The next morning at breakfast, we speak to the girl, and to our son.
"If the world finds out that you have regained your ability," I say, "they will want you to use it. The toy manufacturer will wave his contract in our faces and the authorities will take you away. We like you and want to adopt you into our family. However, that will probably mean you cannot tell your stories to these toys ever again. It is too dangerous. Do you think you would be okay with that?"
The girl stares at me, her big eyes filled with tears.
"Yes," she whispers.
The adoption procedure takes two years. The girl goes to school with my son, makes new friends, always comes first in art class. She tells my son stories, and soon he tells her some back. He writes down his stories, sends them off to a few newspapers. The day he publishes his first story, the wooden dog barks so much we are afraid the neighbors will hear.
The day the adoption is finalized, the girl gives me and my wife a box. We open it to find three identical carvings of a family, a man and a woman with a boy and a girl. The woodwork is a little crude, but the brushwork is delicate.
"I know you asked me not to make any more talking toys," says the girl, "but I couldn’t stop myself from making these. I have never carved anything before. I hope you like them."
My wife’s carving stands on her dresser, mine on my office desk, and my son’s on his dorm-room table. The girl is pursuing an apprenticeship in Paris under Olivier Manet, one of the world’s foremost still-life artists. She has exhibited some of her paintings, and critics have raved about their lifelike quality. The carvings occasionally talk to us, tell us about the girl’s adventures—her first taste of crème brûlée; her awe on staring up at the majestic Notre-Dame; her roommate who gave a solo violin recital before the French President. And sometimes they tell us about a village in the foothills of the Himalayas, where a father makes a toy elephant and his daughter paints it and tells it the tale of Shukram.
(2017)
SECTION TWO
Following the Money
On 6 November 2014, at a day-long conference on human-machine interaction at Goldsmith’s College in London, Rodolphe Gelin, the research director of robot-makers Aldebaran, screened a video starring Nao, the company’s charming educational robot. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me, to my shame) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come the film shows a mother sweating away in the kitchen while a robot is enjoying quality time with her child?
The robot exists to do what we can imagine doing, but would rather not do. What’s wrong with that? Nothing – except that it assumes that we always know what’s in our own best interests. Given that we are now able to hand entire parts of our lives over to robots, we should be thinking even harder about how we want to spend our lives.
The stories in this section articulate some of the big nightmares we entertain about robots – that they’ll steal away our jobs, our livelihoods, even our happiness and our life’s purpose – but what’s remarkable is how innocent so many of the robots seem. That’s the problem with technology: it really is neutral. It really is what you make of it, day to day. No wonder technology is so good at magnifying all our classic mistakes.
Robots are a sort of dark mirror for ourselves, filling in for the bits of life we’d rather ignore. That’s why they provide such a fine vehicle for satire, whether exploring civic impotence in Charles Dickens’s "Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything Section B" (1837) or the bankruptcy of our spiritual life in Fredric Perkins’s "The Man-Ufactory" (1877) – two fine early stories.
There was a fair degree of satire in Czech playwright Karel Capek’s original conception of RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the play which in 1921 launched the word robot on the world. According to Capek, in an article in London’s Evening Standard in 1924, inspiration came when he had to take a crowded tram from Prague’s suburbs to the city centre and noticed how people were behaving: not at all like cattle in a truck, which at least show signs of life and suffering, but like dead things, mechanisms, machines.
As it developed, Capek’s play acquired a visionary political edge. His countrymen were not only being dehumanized by the spread of mass production and "scientific management"; they were being thrown out of work. (Seeing striking textile workers marching through the town of Úpice made a strong impression on him.) The bloodless logic of industrial capitalism has rarely been expressed so well as when Rossum’s general manager Domin reassures Helen Glory (what a name!) about the great benefits robots will bring to the world. Sure, they’re making humans redundant, but
"within the next ten years, Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There’ll be no more poverty. Yes, people will be out of work, but by then there’ll be no work left to be done. Everything will be done by living machines. People will do only what they enjoy. They will live only to perfect themselves."
Again, the vision’s fine as far as it goes, but the devil’s in the detail. In Domin’s utopic future of endless leisure, will we even know how to perfect ourselves? Are we equipped for such a task, physically, morally, intellectually? Is perfection even a state to aspire to? Or are we all just going to rot?
We obsess over the "labour-saving" capacities of our machines, and hanker endlessly for more "free time", but we never think to consider the value of labour itself. Every activity we replace by machine – even dirty, noisy, dangerous activities – is a kind of loss for us. Even factory work, hard, repetitive and brutal, even housework, invisible, unmeasured, unrewarded, can be a source of pride.
What if we save ourselves from the very labour that makes our lives worthwhile? It can’t be an accident that, now that bread- and beer-making are largely automated industrial activities, schools are opening up in my city to teach people with disposable money and time on their hands how to knead dough, and ferment beer. And, easy as it is to sneer at these fetishised activities, surely the really ludicrous thing is how we’re getting machines to do the things that we turn out, after all, to enjoy. (Cornell scholar Morris Bishop hits this particular nail neatly on the head with "The Reading Machine" (1947).)
The other problem with Domin’s vision is that it assumes human beings can simply step off the merry-go-round. With robots making everything for free, the horns of plenty will never cease to overflow. Is he right?
Well, no. For a start, there’s the small matter of only having one planet to live off. And right now, we’re not just running out of materials; we’re running out of things to do with materials. Why do you think our economy has shifted, in the space of less than a generation, from one of goods, to one of services, to one of mere attention?
As far as the machines are concerned, we’re not just consumers. We’re also stuff. Consumables. Our data – which is to say, how we live our lives – already has a money value. Automation hasn’t liberated us from the capitalist machine. We’re still in the machine. Hell, we’re its feedstock.
Stories by Robert Reed, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nick Wolven and Dan Grace all explore this crisis point from different angles. I have to admit that in my own mind I keep coming back to one of the more surreal moments in the Wachowski brothers’ 1999 movie The Matrix, when it’s revealed that our robot overlords are so desperate for power that they’re using us as glorified batteries.