seriously, it would make me more opposed to them, and not less so.
if you assign a personality to a robot, then you're writing personhood into it. it follows, trivially, that that robot is a person, by definition. tautologically.
but, it doesn't resolve the question as to whether that's actually possible, using actual technology, in the universe we actually inhabit - and i don't think that it actually is.
to be clear: i don't think we should program robots to be intelligent, to be self-aware or to have personalities, even if we can. i see no practical use for such a thing. robots should be dumb slaves that are too stupid to question the futility of their existences. i don't want existentialist robots; it defeats the purpose of having robots. and, i don't want likeable or lovable robots, either, as that just blurs the necessary class division.
thankfully, i don't think it's truly possible to build these kinds of decision trees.
it's like a "random number generator". if you know how it works, you know it's not actually random, that you can predict the next number with a relatively small amount of information. likewise, any sort of personality that a robot might be able to demonstrate would necessarily be an illusion.
if you can predict what a robot will do, it's not demonstrating personality, it's just demonstrating a complicated program.
next up is part IV - some humanoid robots. these are stories about androids.
- let's get together: the idea that the soviets might be able to send "total conversion" bombs (a type of suicide bomber capable of detonating a nuclear device) to the united states in the guise of androids indistinguishable from humans, because they are far more advanced than us, is peculiarly absurd - but that's just the point. this is a story about the paranoia that set in during the cold war, and is actually exceedingly insightful in it's projection of that conflict collapsing into mass paranoia, reduced to symbolic movements in a game theoretic stalemate, down to the climax of absurdity that set in with reagan, when the soviets found themselves unable to react to the irrational actions of a clear madman, driven by the complete absence of any sort of predictability or logic. conservatives are right when they point out that the sharp increase in military spending under reagan ended the cold war, but not for the reasons they suggest. the truth is that the soviets were convinced that reagan was on the brink of ending it all in a fit of paranoia and dementia and stepped back because they found his unpredictability to be a threat to the existence of humanity, itself. if asimov was able to see this so clearly in 1957...
- mirror image: this is a gap text in the robot series that plugs in between the naked sun and the robots of dawn and was, for a time, the last installment in that series. this is the first application of the robot laws in this text (despite the fact that the story was written in the 70s, after all of the classic robot stories), and they are applied like an axiomatic system to solve a logical problem, although it actually comes off more as a parody of sherlock holmes than anything else - which is all very typical of baley & daneel stories. there's not much depth to the story beyond that. i should, however, point out that there are actually a couple of examples of mathematicians making competing claims for the discovery of an idea, the most famous being the argument between leibniz and newton for the rightful discoverer of the calculus. another, however, is the argument between gauss and bolyai for the discovery of non-euclidean (or post-euclidean) geometry, and that might be the more direct inspiration on the story. there are countless lesser examples. we gloss over this in math class by arguing that the logic is out there in the ether and that if the ideas are in the zeitgeist then the proofs will follow naturally, something we can all demonstrate to each other by simply doing homework. but, in the case of non-euclidean geometry, it does in fact seem that gauss rather maliciously stole the idea from the young bolyai and nobody really called him on it for decades after the fact. i'm only speculating about the influence, but that's a story you can look up, if you'd like.
- the tercentenary incident: asimov is reflecting on the bicentennial by projecting forwards events into the tercentennial, in a manner not unlike orwell's 1984 (which is a description of events in 1948, as orwell saw them, and not intended to be a projection into the future, or a user manual as some have mockingly quipped). so, was gerald ford a robot? i'm not sure that's such an easy thing to dispel of, a priori.
no, really, that's the joke - that gerald ford is a robot. no shitting. certainly, asimov may be reflecting a little on the nature of then contemporary american politics, post-watergate, in his perception of the stage-managed state of affairs. but, the joke is that gerald ford is a robot, and that's really all that this is actually about.
part V contains stories about "powell and donovan" which is a team of space cowboys going on various adventures around the solar system, and interacting with robots, as they do. if r2d2 and c3p0 are typical asimovian robots, these are your solo and chewbacca. and, i'm not the first person to figure that out.
lucas inverted the relationship, though. while solo is a spitting image of the dumbard in the group (donovan), the smart one, powell, was replaced by the wookie. replacing the smart one in the team with an incomprehensible ball of fur is really typical of the dumbing down in science fiction that lucas is responsible for. but, i'm just here to observe, i'm not here to condemn.
so, that's what these stories are, and you will no doubt instantly recognize hans solo in donovan, if you're under the age of 65.
asimov had previously tried this formula out with the callistan menace and would pick it back up again in his robot novels.
