“That monster, ladies and gentlemen, was the popular mythic image of the robot at the time when the firstactual robots were built. A thing made out of rotted, decayed human flesh, torn from the bodies of the dead. A perverted thing born with all the lowest and most evil impulses of humanity in its soul. The fear of this imaginary creature, superimposed on the real-life robots, was the Frankenstein Complex. I know it will be impossible to believe, but robots were seen not as utterly trustworthy mechanical servants, but as so many potential menaces, fearful threats. Men and women would snatch up their children and run away when robots-true robots, with the Three Laws ingrained in their positronic brains-came close.”
More mutterings of disbelief from the audience, but they were with her now, enthralled by the bizarre and ancient world she was describing. She was telling them of a past almost beyond their imagining, and they were fascinated. Even Kresh, there in the front row, seemed to have lost some of his ferocity.
“There is more,” Fredda said. “There is much more that we need to understand about the days when the Laws were written. For the first true robots were built in a world of universal fear and distrust, when the people of Earth found themselves organized into a handful of power blocs, each side armed with enough fearsome weapons to erase all life from the planet, each fearing one of the others would strike first. Ultimately the fact of the weapons themselves became the central political issue of the time, pushing all other moral and philosophical differences to one side. In order to keep its enemies from attacking, each side was obliged to build bigger, faster, better, stronger weapons.
The question became not whose cause was just, but who could make the more fearsome machines? All machines, all technologies, came to be regarded as weapons first and tools second. Picture, if you will, a world where an inventor steps back from her lab bench and, as a matter of routine, asks notHow can this new thing be useful? but instead,How can this best be used to kill my enemies? Whenever possible, machines and technology were perverted into tools of death, warping society in endless ways. The first of the great underground Cities of Earth were one heritage of this period, designed not for utility and efficiency, but as a protection against the horrifying nuclear bombs that could destroy a surface city in the blink of an eye.
“At the same time as this mad, paranoid arms race, just as this Frankenstein Complex was in full flower, society was making its first steps toward the concept of modem automation, and the transition was not a pleasant one. At that time, people worked not because they wished to do so, or to make themselves useful, or to answer their creative instincts. They worked because theyhad to do so. They were paid for their labor, and it was that pay that bought the food they ate and put the roof over their heads. Automatic machines-robots among them-were taking over more and more jobs, with the result that there was less and less work-and thus less and less pay-for the people. The robots could create new wealth, but the impoverished people could not afford to buy what the robots-owned by the rich-created. Imagine the anger and resentment you would feel against a machine that stole the food from your table. Imagine the depth of your anger if you had no way to stop that theft.
“A final point: Until the era of the Spacers, robots were a vanishingly rare and expensive commodity. Today we think nothing of a Spacer culture where robots outnumber humans fifty or a hundred to one. For the first few hundred years of their use, robots were about a thousand times less numerous than humans. That which is rare is treated differently from that which is common. A man who owned a single robot, one that cost more than all his other worldly possessions combined, would never dream of using that robot as a boat anchor.
“These, then, were the cultural elements that drove the creation of the Three Laws. A folk myth of a soulless, fearful monster built from the undead; the sense of a threatening world out of control; the deep resentment against machines that were robbing the bread from the mouths of poor families; the fact of robotic scarcity and their perception as being rare and valuable. Note that I am concerned mostly with perceptions here, and not so much with reality. What mattered is how peoplesaw robots, not what the robots were like. And these people saw robots as marauding monsters.”
Fredda took a breath and looked out across the room to see the audience dead silent, listening in shocked horror to her words. She went on. “It has been said that we Spacers are a sick society, slaves to our own robots. Similar charges have been leveled at our Settler friends who huddle in their underground warrens, hiding from the world outside, assuring themselves it is much nicer to live out of sight of the sky. They are the cultural inheritors of the fear-built Cities of Earth. These two views are often presented as being mutually exclusive. One culture is sick, therefore the other is healthy. I would suggest it is more reasonable to judge the health or sickness of each independently. To my mind, the health of both is in grave doubt.
“In any event, it is clear that the society, the time period, into which robots and the Three Laws were built was far sicker than ours. Paranoid, distrustful, twisted by violent wars and horrifying emotion, the Earth of that time was a fearful place indeed. It was that sickness that our ancestors fled when they left Earth. It was the wish to dissociate themselves from that sickness that caused us Spacers to reject, for so long, our actual decendancy from Earth. For thousands of years, we denied our common heritage with Earth and the Settlers, dismissing those outside our Fifty Worlds as subhuman, poisoning relations between our two peoples. In short, it is the sickness of that long-forgotten time that is at the core of the distrust and hatred between Settler and Spacer today. The illness has survived the culture that created it.
“I have said that all human inventions are reflections of the times in which they were created. If that is so, the Three Laws are reflected from a dark mirror indeed. They reflect a time when machines were feared and distrusted, when technology was correctly perceived as often malevolent, when a gain made by a machine could come only at the cost of a loss to a human, when even the richest man was poor by the standards of our time, and the poor were deeply-and understandably-resentful of the rich. I have said and will say many negative things about our robot-based culture tonight, but there are many bright and shining positives as well. We have lost not only the fact of poverty but the ability to conceive of it. We are not afraid of each other, and our machines serve us, not we the machines. We have built many great and lovely things.
“Yet our entire world, our whole culture, is built around Three Laws that were written in a time of savagery. Their form and phrasing are as they are in part to placate the fearful, semibarbaric masses of that time. They were, I submit, even at the time of their invention, an overreaction to the circumstances. Today they are almost completely detached from present reality.
“So:What are robots for? In the beginning, of course, the answer was simple. They were for doing work. But today, as a result of those Three Laws written so long ago, the original uses for robots have almost become subordinate to the task of cocooning and coddling humanity.