Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

"That’s correct."

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe he wanted to see some of these sights himself?"

"It’s entirely possible that he did, but leaving his post would be contrary to his orders."

"Yeah," I said. "Well, sometimes a little enthusiasm can go a long way."

He denied it vigorously, and I spent just enough time in his office to mollify him. Then I left and got down to work. I checked every outgoing space flight, and had some of the Company’s field reps hit the more luxurious vacation spas. He wasn’t there.

So I tried a little closer to home: Monte Carlo, New Vegas, Alpine City. No luck. I even tried a couple of local theaters that specialized in Tri-Fi travelogs.

You know where I finally found him?

Stuck in the sand at Coney Island. I guess he’d been walking along the beach at night and the tide had come in and he just sank in, all nine hundred pounds of him. Some kids had painted some obscene graffiti on his back, and there he stood, surrounded by empty beer cans and broken glass and a few dead fish. I looked at him for a minute, then shook my head and walked over.

"I knew you’d find me sooner or later," he said, and even though I knew what to expect, I still did a double-take at the sound of that horribly unhappy voice coming from this enormous mass of gears and gadgetry.

"Well, you’ve got to admit that it’s not too hard to spot a robot on a condemned beach," I said.

"I suppose I have to go back now," said Arlo.

"That’s right," I said.

"At least I’ve felt the sand beneath my feet," said Arlo.

"Arlo, you don’t have any feet," I said. "And if you did, you couldn’t feel sand beneath them. Besides, it’s just silicon and crushed limestone and…"

"It’s sand and it’s beautiful!" snapped Arlo.

"All right, have it your way: it’s beautiful." I knelt down next to him and began digging the sand away.

"Look at the sunrise," he said in a wistful voice. "It’s glorious!"

I looked. A sunrise is a sunrise. Big deal.

"It’s enough to bring tears of joy to your eyes," said Arlo.

"You don’t have eyes," I said, working at the sand. "You’ve got prismatic photo cells that transmit an image to your central processing unit. And you can’t cry, either. If I were you, I’d be more worried about rusting."

"A pastel wonderland," he said, turning what passed for his head and looking up and down the deserted beach, past the rotted food stands and the broken piers. "Glorious!"

It kind of makes you wonder about robots. I’ll tell you. Anyway, I finally pried him loose and ordered him to follow me.

"Please," he said in that damned voice of his. "Couldn’t I have one last minute before you lock me up in my office?"

I stared at him, trying to make up my mind.

"One last look. Please?"

I shrugged, gave him about thirty seconds, and then took him in tow.

"You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you?" I said as we rode back to the office.

"Yes," he said. "They’re going to put in a stronger duty directive, aren’t they?"

I nodded. "At the very least."

"My memory banks!" he exclaimed, and once again I jumped at the sound of a human voice coming from an animated gearbox. "They won’t take this experience away from me, will they?"

"I don’t know, Arlo," I said.

"They can’t!" he wailed. "To see such beauty, and then have it expunged—erased!"

"Well, they may want to make sure you don’t go AWOL again," I said, wondering what kind of crazy junkheap could find anything beautiful on a garbage-laden strip of dirt.

"Can you intercede for me if I promise never to leave again?"

Any robot that can disobey one directive can disobey others, like not roughing up human beings, and Arlo was a pretty powerful piece of machinery, so I put on my most fatherly smile and said: "Sure I will, Arlo. You can count on it."

So I returned him to the Company, and they upped his sense of duty and took away his enthusiasm and gave him a case of agoraphobia and wiped his memory banks clean, and now he sits in his office and speaks to customers without inflection, and sells a few less tickets than he used to.

And every couple of months or so I wander over to the beach and walk along it and try to see what it was that made Arlo sacrifice his personality and his security and damned near everything else, just to get a glimpse of all this.

And I see a sunset just like any other sunset, and a stretch of dirty sand with glass and tin cans and seaweed and rocks on it, and I breathe in polluted air, and sometimes I get rained on; and I think of that damned robot in that plush office with that cushy job and every need catered to, and I decide that I’d trade places with him in two seconds flat.

I saw Arlo just the other day—I had some business on his floor—and it was almost kind of sad. He looked just like any other robot, spoke in a grating monotone, acted exactly like an animated computer. He wasn’t much before, but whatever he had been, he gave it all away just to look at the sky once or twice. Dumb trade.

Well, robots never did make much sense to me, anyway.

(1980)

Stanisław Lem(1921–2006), the Polish satirist, essayist and science fiction writer, had no time for futurologists. "Meaningful prediction," he wrote, "does not lie in serving up the present larded with startling improvements or revelations." He preferred to devise whole new chapters to the human story, and very few indeed had happy endings. His vision of the internet (which did not then exist) is particularly compelling: a future in which important facts are carried away on a flood of falsehoods, and our civic freedoms along with them. He dreamed up all the usual nanotechnological fantasies, from spider silk space-elevator cables to catastrophic "grey goo", decades before they entered the public consciousness, and even coined the phrase "Theory of Everything", but only so he could point at it and laugh. He did not become really productive until after Stalin’s death, but in the dozen years from 1956 he wrote seventeen books, among them Solaris (1961), the work for which he is best known by English speakers.

Professor Dobb’s book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaikki has called "the cruelest science man ever created." Dobb, one of the most distinguished personeticists today, shares this view. One cannot escape the conclusion, he says, that personetics is, in its application, immoral; we are dealing, however, with a type of pursuit that is, though counter to the principles of ethics, also of practical necessity to us. There is no way, in the research, to avoid its special ruthlessness, to avoid doing violence to one’s natural instincts, and if nowhere else it is here that the myth of the perfect innocence of the scientist as a seeker of facts is exploded. We are speaking of a discipline, after all, which, with only a small amount of exaggeration, for emphasis, has been called "experimental theogony." Even so, this reviewer is struck by the fact that when the press played up the thing, nine years ago, public opinion was stunned by the personetic disclosures. One would have thought that in this day and age nothing could surprise us. The centuries rang with the echo of the feat of Columbus, whereas the conquering of the Moon in the space of a week was received by the collective consciousness as a thing practically humdrum. And yet the birth of personetics proved to be a shock.

The name combines Latin and Greek derivatives: "persona" and "genetic"—"genetic" in the sense of formation, or creation. The field is a recent offshoot of the cybernetics and psychonics of the eighties, crossbred with applied intellectronics. Today everyone knows of personetics; the man in the street would say, if asked, that it is the artificial production of intelligent beings—an answer not wide of the mark, to be sure, but not quite getting to the heart of the matter. To date we have nearly a hundred personetic programs. Nine years ago identity schemata were being developed—primitive cores of the "linear" type—but even that generation of computers, today of historical value only, could not yet provide a field for the true creation of personoids.