original cover art by Barclay Shaw and Abhi Thati |
50 Years of Intuition
In "Feminine Intuition", the Robopsychologist Susan Calvin has retired and her former position at US Robotics is now held by Clinton Madarian. Madarian wants to push ahead with creating robots that are less highly constrained by their programming and more creative.
source |
Madarian is rather brash and he states: "One thing the general public believes is that women are not as intelligent as men." He suggests that by calling the "intuitive" robots "Jane", people will be put at ease, not suspecting that they will be more human-like than other types of robot.
Jane 5 |
In public, Bogert and Madarian say their goal is an intuitive robot. In their private work, they hope that they will create a "genius" robot, able to recognize important new astronomical discoveries by "intuition". JN-5 is given all of the available astronomical data and soon reports that there are three nearby stars that are likely to have Earth-like planets. Then, suddenly, Madarian and JN-5 are destroyed by a freak accident. The top brass of US Robotics go into a tizzy, having been so close to success and then having lost the critical data that are worth billion$.
Dr. Susan Calvin recalled from retirement; shown here with the JN-3 and JN-4 prototypes. |
"It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible." -Dr. Calvin
Tracy Dyson |
Carl Sagan's science fiction story about the female astronomer who makes First Contact with aliens. |
1970 to 2060
When writing "Feminine Intuition", Asimov did not explicitly state during what year the events of the story are taking place, but let's say it is about the year 2060. Currently, about 40% of the PhDs in astronomy are earned by women. It is not unreasonable to imagine that by 2060 the male-female balance in astronomy could be close to 50-50. Sadly, writing in 1969, Asimov depicted all of the astronomers who interacted with the JN-5 robot as being males.
1969 NASA. JoAnn Morgan, the only woman engineer among scores of male counterparts (source) |
Could Asimov have depicted some of the Board members for US Robotics as being women? Of course, but his goal was to depict a bunch of hard-headed floundering males who had to turn to a woman for help in solving a problem. When Asimov was writing "Feminine Intuition" he was in the process of separating from his first wife and soon he would be living happily with Janet, an M.D. specializing in psychiatry.
Dr. Calvin in Hollywood |
1968: another historical snapshot
Related Reading: more science fiction from 1969
Next: recovery of lost memories from 1977
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