Tillich, as part of his thoughts on theology and art, said that artists are the prophets of their day. I think of this sometimes when I read or recall literary works that have proven prescient to our present time. I wonder, even, if we would have made some of the mistakes we’ve made in our recent history were we a culture that is more well-read.
The obvious example that everyone immediately reaches for, of course, is Orwell’s 1984, having provided stark warnings regarding our current age of surveillance capitalism. The examples, though, are not necessarily always dystopian. When writers and creators imagined new worlds such as Star Trek, they inspired a generation of people, some of whom are technical geniuses, to build the fantastic technology that they saw and wanted to experience. Viewed through that lens, its no wonder that humanity has achieved some of the things that we have in the last two decades or so.
This sprang to mind for me recently when one of our kiddos asked me when the first robot was built. I recently read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, and, while I read it during an insanely busy time in life and have not yet even managed to transfer it to my bookshelf as of when I write this, I found myself thinking about just how well this novel predicted the last few years, in spirit if not in fact.
What’s interesting about reading Asimov is that you’ll find his popular works have not translated well to the screen. The film adaptation of I, Robot and recent Foundation series are so far removed from the source material as to only share a name. You see, I also grew up watching Star Trek and dreaming about those possibilities, as well as reading Asimov and Henlein. To follow Tillich’s argument, Asimov is particularly prophetic in his predictions among this group. Reading his work, you’ll find he had difficulty imagining some things that are commonplace today, and he certainly got some things wrong. Characters in his novels tend to still read print newspapers, even when space travel is involved, and he imagines a world powered exclusively by nuclear energy. It’s easy to shrug off his work as that of a dreamer, especially if reading a story such as Foundation that covers such a huge swath of time.
I, Robot also covers a significant sweep of history. Asimov imagines the introduction of robots to humanity, and the development of the technology from its nascent, primitive stages into a critical lynchpin of society that humanity eventually cannot imagine functioning without. My initial inclination as I read this was to think that we’re currently in these nascent stages. Certainly, robots assemble things in factories, provide surgeons with more precise tooling, and vacuum our floors. Robots performing autonomous tasks still seem a long, long way off as I watch the last device on that list try to navigate my living room, however, and, were that the extent of where we are in Asimov’s imagined history, I think that his assertions would seem laughable.
Only in our very recent memory, though, have we shifted our aspirations to being digital. When Asimov wrote this novel, these amazing technologies were imagined as complex electronics, focusing on the hardware and how the “positronic brains” of the robots could function. Now, we think of what we can achieve with code, and how that code drives the hardware. While the black swan event of the Internet was not in Asimov’s story, the blending of the digital and physical…the software and hardware…was very present, even though he couldn’t really articulate how that would work.
This book, of course, is famous for the Three Laws of Robotics, and much of the novel centers around how robots, becoming sentient, navigate these pre-programmed laws and, ultimately, work around them. As humans make robots responsible for the day-to-day operations of society, the laws, which center around obeying and never harming humans, become more loosely defined as the machines coldly calculate the good of the many over the good of the few.
As we are now at the beginning of the use of artificial intelligence in our daily lives, and are already beginning to offload a disturbing amount of decision making to this opaque and inhuman engine, I realize that we’re seeing what Asimov foresaw in a blurry dream arrive in an abrupt and distinctly sharp focus. Our AI’s are developed by corporations for profit. There is no concept of Asimov’s three laws (honestly, I might feel less reticent about AI if there were), and, if we’ve learned anything about technological advances, it is that they are certain to be weaponized. I, Robot ends on a sinister note, as the creator of much of modern robotics is left wondering if a new leader of the global world order is, in fact, a robot. Imagine a single individual leading the entire world, and our not being able to disprove that this person is actually an AI in an incredibly realistic robotic body. That concept is, or should be, terrifying.
Another theme that is developed is, can human beings create a life form which can become sentient? If we can, what are the rights of that sentient life form? We are already hearing discussions around this, pondering if AI will have rights. Asimov saw a Frankenstein realized, a thinking, feeling digital creation that could take control of all of us while we tried to simply grasp the extent of what exactly it is that we’ve managed to create.
As we encounter the extinction-level event that is artificial intelligence, I, Robot gives us a startlingly clear portrait..or prediction…of the direction we are traveling, quickly, blindly, and with reckless surrender. While some details differ from what Asimov pictured, the results, I fear, will ultimately be the same.