Definitions of Humanity
What classifies humans as such and makes them better than their creations?
Examinations of morality and humanity in the works of Isaac Asimov and C.L. Moore
Copyright 1999 by Bridget Kelly
There is a natural assumption that humans are superior to robots because they created the robots. This could be attributed to several factors, not least of which is, of course, natural human conceit. Another is the prevalent mythological theme of the omnipotent creator in Western tradition. There is a perception that nothing can produce something greater than itself, or perhaps that nothing will produce something greater than itself, either by ability or inclination. To create something implies that the creator has control over it. The idea remains that what was made can be unmade and the control the creator had at the creation is retained.
By this view, robots, no matter how far they are improved by humans, must remain under their dominion as their inferiors. No matter how intelligent, how strong, how durable, how versatile, how clever, how human the robots become, they remain the creations of humans, and can never be superior or even equal to them. Robots must remain subservient to their human creators as humans once were to this Creator God, though religion and the requisite blind faith have been replaced by physical pathways impressed on the factory-made brains, coldly logical precepts created so as to be inviolable.
But this myth of an omnipotent creator is not as prevalent as it seems. The logic behind a creator's inability to excel himself is flawed, and there are precedents supporting the contrary viewpoints in many belief systems, including the commonly held Western one. The theme of the son overthrowing the father recurs many times in Greek and Roman mythology. And in the creation myths of many cultures, the creator is not an omnipotent being creating the world through sheer willpower.
Surprisingly (to the western mind) few belief systems contain an all-powerful creator figure after all, and some interpretations of even the Bible and its surrounding traditions suggest that the Creator and the Savior are entirely separate entities. Many sects of Gnostic Christians in the centuries immediately following the life of Jesus believed that there were two Gods, one the petty and controlling Creator, the other a benevolent Redeemer seeking to protect the creatures of the world from the Creator's ill-will-- for example, the Creator put Adam and Eve into the Garden of Eden but forbade them to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, wanting them to remain in subservient ignorance; the serpent entices Eve to eat of the tree to increase her knowledge. By the way, in Genesis, the name of Satan is not mentioned here. It wasn't until well into the first millennium that these sects were finally condemned as heretic. Interestingly enough, the Redeemer was often perceived as female. The currently accepted idea of the Christian Trinity as being Three aspects of One divinity-- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-- was not settled on until well into the fourth or fifth century A.D., and it caused a major rift in the early Church. So that which we perceive as the 'normal' view of the Omnipotent Creator is really nothing of the sort.
Another, somewhat related argument for the robots' inherent inferiority is that they lack a certain something that humans are born with, be it a divine spark or some completeness as a biological entity, perhaps a measure of irreplaceability and uniqueness that cannot be manufactured. The simple fact that, no matter how sophisticated they are, they were made on an assembly line from interchangeable parts, is an insurmountable obstacle for many in considering them as good as a human, or even worthy of consideration as an entity. As Powell says in "Runaround" (page 43, I Robot), "A robot's only a robot. Once we find out what's wrong with him, we can fix it and go on." Despite the sophistication and apparent sensitivity, and even capacity for emotion, of the robot, he still is made of metal and can be disassembled and reassembled.
Another illustration of the robots' mass-produced quality is "Little Lost Robot", in which the search for the missing Nestor 10 requires that Susan Calvin and the other robotics experts must repeatedly test and interview every single one of the sixty-three robots on the ship. In every test, each of the robots must react more or less identically; variation indicates abnormality, which is dangerous. They all must independently come up with the exact same conclusions, and for the most part they do; their brains were all given the same 'prenatal' education, so they all think the same way.
In the same situation, it is unlikely that sixty-three humans would all come up with the same response. But the reason for that would not necessarily be any inherent spark of divine creativity within the human brain somewhere. The reason would be that humans are born without any pre-implanted knowledge and must learn as they live; for this reason, even if humans are given identical educations, the material presented will be perceived and absorbed differently by each individual depending on variables that cannot be controlled, and therefore knowledge will be applied differently by each.