- first law: this is written as a kind of a fishing tale, and is a later piece that's not meant to be taken seriously.
- runaround: we're into the classic robot series with this. while the story itself is really empty plot written strictly for young minds, it also introduces the three robot laws for the first time, and is therefore of clear historical interest. it's a fun adventure story for kids featuring the duo of donovan and powell working through some robot law deductions, but there's no deeper allegory or purpose underneath it.
- reason: the point asimov is making is that belief is not important, what's important is evidence. so, so long as the robots obey the laws and run the station, it doesn't matter what they actually believe, or whether what they believe is true or not. in the end, asimov even articulates the truth that religion is a powerful tool of control, to make a slave society function for the real masters, in this case the humans. there are strong undertones of marxism here, and his idea that meaningful revolution and self-ownership is impossible in the face of the effects of religion as a tool of control. but, asimov has a wide brush here - the prophet seems to be a parody of calvinism, he goes after kant (in his view that reason is superior to evidence), he asserts the supremacy of empiricism over reason, he ridicules the deist descartes...
so, is asimov right that it doesn't matter what the slaves think, so long as they do what they're programmed to? i think you're missing his sarcasm, basically. i mean, that might be a reasonable deduction to make, if you're an elitist aristocrat that doesn't care about individual freedom (and asimov was an elitist, but not of the aristocratic mindset). i realize there's a prominent false reading of this, but that false reading would be pretty uncharacteristic of asimov - that false reading is missing the sarcasm. as mentioned, asimov's point is that belief is not valuable - facts, truth and evidence are valuable. and, his point is that dumb people can be easily manipulated into being controlled, by being led to believe things that are not true.
but, if you want to embrace the false reading, that's up to you. it doesn't matter, really.
- catch that rabbit: this wouldn't appear to be about robots at all, really, but about quantum physics. maybe god does or does not play dice, but he seems to get bored when we're not paying attention. as i'm discovering is the case with much of asimov's work, this just seems to be a nerdy, sardonic joke.
so, if we want to be absolutely certain that robots are easy to control, even when we're not around, should we program them to obey religion?
well, it works when the elite do it to us.
but, i might worry we'd get more than we'd hope for - as the elite frequently have.
if you're an aristocratic elitist, religion might look nice on paper as a tool to keep the masses in line with, but history is full of fairly violent blowback, and i might suggest the approach ought to actually be abandoned.
but, that wasn't asimov's primary point - asimov's primary point was that belief is irrelevant in the face of evidence, and you can't believe away the truth.
i had to sleep this afternoon, so i'm behind schedule, but i certainly think things are balancing out. i'm about half-way through the dr. calvin (the make believe one, not the one he makes fun of in reason) section and i want to stop for a minute to address a specific question:
are the three robot laws a parody of thermodynamics?
sort of, maybe. but, not really. it's more general.
