"Well, you’ve got to admit that it’s not too hard to spot a robot on a condemned beach," I said.
"I suppose I have to go back now," said Arlo.
"That’s right," I said.
"At least I’ve felt the sand beneath my feet," said Arlo.
"Arlo, you don’t have any feet," I said. "And if you did, you couldn’t feel sand beneath them. Besides, it’s just silicon and crushed limestone and…"
"It’s sand and it’s beautiful!" snapped Arlo.
"All right, have it your way: it’s beautiful." I knelt down next to him and began digging the sand away.
"Look at the sunrise," he said in a wistful voice. "It’s glorious!"
I looked. A sunrise is a sunrise. Big deal.
"It’s enough to bring tears of joy to your eyes," said Arlo.
"You don’t have eyes," I said, working at the sand. "You’ve got prismatic photo cells that transmit an image to your central processing unit. And you can’t cry, either. If I were you, I’d be more worried about rusting."
"A pastel wonderland," he said, turning what passed for his head and looking up and down the deserted beach, past the rotted food stands and the broken piers. "Glorious!"
It kind of makes you wonder about robots. I’ll tell you. Anyway, I finally pried him loose and ordered him to follow me.
"Please," he said in that damned voice of his. "Couldn’t I have one last minute before you lock me up in my office?"
I stared at him, trying to make up my mind.
"One last look. Please?"
I shrugged, gave him about thirty seconds, and then took him in tow.
"You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you?" I said as we rode back to the office.
"Yes," he said. "They’re going to put in a stronger duty directive, aren’t they?"
I nodded. "At the very least."
"My memory banks!" he exclaimed, and once again I jumped at the sound of a human voice coming from an animated gearbox. "They won’t take this experience away from me, will they?"
"I don’t know, Arlo," I said.
"They can’t!" he wailed. "To see such beauty, and then have it expunged—erased!"
"Well, they may want to make sure you don’t go AWOL again," I said, wondering what kind of crazy junkheap could find anything beautiful on a garbage-laden strip of dirt.
"Can you intercede for me if I promise never to leave again?"
Any robot that can disobey one directive can disobey others, like not roughing up human beings, and Arlo was a pretty powerful piece of machinery, so I put on my most fatherly smile and said: "Sure I will, Arlo. You can count on it."
So I returned him to the Company, and they upped his sense of duty and took away his enthusiasm and gave him a case of agoraphobia and wiped his memory banks clean, and now he sits in his office and speaks to customers without inflection, and sells a few less tickets than he used to.
And every couple of months or so I wander over to the beach and walk along it and try to see what it was that made Arlo sacrifice his personality and his security and damned near everything else, just to get a glimpse of all this.
And I see a sunset just like any other sunset, and a stretch of dirty sand with glass and tin cans and seaweed and rocks on it, and I breathe in polluted air, and sometimes I get rained on; and I think of that damned robot in that plush office with that cushy job and every need catered to, and I decide that I’d trade places with him in two seconds flat.
I saw Arlo just the other day—I had some business on his floor—and it was almost kind of sad. He looked just like any other robot, spoke in a grating monotone, acted exactly like an animated computer. He wasn’t much before, but whatever he had been, he gave it all away just to look at the sky once or twice. Dumb trade.
Well, robots never did make much sense to me, anyway.
(1980)
NON SERVIAM
Stanisław Lem
Stanisław Lem (1921–2006), the Polish satirist, essayist and science fiction writer, had no time for futurologists. "Meaningful prediction," he wrote, "does not lie in serving up the present larded with startling improvements or revelations." He preferred to devise whole new chapters to the human story, and very few indeed had happy endings. His vision of the internet (which did not then exist) is particularly compelling: a future in which important facts are carried away on a flood of falsehoods, and our civic freedoms along with them. He dreamed up all the usual nanotechnological fantasies, from spider silk space-elevator cables to catastrophic "grey goo", decades before they entered the public consciousness, and even coined the phrase "Theory of Everything", but only so he could point at it and laugh. He did not become really productive until after Stalin’s death, but in the dozen years from 1956 he wrote seventeen books, among them Solaris (1961), the work for which he is best known by English speakers.