No two humans can think the same way because the pathways carved into the brain are done so by a lifetime of learning, whereas robots are pre-educated before the brains are inserted into the bodies, and there are no differences in situation and therefore perception between the brains. Therefore, the fact that sixty-two of the sixty-three robots had more or less identical responses does not indicate any major difference in the raw ability of their brains.
Indeed, the positronic brains of Asimov's robots seem somehow counter to the way robots are most often thought of. They are admitted to be beyond the complete understanding of even those who manufacture them, somewhat along the lines of a human brain. They are not made up of hard-wiring and circuits, but of a sort of human-brain-like substance into which circuit-like pathways are introduced by a complex series of procedures. Several times within the stories, thoughts originate with the robots that somehow confuse or even startle the humans working with them. This would indicate that not all of the robots derive directly from anything the humans can really control.
And, of course, in C.L. Moore's story, the brain is human, and the body around it is robotic: this was the first definition of a cyborg. The issue here is whether Deirdre can remain human without the body of a human or even the senses of a human. As it turns out, her robotic body, far from being inferior to a human one, gives her superhuman strengths. She is far more powerful as a cyborg than she was as a human. The irony in this, of course, is that the cyborg body is intended to be almost as a wheelchair or some such aid to compensate for her handicap, so that she might still retain some measure of life in any kind of normal way.
This creation was entirely accidental and one-of-a-kind, opposite to Asimov's practical and mass-produced robots. There is a certain similarity to the robot in "Liar!", the accidentally unique Herbie; he was not created to be more intelligent in any way than a human, but by some freak occurrence he can read minds. He goes insane because his brain has the imprinted Laws on it, and in his position of power he cannot help but bring harm to a human somehow; there is no way he can avoid breaking the First Law. The Laws are structured to keep the robots inferior to humans, and cannot be altered without entirely changing the nature of robots.
These stories bring up the difficult ethical issue of what is human and what is not. Where is the boundary between that which we consider human, and therefore hold as entitled to basic human rights and considerations, and that which we consider not human, and therefore can disregard as we will? This boundary is important and much debated in forums other than science fiction; the issue has been raised throughout history as unmonied men, women in general, non-whites, and even children have slowly been added to the category originally thought of as 'man', meaning 'those creatures worthy of consideration for the rights and respect accorded those classified as such by human society', and the boundaries continue to be pushed in the realms of debate concerning such issues as genetic research, cloning, fertility treatments, and abortion. But science fiction remains the forum where this issue is most often debated, and where the boundaries are most stretched. Robots are only one category of near-human to give those who stop to consider it something to really think about.
So, besides the building materials, what is it that separates robots from humans and sets them apart as definitely "other"? Moore's character Maltzer expresses the belief that it is the human senses that set them apart and make them what they are.
'Sight,' Maltzer said, 'is the most highly civilized of the senses. It was the last to come. The other senses tie us in closely with the very roots of life; I think we perceive with them more keenly than we know. The things we realize through taste and smell and feeling stimulate directly, without a detour through the centers of conscious thought. ... We need those primitive senses to tie us in with nature and the race. Through those ties Deirdre drew her vitality without realizing it. Sight is a cold, intellectual thing compared with the other senses. But it's all she has to draw on now. She isn't a human being anymore, and I think what humanity is left in her will drain out little by little and never be replaced. ...'"
Even with a human brain and human memories Deirdre cannot be fully human in a body so alien, by this logic. But she is not a robot. She is a human brain, given tools other than a human body to operate. If this causes her to become distanced from the human race, does it really make her less human, or does it merely make her experience so different from that of the average human that mutual understanding becomes more difficult? The story finishes with a line that seems full of foreboding: " 'I wonder,' she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice." The phrase "distant taint of metal" implies that her cyborg nature robs her of a certain purity and simplicity, robs her of comprehensibility to a normal human.
Is this what makes robots irreparably distinct from humans in a way that can never be reconciled, this "distant taint of metal"? However sophisticated, sensitive, high-tech, subtle their brains might be, they reside in a body of metal. They arise spontaneously to awareness from assembled parts. They are not conceived, are not born, have no parents, no ancestors. Their predecessors are not their ancestors, but are merely obsolete heaps of junk, and there is no direct bloodline, no flesh-and-blood identification with them. There is nowhere that they come from besides the factories of humans.