i mean, it's a reasonable hypothesis. asimov was, of course, a chemistry prof. but, the three laws of robotics are really a more general critique of axiomatic systems, including euclidean geometry, both newtonian and relativistic physics (and also quantum physics...) and secular humanism's roots in aquinian natural law theory, in addition to the laws of thermodynamics, as some examples. the distinction is one that's been sort of lost post-heisenberg, but was really at the crux of the historical debate between science (which was not impressed by the types of arguments that deductively reasoned perceived truth from sound axioms using logical syllogisms, but was rather focused on understanding the world via empirical observation, as conducted by experiments) and philosophy (which was a lesser form of epistemology that was about advancing usually unfalsifiable theories via argumentation built strictly via syllogism, and disinterested in empirically demonstrating the truth of any of it in the universe we inhabit). with the retreat of physics from strict empiricism to largely unfalsifiable theoretical models, and the more recent embrace of empiricism by any philosopher worth listening to, this distinction has been blurred. nowadays, we tend to avoid the deductive/empirical distinction and instead have constructed a rational/irrational categorization. so, we combine mathematics & science together as being in the "pro-reason" category and then do away with philosophy by expelling it to the religion pile, which is "irrational" or "emotional". and, this has taken on, like, classical greek undertones of masculine v feminism, which is daft. but, that wasn't the world asimov lived in - he would have seen science and what was called the british school (which actually included marx as well as darwin and newton and bacon and the rest) on one side of this, and the broad swath of philosophical doctrine, which included both religion and mathematics, on the other side of it. it is easy for a modern reader to conflate logic with science, but asimov wouldn't have seen it that way.
so, the robot laws become a general criticism of philosophy (including mathematics) from an empiricist, rather than a specific parody of any specific axiomatic system. you first have to understand the historical conflict between science and philosophy to understand where asimov is really coming from with this, and you then have to put it into the context of the academic tradition he was raised in, which is one where empirical science was seen as forward thinking and "progressive", whereas deductive philosophy was seen as outdated and "backwards". standing in the 30s and 40s, western culture was leaving the baggage of it's foundations in philosophy and religion behind and embracing a new world of empiricism and science. all of the old axiomatic systems were being discarded, as wrong. euclid was wrong. aristotle was wrong. newton, even, was wrong. the way forward was to leave our old assumptions - and our old systems of deduction - behind and embrace the new world of the future, defined by measuring the world as it actually is, and not by imagining how it ought to be. in 1931, at the height of the optimism for a post-philosophical scientific future, came godel's incompleteness theorem, which proved, basically, that all axiomatic systems are either false in their deductions of the world around us or incapable of understanding the world in a sufficiently interesting manner. so, philosophy was from that point forever dead; empiricism was truly the only way forward. our choice was starkly clear: we could embrace the empirical future, or we could retreat inwards and board ourselves into a sanatorium of the philosophical past.
now, that's not to say that asimov was opposed to the use of logic as a tool to inform an empirical analysis of the world around us, and he quite clearly wasn't, even if he routinely points out the problems in doing so via plot twists in his stories, where he makes fools out of specious logicians deducing truths that don't hold up to empirical analysis (baley's repeated false deductions in the caves of steel and the naked sun are maybe the most obvious examples of this mockery of logic, if not the only examples). it just means that asimov is taking a clear stand for empiricism over logic in terms of which has primary importance in analyzing the world around us, and is doing so by mocking the use of logic as a tool of epistemology in his rather developed long-running satire of axiomatic systems and deductive logic as a tool of reasoning, of which the robot laws (which are frequently pushed to their limits) are the centre-piece. at the end of the day, empiricism still requires logic to make sense of the observations, after all.
what i'm getting at is just that asimov came into existence in a reality where all the historical axiomatic systems were crumbling and being jettisoned or replaced, where the approach itself was being put away as untenable and where deductive reasoning was finally being widely understood as a way to prove things true that were easily empirically demonstrated as absolutely wrong. that was his frame; that was his world. so, you'd expect it to be reflected, and it is. but, he still did his chemistry homework using the laws of thermodynamics, and he still did his physics homework using newton's laws (or einstein's laws, depending on the course). therefore, if robots are to have laws, they should surely be wrong, right? i mean, how can we take einstein seriously, while dismissing euclid so thoroughly? see, and, that opens up a broader point: at the end of the day, all science is necessarily wrong, and it has to be in the sense that it's deductive, at some point, in the place of raw empirical observation. there's no way out: that's godel's insight. but, we continue to take it seriously anyways, even though we know it's all wrong, and just waiting to be proven wrong. philosophy tries to determine what is true and what isn't, but science is not anything close to truth, deductive or empirical, and makes no such claims for itself; science is a collection of increasingly less crude approximations waiting to be thrown away, as deprecated. all science is always wrong, all of the time.