Professor Dobb’s book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaikki has called "the cruelest science man ever created." Dobb, one of the most distinguished personeticists today, shares this view. One cannot escape the conclusion, he says, that personetics is, in its application, immoral; we are dealing, however, with a type of pursuit that is, though counter to the principles of ethics, also of practical necessity to us. There is no way, in the research, to avoid its special ruthlessness, to avoid doing violence to one’s natural instincts, and if nowhere else it is here that the myth of the perfect innocence of the scientist as a seeker of facts is exploded. We are speaking of a discipline, after all, which, with only a small amount of exaggeration, for emphasis, has been called "experimental theogony." Even so, this reviewer is struck by the fact that when the press played up the thing, nine years ago, public opinion was stunned by the personetic disclosures. One would have thought that in this day and age nothing could surprise us. The centuries rang with the echo of the feat of Columbus, whereas the conquering of the Moon in the space of a week was received by the collective consciousness as a thing practically humdrum. And yet the birth of personetics proved to be a shock.
The name combines Latin and Greek derivatives: "persona" and "genetic"—"genetic" in the sense of formation, or creation. The field is a recent offshoot of the cybernetics and psychonics of the eighties, crossbred with applied intellectronics. Today everyone knows of personetics; the man in the street would say, if asked, that it is the artificial production of intelligent beings—an answer not wide of the mark, to be sure, but not quite getting to the heart of the matter. To date we have nearly a hundred personetic programs. Nine years ago identity schemata were being developed—primitive cores of the "linear" type—but even that generation of computers, today of historical value only, could not yet provide a field for the true creation of personoids.
The theoretical possibility of creating sentience was divined some time ago, by Norbert Wiener, as certain passages of his last book, God and Golem, bear witness. Granted, he alluded to it in that half-facetious manner typical of him, but underlying the facetiousness were fairly grim premonitions. Wiener, however, could not have foreseen the turn that things would take twenty years later. The worst came about—in the words of Sir Donald Acker—when at MIT "the inputs were shorted to the outputs."
At present a "world" for personoid "inhabitants" can be prepared in a matter of a couple of hours. This is the time it takes to feed into the machine one of the full-fledged programs (such as BAAL 66, CREAN IV, or JAHVE 09). Dobb gives a rather cursory sketch of the beginnings of personetics, referring the reader to the historical sources; a confirmed practitioner-experimenter himself, he speaks mainly of his own work—which is much to the point, since between the English school, which Dobb represents, and the American group, at MIT, the differences are considerable, both in the area of methodology and as regards experimental goals. Dobb describes the procedure of "6 days in 120 minutes" as follows. First, one supplies the machine’s memory with a minimal set of givens; that is—to keep within a language comprehensible to laymen—one loads its memory with substance that is "mathematical." This substance is the protoplasm of a universum to be "habitated" by personoids. We are now able to supply the beings that will come into this mechanical, digital world—that will be carrying on an existence in it, and in it only—with an environment of nonfinite characteristics. These beings, therefore, cannot feel imprisoned in the physical sense, because the environment does not have, from their standpoint, any bounds. The medium possesses only one dimension that resembles a dimension given us also—namely, that of the passage of time (duration). Their time is not directly analogous to ours, however, because the rate of its flow is subject to discretionary control on the part of the experimenter. As a rule, the rate is maximized in the preliminary phase (the so-called creational warm-up), so that our minutes correspond to whole eons in the computer, during which there takes place a series of successive reorganizations and crystallizations—of a synthetic cosmos. It is a cosmos completely spaceless, though possessing dimensions, but these dimensions have a purely mathematical, hence what one might call an "imaginary" character. They are, very simply, the consequence of certain axiomatic decisions of the programmer, and their number depends on him. If, for example, he chooses a ten-dimensionality, it will have for the structure of the world created altogether different consequences from those where only six dimensions are established. It should be emphasized that these dimensions bear no relation to those of physical space but only to the abstract, logically valid constructs made use of in systems creation.