Robot Visions

Day both follows and is followed by night. Summer both follows and is followed by winter. Rain both follows and is followed by clear weather, and the net result is, therefore, no change. That may be boring, but it is comfortable and induces a feeling of security.

In fact, so comfortable is the notion of short-term cyclic change implying long-term changelessness, that human beings labor to find it everywhere. In human affairs, there is the notion that one generation both follows and is followed by another, that one dynasty both follows and is followed by another, that one empire both follows and is followed by another. It is not a good analogy to the cycles of nature since the repetitions are not exact, but it is good enough to be comforting.

So strongly do human beings want the comfort of cycles that they will seize upon one even when the evidence is insufficient-or even when it actually points the other way.

With respect to the universe, what evidence we have points to a hyperbolic evolution; a universe that expands forever out of the initial big bang and ends as formless gas and black holes. Yet our emotions drag us, against the evidence, to notions of oscillating, cyclic, repeating universes, in which even the black holes are merely gateways to new big bangs.

But then there is the other change, to be avoided at all costs-the irreversible, malignant change; the one-way change; the permanent change; the change-never-to-return.

What is so fearful about it? The fact is that there is one such change that lies so close to ourselves that it distorts the entire universe for us.

We are, after all, old, and though we were once young we shall never be young again. Irreversible! Our friends are dead, and though they were once alive, they shall never be alive again. Irreversible! The fact is that life ends in death and that is not a cyclic change and we fear that end and know it is useless to fight it.

What is worse is that the universe doesn’t die with us. Callously and immortally it continues onward in its cyclic changes, adding to the injury of death the insult of indifference.

And what is still worse is that other human beings don’t die with us. There are younger human beings, born later, who were helpless and dependent on us to start with, but who grow into supplanting nemeses and take our places as we age and die. To the injury of death is added the insult of supplantation.

Did I say it is useless to fight this honor of death accompanied by indifference and supplantation? Not quite. The uselessness is apparent only if we cling to the rational, but there is no law that says we must cling to it, and human beings do not, in fact, do so.

Death can be avoided by simply denying it exists. We can suppose that life on Earth is an illusion, a short testing period prior to entry into some afterlife where all is eternal and there is no question of irreversible change. Or we can suppose that it is only the body that is subject to death and that there is an immortal component of ourselves, not subject to irreversible change, which might, after the death of one body, enter another, in indefinite, cyclic repetitions of life.

These mythic inventions of afterlife and transmigration may make life tolerable for many human beings and enable them to face death with reasonable equanimity-but the fear of death and supplantation is only masked and overlaid; it is not removed.

In fact, the Greek myths involve the successive supplantation of one set of immortals by another-in what seems to be a despairing admission that not even eternal life and superhuman power can remove the danger of irreversible change and the humiliation of being supplanted.

To the Greeks it was disorder (Chaos) that first ruled the universe, and it was supplanted by Ouranos (the sky), whose intricate powdering of stars and complexly moving planets symbolized order (“Kosmos”).

But Ouranos was castrated by Kronos, his son. Kronos, his brothers, his sisters, and their progeny then ruled the universe.

Kronos feared that he would be served by his children as he had served his father (a kind of cycle of irreversible changes) and devoured his children as they were born. He was duped by his wife, however, who managed to save her last-born, Zeus, and to spirit him away to safety. Zeus grew to adult godhood, rescued his siblings from his father’s stomach, warred against Kronos and those who followed him, defeated him, and replaced him as ruler.

(There are supplantation myths among other cultures, too, even in our own-as the one in which Satan tried to supplant God and failed; a myth that reached its greatest literary expression in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.)

And was Zeus safe? He was attracted to the sea nymph Thetis and would have married her had he not been informed by the Fates that Thetis was destined to bear a son mightier than his father. That meant it was not safe for Zeus, or for any other god, either, to marry her. She was therefore forced (much against her will) to marry Peleus, a mortal, and bear a mortal son, the only child the myths describe her as having. That son was Achilles, who was certainly far mightier than his father (and, like Talos, had only his heel as his weak point through which he might be killed).

Now, then, translate this fear of irreversible change and of being supplanted into the relationship of man and machine and what do we have? Surely the great fear is not that machinery will harm us-but that it will supplant us. It is not that it will render us ineffective-but that it will make us obsolete.

The ultimate machine is an intelligent machine and there is, only one basic plot to the intelligent-machine story-that it is created to serve man, but that it ends by dominating man. It ca

There is the danger of the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the golem of Rabbi Loew, the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein. As the child born of our body eventually supplants us, so does the machine born of our mind.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which appeared in 1818, represents a peak of fear, however, for, as it happened, circumstances conspired to reduce that fear, at least temporarily.

Between the year 1815, which saw the end of a series of general European wars, and 1914, which saw the begi

It was in that interval that modern science fiction began-and by modern science fiction I refer to a form of literature that deals with societies differing from our own specifically in the level of science and technology, and into which we might conceivably pass from our own society by appropriate changes in that level. (This differentiates science fiction from fantasy or from “speculative fiction,” in which the fictional society ca

Modern science fiction, because of the time of its begi

This optimistic note continues to this day, particularly among those writers who were molded in the years before the coming of the fission bomb-notably, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and myself.

Nevertheless, with World War I, disillusionment set in. Science and technology, which promised an Eden, turned out to be capable of delivering Hell was well. The beautiful airplane that fulfilled the age-old dream of flight could deliver bombs. The chemical techniques that produced anesthetics, dyes, and medicines produced poison gas as well.