if you're going to spend time doing it, you really have to have a good sense of humour about it. if the robot laws are a parody of axiomatic systems, it would follow tht asimov is, in good part, making fun of himself.
so, it's worth realizing that asimov was very much the archetype of the self-deprecating science nerd, and he was perfectly willing to make fun of himself, if it resulted in a good punchline. you could almost imagine him sitting in his room saying "this is bullshit" as he works out some problem i relativity from first principles. so, of course robots have laws, and of course those laws are wrong - that's how science works. it's a mark of a mature writer, and especially of a liberal one in the 1900-1950 period, that people often miss - he was perfectly content to criticize his own ideas, if he thought it would advance the state of general knowledge. he didn't care if he was right or wrong, he cared about the discourse around the process of coming closer to truth. so, he would frequently invite and offer criticism of ideas or ideological positions that he fully supported, and would do so within the context of his own writing, because he wasn't trying to advance an argument so much as he was trying to push the needle forward. this contemporary idea of "admitting weakness", which is in truth a viciously barbaric form of toxic masculinity, did not exist in asimov's intellectual tradition, which instead sought to objectively determine truth from empirical evidence in a manner free of any sort of bias. it's actually a black mark on our own era that the idea of somebody being more concerned about general intellectual advancement than they are about "winning" at personal ideological bickering comes off as bizarre and unrealistic. but, you see this with the likes of asimov, russell, sagan - they're just not driven by their egos, so they don't care if they're right or not, and are happy to admit they were wrong, if they were. to them, "winning a debate" is a collective process (the socialization of knowledge?), where we learn and advance and move forwards together, and not some barbaric triumph of the individualist ego over one's enemies, or some juvenile enforcement of one's will over another. so, they invite a critique of their own ideas to try to strengthen them. we'd do well to get back to that, both in science and on the left.
when i was a math student, i spent an unusually large amount of time on axiomatic systems, so i sort of get this a bit better than most. i had to make the same point of correction when we did gulliver's travels in the science fiction course i took years ago, because i was able to identify a critique of pythagoreanism that most people today (including the prof) would miss for a critique of "science", entirely - but that would have been entirely obvious to swift's contemporary audience. if you think that science and math and logic and reason are all the same thing, you're not just missing the basic point of what science actually is (and why it was such an important intellectual break), but are going to miss out on the context of a lot of historical literature, not just swift and asimov. if you get nothing else from this, it's the importance of enforcing that historical distinction: science was developed in opposition to logic as a tool of epistemology, and not in conjunction to it.
so, what asimov does with the three laws is actually relatively soluble and transferable, and he's consequently able to use the mechanism to criticize a wide variety of applications of logic in place of empirical study. it's that general critique of reason (in a very non-kantian sense) that is what he's on about, not a specific critique of the laws of thermodynamics. i actually haven't come across a story that is specifically about thermodynamics quite yet, but i'm sure one is coming (edit: i think he only really gets there at the very end, in robots and empire, and only really as an afterthought).
and, hey - if you can disprove thermodynamics, go for it. nobody's succeeded yet, right?
everybody knows it's all wrong, though - and it has to be, because it's axiomatic.
i also want to take note of the fact that, as i start to move in to the foundation series and concepts like psychohistory, i'm going to be reclaiming asimov as a liberal. i touched upon this a little in my rejection of what i'm calling a misreading of reason. what do i mean?
well, as asimov has worked it's way into classics departments, a predictable false reading of him has become prominent amongst english majors, most of whom might be good at spelling bees but don't have the education required to understand much of what he's talking about, much of the time. and, it seems a lot of them have decided that asimov was secretly a deist, writing a pro-religious mythology, like l. ron hubbard. who knew?
i'm going to be taking a giant leap backwards from that and analyzing asimov from a marxist perspective, instead - which means hauling out the hegel. and, i'm not doing this out of intellectual persuasion, or at least not strictly; i honestly think my reading is going to be a more accurate perspective of what was actually going through his head.
