I’m making an effort to get around to films, books, and music I’ve always meant to try, but have never made the time for. Next in line is science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, whose collection of short stories I, Robot was sitting on the shelf of a local charity shop. It took me a while to get to grips with his style, but now I’m nearing the end I’m gripped.
A story that surprised me was Reason – one that moves beyond science fiction to allude to arguments around philosophy, religion, free will, and the meaning of life. It centres around a test of the robot Cutie, designed to run a space station, who refuses to obey human commands and is subservient only to what it calls “The Master”. It converts the outpost’s entire robotic crew to its ideology, and essentially holds the humans hostage.
But by the end, Cutie’s operators realise that there’s no point in reeducating the robot. While they have been held captive, the station has been run perfectly well – they reason that Cutie was following the second law of robotics, knowing that humans would come to harm if it wasn’t. They even reason that future robots should spend time with Cutie to learn to serve The Master before they are deployed elsewhere.
There’s more to the story than this (go and read it!), but it raises many interesting questions. How can we be sure of our origins? Are our motivations really our own, or are our actions part of a bigger plan? And do our intentions matter, or is it purely our outcomes and their impact that we should be concerned with? Asimov’s work has made me want to pick up the philosophy classics I studied as a teenager again…
Stack Stubs 