“What are we to do, sir?” Donald asked.
Do? That was an excellent question. The situation was a tinderbox. In theory, he now had the evidence to move against Fredda Leving, but not now. What could he do? Clamber up on the stage and arrest her in the midst of her speech? No. Doing so could easily upend the entire intricate arrangement with the Settlers. Fredda Leving fit into that somehow, that much was clear. How, he had no idea. Besides, he had the very strong impression that he would need hear what she had to say if he was going to pursue this case.
But there were other avenues open to him besides the arrest of Fredda Leving.
“We can’t take Leving in, Donald, much as I’d like to,” Kresh said at last. “Not with the Governor and Welton with her. But the moment this damned talk is over with, we are picking up Terach and Anshaw. It’s time we sweated those two a little.”
As for Fredda Leving, maybe he could not arrest her tonight. But he had no intention of making her life easy. He glared up at the stage, waiting for the curtain to open.
AT long last, and far too soon, Fredda could hear the sound she had been waiting for-and dreading. The gong sounded, and the audience began to settle down, grow quiet. It was about to begin. A stagehand robot gave Governor Grieg a hand signal and he nodded. He came over to Fredda and touched her forearm. “Ready, Doctor?”
“What? Oh, yes, yes of course.”
“Then I think we should begin.” He guided her to a seat behind a table at one side of the stage, between Tonya Welton on one side, and Gubber and Jomaine on the other.
All had their attendant robots hovering nearby. Gubber’s old retainer Tetlak, with him since forever. Jomaine’s latest updated, upgraded unit. What was the name? Bertram? Something like that. The joke around the lab was that he changed his personal robot more frequently than he changed underwear. Tonya Welton with Ariel.
A strange, slight irony there. Tonya was here on Inferno to preach against reliance on robots, and here she was with the robot Fredda had given her in happier days. Meanwhile, she, Fredda, had no robot with her at all.
With a start, she realized that the curtain had opened, that the audience was applauding the Governor politely-with a few boos from the back of the house-and that the Governor was well launched into her introduction. In fact, he was finishing up. Hells and heavens! How could her mind wander that much? Was it some aftereffect of the injury, or the treatment, or just a subconscious way of dealing with stage fright?
“…not expect you to agree with all she has to say,” Governor Grieg was saying. “There is much that I do not agree with myself. But I do believe that hers is a voice to which we must listen. I am convinced that her ideas-and the news she will relate-will have tremendous repercussions for us all. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. Fredda Leving.” He turned toward her, smiling, leading the applause.
Not quite sure if it would not be wiser to cut and run for the stage wings and the side exit, Fredda stood up and walked toward the lectern. Chanto Grieg retreated back toward the table at the rear of the stage and took a seat next to Jomaine.
She was there, all alone. She stared out into the sea of faces and asked herself what madness had brought her to this place. But here she was, and there was nothing to do but move forward.
She cleared her throat and began to speak.
14
“THANK you, my friends,” Fredda began. “Tonight I intend to present an analysis of the Three Laws. However, before we launch into a detailed law-by-law examination, I think it would be wise to review some background information and focus our historical perspective.
“In my previous lecture, I presented arguments intended to establish that humans hold robots in low regard, that misuse and abuse of robots is degrading to both us and them, that we humans have allowed our own slothful reliance on robots to rob from us the ability to perform the most basic tasks. There is a common thread that holds all these problems together, a theme that runs through them all.
“It is the theme, ladies and gentlemen, of the Three Laws. They are at the core of all things involving robotics.”
Fredda paused for a moment and looked out over the audience, and happened to catch Alvar Kresh’s eye in the first row. She was startled to see the anger in his face. What had happened? Kresh was a reasonable man. What could have angered him so? Had some piece of news come to him? That possibility put a knot in her stomach. But never mind. Not now. She had to go on with the lecture.
“At the beginning of my previous lecture, I asked, ‘What are robots for?’ There is a parallel question: ‘What are the Three Laws for?’ What purpose are they meant to serve? That question startled me when I first asked it of myself. It was too much like asking, ‘What are people for?’ or ‘What is the meaning of life?’ There are some questions so basic that they can have no answer. People just are. Life just is. They contain their own meaning. We must make of them what we can. But as with robots themselves, the Laws, I would remind you once again, are human inventions, and were most certainly designed with specific purposes in mind. Wecan say what the Three Laws are for. Let us explore the question.
“Each of the Laws is based on several underlying principles, some overt and some not immediately evident. The initial principles behind all three Laws derive from universal human morality. This is a demonstrable fact, but the mathematical transformations in positronic positional notation required to prove it are of course not what this audience wishes to hear about. There are many days when I don’t wish to hear about such things myself.”
That line got a bit of a laugh. Good. They were still with her, still willing to listen. Fredda glanced to her notes, took a slightly nervous sip from her water, and went on. “Suffice to say that such techniques can be used to generalize the Three Laws such that they will read as follows: One, robots must not be dangerous; two, they must be useful; and three, they must be as economical as possible.
“Further mathematical transformation into the notation used by sociological modelers will show that this hierarchy of basic precepts is identical to a subset of the norms of all moral human societies. We can extract the identical concepts from any of the standard mathematically idealized and generalized moral social codes used by sociological modelers. These concepts can even be cast into a notation wherein each higher law overrides the ones below it whenever two come into conflict: Do no harm, be useful to others, do not destroy yourself.
“In short, the Three Laws encapsulate some ideals of behavior that are at the core of human morality, ideals that humans reach for but never grasp. That all sounds very comfortable and reassuring, but there are flaws.
“First, of necessity, the Three Laws are set down, burned into the very core of the positronic brain, as mathematical absolutes, without any grey areas or room for interpretation. But life is full of grey areas, places where hard-and-fast rules can’t work well, and individual judgment must serve instead.
“Second, we humans live by far more than three laws. Turning again toward results produced by mathematical modeling, it can be shown that the Three Laws are equivalent to a very good first-order approximation of idealized moral human behavior. But they areonly an approximation. They are too rigid, and too simple. They cannot cover anything like the full range of normal situations, let alone serve in unusual and unique circumstances where true independent judgment must serve. Any being constrained by the Three Laws will be unable to cope with a wide range of circumstances likely to occur during a lifetime of contact with the available universe. In other words, the Three Laws render a being incapable of surviving as a free individual. Relatively simple math can demonstrate that robots acting under the Three Laws, but without ultimate human control, will have a high probability of malfunctioning if exposed to human-style decision situations. In short, the Three Laws make robots unable to cope unaided in an environment populated with anything much beyond other robots.