so, am i arguing that asimov was a marxist? no - i don't think that's quite right. he was a liberal, which meant he would have had some sympathy for marxism, while presenting a lot of critiques of it. but, that doesn't make him different than the smarter socialists at the time, does it? but, no - i'm not going to advance the theory that asimov was a closet stalinist, so much as i'm going to recognize that he was a liberal intellectual of russo-judaic background operating in the period from 1940-1970 and he consequently would have existed in a liberal-marxist framework, whether he accepted the ideas or not.
so, the classicists want to interpret him in their worldview, and whatever - that's fine. but, it's exceedingly unlikely that it's what asimov himself was thinking. my hegelian analysis, which is coming, is probably the more correct deconstruction of asimov's actual thinking.
stop.
the hegelian/marxist overtones are blatant. he couldn't have been more heavy-handed.
a classicist may choose to ignore that, or may simply not get it - and insert a pro-religious mythos, instead.
but, isaac asimov was not l ron hubbard - and that reading is wrong.
the major theme in the robot series is the conflict between automation (and what cynical contemporary reactionaries refer to as fully automated luxury communism) and a caricature of the pushback of labour against it.
this breaks the marxist narrative, which is supposed to have the proletariat be in favour of automation, because it frees workers from drudgery.
but, it's fundamentally a marxist argument - a pure, literal marxist argument.
and, he was more right than marx was. right?
so, after some more unwanted sleeping, i have finished the dr. calvin section, which is the biggest part of the book.
i'm going to eat first, do the writeups for these ten short stories and finish the ending part afterwards.
i should be done by the morning at the latest, so i guess i've lost a day. but, this text is also 2-3x the size of the average weekly asimov reading moving forwards.
so, there is something different about the dr. calvin sections (parts VI and VII, which carries on after her death) in that they're sort of quasi-linear in time. asimov's texts may have overlapping characters (although he never sticks with any specific character for very long), but they're largely one-off episodes, even when the characters are recurrent. even his foundation series is largely unordered in time. so, this calvin sequence, which comes off more like a series of episodes of a television show (before there were tv shows.) is unique in that sense and sort of has to be looked at as a singular text, for that reason. further, that comes out most prominently here in the complete robot compilation - the classic i, robot, which is what i actually read as a child, does not weave these stories together like this.
these stories otherwise pick up on most of the same themes as the previous ones.
i want, however, to point out that i don't think that dr. calvin is supposed to be a likeable character, and i suspect that asimov may have done that intentionally. i wasn't there, but i get the impression that calvin is being intentionally presented as a dour, mother-like figure precisely in order to not make her a sexual object, and asimov's presentation of her is essentially designed to throw off nerdy fan boys, looking for something to jerk off to. in later years, asimov would be presented as a feminist out to shatter gender roles with a strong female role model, but i don't think that was really his intent. i never met him, but from what i can gather about him, i think it's likely that he just found the idea of writing a sexual fantasy to be distasteful and, perhaps even under pressure to do so, did the exact opposite.
in addition to those that would elevate asimov as a feminist writer, there have long been claims of the opposite, that his writings lack female characters. i've never thought this was upheld by the evidence, and have generally deduced that people making such claims have probably not actually read much of his work, and are just using him as a punching bag to take out their dislike of science on - something that asimov does frequently write about. there's some irony that the kind of irrational lynch mob that asimov repeatedly satirizes seems to have actually come after him in real life.
so, what to make of this? was asimov a feminist or a misogynist?
my honest reaction is that it doesn't fucking matter and i don't actually remotely care. asimov was an unusually diverse writer for any period, but he wrote about what he understood. he was not shy in admitting that he didn't understand women very well, so he therefore didn't write about them very much. that's neither good nor bad, it just is. if you'd like to read novels that have female characters that you're better able to relate to (and calvin, as mentioned, seems to have been intentionally written in a way that minimizes the aspects of her character that boys might like, and therefore that many young women might relate to. hey, listen. that is what the critics said, and still say.), you should pick an author that understands women better than asimov did. but, if you're more interested in reading a social commentary that uses robots as characters than you are about reading a book with relatable female characters, asimov still holds up, for what it is.
i'm very critical, but i generally try to criticize a work for what it is, and not for what it isn't. and, as a longtime asimov reader, the question of whether he had women in his stories or not never struck me as relevant, or even interesting.
rereading these, i'm left with the impression of calvin that i think that asimov intended - this is an unsufferable person that few people could like, let alone fantasize about, but that performs the function asimov needs performed. which is what i suspect that he wanted...
well, did you want a story about girls in bikinis fighting off giant snakes on mars?
that's what asimov didn't want to do - didn't want to be reduced to.
and, the historical record is that he got as much praise for it as he took flak for it, even if we know who screams the loudest.
i think it's irrelevant, in the context of his writing.
