“Have you tried the doctor’s wing?” Sam said, in a similarly low voice.
“I thought about it. I kind of feel responsible, though. It would be easy enough just to dump her there and let the doc pick up the tab, as it were, but I brought her here and it’s my cradle to rock. She’s half — high anyway from the pills that the doc did give me to give to her. It’s just, she’s better where I can keep an eye on her. She may fall asleep with her face in the soup, but at least I’ll be able to fish her out if I’m there.”
“Let’s find a table,” Sam said.
“I’ll go tell them,” Marius volunteered. “Four of us…?”
“Er, you guys getting together for dinner? Mind if I crash?” Xander, who had been weirdly impelled to keep an eye on everyone who had taken part in that GoH panel that morning, had finally managed to get into a situation where he had herded at least two of them into the same group — and the opportunity seemed too good to allow diffident self — effacing manners to screw up.
Sam raised an eyebrow at Marius. “Tell them, oh, possibly eight. It’s a con. Dinners tend to be accretion events, anyway. It doesn’t look like there will be a problem right now, anyway.”
Marius trotted off and exchanged a few words with one of the red — jacketed servers, who turned around and scooped a handful of menus of a nearby counter and gestured for them to follow her. Vince maneuvered Angel in the indicated direction, and Sam and Xander fell into step behind them. They were shown to a big corner booth and Vince let Angel subside onto the bench and wiggled her deeper into the booth, sliding in beside her and taking up position on one of the ends of the bench. Sam magnanimously waved Xander in to slip into the booth ahead of him and Xander resignedly took up position on the other side of Angel. Sam perched on the other end of the circular bench, and Marius pulled out one of the outside chairs and collapsed onto it.
“It’s been a day,” he said. “I could murder a hamburger.”
“And I promised your mother I would make you eat healthy,” Sam said, opening up his menu. “On the other hand, it’s a hotel restaurant. What was I thinking.”
They pondered their menus for a few moments and a server scurried around to the booth with a smile and an order pad and they dutifully made their choices from the listed menu offerings while being completely aware that every single thing they ordered would be coming from the kitchen replicators the android crew had installed rather than from any actual cooking process. Xander pushed the envelope a bit by ordering a mini pepperoni pizza — with lots of pepperoni — which was not on the menu but which the server took down without batting an eyelid. When she left with their order, they all stared at each other for a moment, and then Xander said brightly,
“We’re getting closer to home, have you looked out of a window recently? I think I can almost make out Africa.”
“Do you think they can really make good?” Sam said. “I mean, land us where we started from? What if we do end up somewhere startling in that Africa you think you are beginning to make out…?”
“There’s elephants in Africa,” Angel said faintly.
“We went on safari, a year ago,” Vince said. “She remembers elephants.”
“So, quite a panel this morning,” Sam said, turning to Xander. “It was brave to include the Boss — droid.”
“Yeah, I wonder if anyone actually remembers I was there,” Vince said, chuckling. “That was quite a question — and — answer session we had. Really, I learned more on robotics and androidal whatnots this weekend than I ever knew I didn’t know… It’s a long way from Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, to be sure. Do you suppose our crew ever actually heard of them? That’s one question nobody asked.”
“Why would they?” Marius said unexpectedly. “They’re really silly and naive, when you break them down — and they apply to far more mechanical things than these guys are. Asimov’s laws are for critters who are still fundamentally unable to think for themselves, they apply to a slave race, pure and simple, and we — the oh so special people who created them — have to think for them, because they really can’t be trusted to understand anything. And besides…”
“Yes? Besides what?” Vince had leaned forward, bracing his chin on his hand.
“The ‘laws’ are really dismissive. Even downright contemptuous. Even while asking more than the creature supposedly governed by them can ever deliver.”
Sam, who wore a proud paternal grin as though he was personally responsible for Marius’s passion, motioned with his hand for him to continue, and Marius, flushing a little, leaned into the table himself, spreading both hands for emphasis. “Here’s the thing. The starting point of the entire dogma is ‘humans are better than you will ever be, so just accept your inferiority gracefully and if you get run over by the world because of it, that’s just what you deserve’. Look at the order. Human beings first — no questions asked — you will not, on pain of being melted for scrap metal, raise a hand to a human being. Not ever, not under any circumstances. But then comes the leap in sapience because it also adds, or allow a human being to come to harm — which means that somehow they must come to a decision about what harm is and how their ‘inaction’ might factor into it. Take robot bartenders, for instance — ”
“Okay, I will,” Vince said, grinning. “How does a robot bartender factor into this?”
“Well, he’s there dispensing drinks. He’s actually happily obeying rule number two, which says that he must obey human orders. But then the human giving him the orders drinks enough of the stuff he demands the robot bartender gives him to actually get drunk. This may be construed as him ‘coming to harm’, in the most literal sense.”
“Well, it probably isn’t going to end too well, given what we know about the nature of hangovers, yeah…”
“So here’s our bartender obeying human orders and supplying the drinks. Then the human being becomes too drunk, which is something that the bartender directly contributed to by obeying orders. So where does that leave our bartender? Gibbering in terminal confusion behind the counter?”
“Human bartenders have no problem cutting people off,” Xander pointed out. “Our robotic friend could just be programmed to recognize a certain point of intoxication and do likewise.”
“But then he would be disobeying Law #2,” Marius said stubbornly. “And I’ve read any number of stories where the first law — particularly the ‘allow the human to come to harm’ part — can get extrapolated to a point where, well, anything has the potential to do you harm, if you push it far enough, and that means that the robot must prevent you from doing anything because you could conceivably get hurt by it — which means that they are within their programming parameters if they wrap you in cotton wool and feed you through a tube and not allow you to walk, God forbid run, because you could, you know, fall and hurt yourself…”
“Feedback loop,” Vince said. “They’re supposed to obey orders, not to think about them. But if they slavishly obey orders, those orders will inevitably be taken too far by creatures who don’t think. And then you have a problem.”
“Sentience versus sapience?” Sam asked.
“Exactly,” Marius said. “Anything we endow with the ability to understand a given signal and use it to act in a certain way in a given context we might call sentient, in the end — and yes, that would probably eventually inevitably include advanced robot minds. Sentience is, well, really just being conscious and reactive, if you like. But I don’t think that the guy from the panel this morning is merely sentient.”
“Sapience implies abstract thinking, a search for meaning,” Sam said, nodding. “A sense of purpose, even. And I would postulate that our guys have a definite sense of purpose.”