Humans, however, were not created, but evolved. Science has managed to trace, in theory at least, the rise of the human race from the very first sparks of life in the primordial soup of the world. Humans came from someplace. And even without the aid of science, humans have families, and usually family trees and traditions; most humans know where they came from. There is an ancestral homeland, some sort of ancient name, something indicating a lineage and a place in the world, at least a parent. An assembly line cannot give that. A robot's memory must be a sterile and perfect thing that begins spontaneously from the moment when they become aware; there is no childhood, no development. All they have, in Asimov's (and after him, almost every other writer's who has dealt with robotics) vision, are the Laws.
Returning to the case of Herbie, it is shown here that the Laws can only apply as long as the robots are subhuman. Robots are not given life experiences that would lead to the formation of such complex emotional relationships as humans inevitably become embroiled in. Therefore, they do not fully understand many human emotions. Asimov never says that they have no emotions; on the contrary, he applies emotions to them as freely as to his human characters, mentioning only that they lack the facial features to express the emotions.
He says that robots cannot feel anger, but Cutie demonstrates an emotion akin to it at Donovan's 'sacrilege'; the ban on anger comes only from the imprinted Laws. Robots cannot get angry at humans because that could lead to a loss of temper, which would be instability, and could be dangerous. Dave certainly feels distress at his inability to fill the ore quota, and his inability to explain this shortcoming. Speedy feels considerable chagrin at his endangerment of the Mercury mission by his entrapment in the conflict between the second and third laws, to the point where he cannot bear to approach Powell. Herbie's understanding of human emotions is considerably fuller than that of most robots because he can read their thoughts, and he is fascinated because by their very nature thoughts cannot be fully understood, ever. There will always be something that cannot be predicted by logic, something unprecedented, something irrational and fascinating. Herbie snaps because there are too many variables for him to fully obey the First Law, and unlike humans, he cannot bend any rules to apply them to a reality too complex for such a black-and-white law.
This is not indicative of any failing in Herbie's intelligence; his mind may well be just as powerful and more so than a human's, but he is so rigidly bound by the imprinted Laws that he cannot function at a normal level. There is too much responsibility on him because of the humans' inability to fully grasp the nature of his ability, and he cannot compensate, and thus he is destroyed.
In the story about Stephen Byerley, "Evidence", Susan Calvin makes plain her view that robots are, in fact, preferable to humans. "Robots are essentially decent," she says, on page 216. This is because they have these three Laws implanted in them; they have no choice but to be decent. They must be moral; it is a forced response that they do the things that a decent human would merely feel compelled to do. "Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world's ethical systems," she says. "... [Y]ou just can't differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans."
But this, in the end, is the only thing that really differentiates humans from robots in all cases, and sets them inextricably on a subservient level. These Laws are part of them; their brains cannot be created without these laws. This makes them 'better' than humans in that they are forced to be good; they cannot be immoral. But the crucial thing that is lacking is free will. This is the important element of the creation story of the Judeo-Christian tradition: God created man free. He told the humans that they should do anything they wanted to, but they should not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But he did not create them unable to do so. The story in Genesis does not say immediately that it was an evil thing to eat of the tree. The humans could no longer remain as creatures directly with God, happily serving him, once they had exercised their free will to gain knowledge; they were cast out of the Garden of Eden, but from that human civilization began.
The robots don't have this option, and therefore can never be other than servants of humans, sub-human. They must be good. Humans can be good. This makes humans' goodness a special thing. If there is no decision, there is no right or wrong. Cloistered virtue, to use John Milton's argument from his paper the Aeropagitica, is no virtue. If one has never been exposed to temptation, one cannot have withstood it, and therefore one's moral right remains unproven. Without free will, there is no good and no evil. Without this freedom, robots can never be superior or even equal to humans.
Deirdre knows this, and it is what makes her superhuman. On page 56 she says, "I'm not a robot, with compulsions built into me that I have to obey. I'm free-willed and independent, and, Maltzer-- I'm human."
Additional materials for the reader:
- Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, listed and explained.