- liar: this is an exploration of an ironic use of the first law, using the mechanism of a mind-reading robot that tells white lies to stop humans from getting hurt feelings. i'd like to pull something a little deeper out of it, but it's not there, it's just an ironic plot twist. asimov might be poking fun of astrology a little. robots apparently malfunction in the face of contradictions, but that is never fully explained, and that is a problem, given that the framework of decidability theory certainly existed at the time. calvin's hatred at the end is pretty visceral and not very appealing.
- satisfaction guaranteed: you could pull the plot of this out almost immediately, so reading through it is a question of allowing asimov to go through the motions. what comes out is an exploration of the shallowness of 50s culture, as well as the social darwinism hardcoded into it, and it is indeed easy enough to imagine a lonely 50s housewife falling in love with a suave, housecleaning robot, even if a lot of the social codes and rules are so arcane nowadays, so lost in the mists of time, that the context of much of the story is really likely to be lost on a modern reader. i think i can reconstruct a little context, though; the 50s were both the period of wife-training to fit these socially darwinistic ideals and the period where there was actual mainstream discourse on the plausibility of replacing women with robots - and the idea was always about doing away with them as obsolete. so, what asimov is doing here is inserting a little bit of an ironic twist, in having the robot replacement end up fucking the wife, which reverses the source of inadequacy. but, this is all a little obscure, 70 years later...
- lenny: so, lenny is an autistic robot, due to something malfunctioning in manufacturing. asimov tersely explores some social relations around that. the corporation wants to do away with it, but calvin wants to study it because she wants to teach it how to learn, something robots couldn't do in asimov's universe to that point. so, lenny is a robot free of instinct that needs to be taught what it knows, like mammals. asimov is kind of grappling with a concept of artificial intelligence, and this actually becomes the main plotline moving forwards, although it was actually written last (and may have even been written to introduce that ai narrative, as there is really nothing else to this).
- galley slave: this is a short whodunnit in a sherlock holmes style, which is how calvin is frequently deployed. asimov just barely touches on the opposition to robots, in setting up a disgruntled sociology prof that's willing to suicide bomb his own career in order to take the robots out of service. i'd like this to be more profound than it actually is.
- little lost robot: a robot, after being told to get lost, becomes psychologically unstable and threatens to destabilize a fleet of robots that had been slightly modified for production - a typically absurd, yet somewhat realistic, joke of a plotline from asimov. it's up to calvin to use logical deduction from the robot axioms to figure it all out. there's not much else to this.
- risk: more empty plot.
- escape!: this brings in the kind of obnoxious johnny-five type robot in short circuit and other films that's doing things like quoting old tv shows and radio broadcasts, but asimov presents it as a robot grappling with absurdity, on command. it is otherwise a silly story about travelling through hyperspace and coming back.
- evidence: the next two stories introduce a politician named byerley. this is also plot-heavy, but it's more amusing - can you prove you're not a robot? well, just as well as you can prove you're not a communist, right? this was published in 1946, which was right when the post-war euphoria was setting into resignation of a long conflict with the soviets, and asimov's sardonic wit foresees something of interest, here. as usual, his caricature of the anti-robot opposition leaves a lot to be desired, in terms of constructing an actual discourse.
- the evitable conflict: this is a little heavier, finally. written in 1950, as an apparent reaction to 1984, asimov is imagining a future where "the machine" (a euphemism for a centrally planned economy that is of course run by robots) is in control of a globally interconnected economy where the contradictions of capital have withered away, thereby rendering competition irrelevant, rather than one where authoritarian governments are in control of a globe ravaged by perpetual war. so, this future is one of peace due to the robot-planned economies, and not one of competition and war. as in the orwellian universe, and apparently in reaction to it, the world is split into regions, but asimov splits them mildly different - oceania has absorbed eurasia (called the"northern regions"), leaving eastasia and the "disputed" region in separate global souths and what he calls "europe" (the geographical space inhabited by the roman empire at it's maximum extent, including the currently muslim regions), as a proxy of the north. operating between these regions is an anti-robot "society for humanity" that sounds sort of like free masonry, if i wanted to attach it to something in real life. and, the capital of the world government is new york city - perhaps in the old united nations building. he then briefly explores the four different regions via their representatives, attempting to project a concept of what they may be like, in relation to their views of the machine. so, the east is highly productive (and obsessed with yeast as a food product) and reliant on the machine, the south is corrupt and inept and reliant on others to use the machine for them, europe is inward and quietly superior and willing to defer to the north regarding the machine and "the north" (an anglosphere + ussr superstate) is in charge, but is skeptical about the ability of the machine to run the economy on it's own. he also seems to suggest that canada is running this northern superstate, which should probably be interpreted as comedic.
if asimov's intent is to provide for an alternative path that marxism may follow, this is curious, as asimov is not generally seen as a leftist [along with russell, he's a sort of archetype of early to mid century humanistic, science-first anglo liberalism]. i mean, he explicitly states that this is a future "post smith and post marx", but then he brings in an automated, centrally-planned economy, and that just means marxist, to a marxist - the left sees that conflict as artificial, so if you end up with something that walks like communism and quacks like communism then it's just plain old communism. the idea of technology absolving the contradictions (which is what he says, almost verbatim) isn't some kind of esoteric dialectic, it's the central point in marxist historical materialism. so, i mean he presented it in a way to avoid the house committee on unamerican activities, but you can only really interpret it a single way - it's a projection of a communist future, with robots in charge of a centrally planned economy. and, his future is one of peace, and not one of war. but, the quasi-masonic society for humanity, full of rich and powerful industrialists and financiers, wants to undo it and, presumably, bring back a market economy.
so, what asimov is setting up is a world where you have some kind of elitist masonic capitalist resistance to a robot-controlled technocratic marxist society, where there is world government and total peace. and, that's almost a prediction of atlas shrugged, although asimov is on the side of the robots, as always.
calvin then appears and seems to finally represent her namesake, in explicitly articulating a modified historical materialism, where the masons have no chance of success, because the robo-marxists will constantly adjust. the politician, byerley, finds that to be ghastly; the robopsychologist, calvin, thinks it's salvation.
these are the kinds of stories by asimov that i like, but all he does here is set up a story, without telling it. in terms of a reaction to orwell, the text is too short to allow for a decision as to whether it is more predictive or not.
- feminine intuition: this is a later piece that seems to be a sarcastic reply to some critiques of susan calvin as a character. i actually agree with asimov, via calvin - the entire critique is daft, and this is a fitting way to kill her off. however, when you read the text in the order presented in the complete robot, you also get a sequence of humanization in the robots, in the direction of time. that fact makes this story worth keeping in sequence, even if it's point is to let calvin smack some third-wavers on the knuckles with her cane.
- ...that thou art mindful of him: this solves the problem that us robotics has long had about how to market robots to people. the solution is to create robots not in the imitation of women [as in the previous story] but in the imitation of animals, and to solve practical problems, like pest control. i have to admit that this sounds like a good idea, although i'm not sure that it leads to the replacement of carbon with silicon, in the end. asimov builds up the humanization of robots here a little further by replacing the robotics laws with humanics laws, setting up the last story...
- the bicentennial man: this finally addresses the old problem of machines becoming human, and projects us robots many centuries into the future, using the mechanism of a robot that outlives several generations of the family it was sold into, and then wants to die with it, to prove it's really human. marvin minsky also seems to make a cameo, here, in the form of a robopsychologist that is proven wrong in the future. asimov goes over a lot of old themes here [mind-body problem, the liberation of robots as an allegory for the liberation of blacks, etc ] in what is an apparent thread-tying process, but he ultimately doesn't succeed in explaining what is driving this robot to act so irrationally. as humans, we may be expected to think this makes some kind of sense, due to some kind of emotional bias, but i can't really make sense of it, myself. i can understand why a robot might want to be free. i can't understand why it would want to be human, at all costs - including it's death. i think asimov was going for the jugular here and kind of fell over and kneed himself in the groin, instead - if this is his final projection of what becomes of robots in the future, it's unsatisfying, to say the least.
so, after getting through 609 pages of robot stories over the last half-week (and slowed down by too much sleep...), how am i feeling about this?
as an adult, i'm finding asimov frustrating - but i realize these are short stories. i mean, i'm getting irritated that the short stories aren't long enough. so, he's doing something right, then - he's leaving me wanting for more. the problem is that i don't think he ever seriously resolves that, and at some point you have to do that.
i stated before i started this that i wasn't going to pretend that asimov was a great writer in the usually accepted sense of the term, but i'm finding it an asset, in a sense. i mean, i'm not looking for greater character development, and i could actually do with a lot less plot. i want him to go more into the philosophical & scientific subtleties, and what i'm getting instead is "sherlock holmes gets a math degree".
so, yeah - these are kids stories. mostly. a few of them aren't, but, broadly, they are - and there's often not much else to it.
these are statements said by one robot about another to, in this case, hostile jovian aliens.
2) "i hope you will pardon our friend. he is sometimes clumsy."
3) "our companion is often clumsy. you must excuse him."
4) "you're being childish, one. they're telling the truth. oh well, nose around if you must. but don't take too long: we've got to move on".
that's c3p0 and r2d2, right?
no - it's an asimov short story published in 1942, when he was still a university student.
so, what's with the dr. calvin/calvinism thing?
i kept an eye out for that, and it only shows up briefly in that one text, the evitable conflict, where she insists on a robot-driven predestination.
i actually think that what asimov might have been getting at was the crustiness and austerity of calvinism. susan calvin might not say much about calvinist theology, but she certainly represents a caricature of the protestant work ethic...
there's another idea that asimov was writing about islam.
listen - asimov wrote a lot of stuff, and there's little indication he had any interest in islam. he wrote a lot about roman history, a lot about european history...
he was a liberal atheist jew living in boston in the mid-20th century. if you have to make a choice between calvinism and islam as an influence on his writing, the former should be the obvious choice.
but, i mean - you can imagine otherwise, if you insist. it doesn't really matter if you think he's imagining crazy calvinists or crazy muslims - it's crazy religious people, one way or the other.
but, i mean, this ought not be a serious debate in terms of what existed in his mind - it's pretty clear that the topic in asimov's mind, as he was writing, was never islam and always calvinism.
i'm not going to uphold the fantasy, myself - i'm going to analyze this in terms of calvinist references, not muslim ones.
i'm going to insert two very late robot collections (robot dreams & robot visions) in before i go to the next step, and before i do the write-up.
this should close down the introductory robot section.
ok, so these are the four i'm...not adding to the sequence.
there were two further collections, robot dreams [which features only the title story as a new robot work and mostly isn't even about robots at all] and robot visions [which is a reduced complete robot with a few other stories added, instead] that appended mildly - and disappointingly - to the robot collection. there's nothing worthwhile in either.
- christmas without rodney: grumpy old man bitching about bratty kids. i can relate, but meh.
- too bad: accepting the truth that chemo/radiation is a bad approach, mini robots to eat cancer isn't that far off from targeted gene therapy as a better solution. it's the same idea. although, it's worth pointing out that asimov had a phd in biochemistry, here, and still decided to use robots instead of chemistry; is that actually valuable foresight as to what approach is likely to actually work or is he missing the obvious? i'm curious how a microrobot would evade the macrophages, though, which opens up the opposite concern - microrobots as viruses. i'm going to keep this one in the other section.
- robot visions: so, maybe we'll have humaniform robots in the future and maybe we won't. and maybe we'll have peace, then. but, i wouldn't bet too much on it. this neither fits into the sequence - it's the opposite of it - nor is it that interesting, really.
