Rust to Rust

original cover art by Barclay Shaw

I'm on a mission to read all of Isaac Asimov's stories about positronic robots and I often include brief commentaries about Asimov's robot stories here in this blog. The next step: commentaries about commentaries on Asimov's robots that were published by others!

In 1976, I was already a fan of Asimov's robot stories when the first issue of Galileo magazine was published. In that issue was an essay called "Ashes to Ashes, Rust to Rust: The Robot in Science Fiction" by Peter Weston.

Weston was apparently driven to his unusually long title (including "Ashes to Ashes, Rust to Rust") by the title of Asimov's 1974 robot story "That Thou Art Mindful of Him". I suppose some people are put into a religious frame of mind when they start contemplating the idea that humans might one day build artificial life-forms with human-like minds. Asimov was agnostic, so he wrote his robot stories from a logical perspective, without any concern for religious taboos.

issue #1

Asimov wrote many science fiction stories about the idea that humans would, in the future, build robots who were superior to humans. He also toyed with the idea of building the Three Laws of Robotics and telepathic abilities into human brains, making possible the galaxy-spanning super-organism that he called Galaxia.

Clank. Weston began his robot essay with the words "CLANK-CLANK-CLANK" in honor of a type of early science fiction story about lumbering metal robots. There on the cover of the magazine (image to the left) is Pioneer 10, the first human-made robotic spaceship to be sent into interstellar space. Built by NASA with 1960s technology, poor old Pioneer 10 only has a few thousand bytes of computer memory, so it is not much of a robot. However, 50 years later, the Perseverance Mars rover has 4Gb of memory and a radiation-resistant 1990s era microprocessor that allows the robotic rover to drive itself.

from "The Robot Chronicles"

Isaac Asimov despised the fictional clanking robots that he read about as a youth. When creating his own robot stories, Asimov imagined how scientists of a future robotics industry might engineer robots, much as cars and airplanes were engineered in the 1930s. 

Ameca

Of course, Asimov was trying to compete for publication in early Sci Fi magazines where you could not sell a story about something as boring as a robotic rover driving on the surface of a desolate Mars. Asimov wrote about humanoid robots who, endowed with positronic brains, could think and reason just like humans, if not better. Now, here we are 60 years later and that sort of humanoid robot is still a fictional plot element for Sci Fi stories and actually building a human-like machine remains a tough engineering challenge for the future.

original cover art by Ralph McQuarrie

In his 1976 commentary on "The Robot in Science Fiction", Weston mentioned the 1943 short story "Death Sentence" by Isaac Asimov. I read "Death Sentence" long after having read Asimov's 1983 novel The Robots of Dawn, but it is an interesting exercise to imagine how that 1943 story gestated in Asimov's fertile mind for four decades. In "Death Sentence", Asimov imagined a far future time when many exoplanets of the galaxy were settled. As a history buff, Asimov loved to play around with the idea that in the far future, people of a galactic civilization would have forgotten their planet of origin. For "Death Sentence", Asimov set the story in a future "Galactic Federation" that suddenly discovers the lost planet Earth.

interior art by Elton Fax

Being something of an amateur archeologist, after 25 years of hard work, Theor Realo finds ancient documents that describe a planetary-scale psychological experiment (performed on Earth) that was begun many thousands of years ago by psychologists of a long-gone (15,000 years in the past) galactic civilization. Asimov pretended that Earth was located in such a poorly-traveled part of the galaxy that it had not been visited by anyone of the Galactic Federation. And yes, people still smoke in this enlightened Galactic Federation of the future (see the image to the left). And no, the "death sentence" has nothing to do with lung cancer.

Theor Realo figures out where Earth is and he visits "our planet" for five years. While there, the Earthlings study Theor and his spaceship. Eventually, Theor escapes from Earth and tells his tale to an old school chum, Brand Gorla, a psychologist. Theor has discovered that the Earthlings are humanoids with artificial biological bodies and positronic brains. 

Theor describes the robots of Earth

 Psychological Engineering. Theor's interpretation of his archeological findings (many of the old documents are written in "ancient Centaurian") is that the ancient psychologists of a long-lost galactic civilization set up the experiment on Earth, using specially designed robots for their psychological experiment.

interior art by Elton Fax

Is "Death Sentence" set in an alternate history, distinct from Asimov's other stories about the future galactic empire, or can it be fit in with other stories such as The Robots of Dawn and Foundation and Earth? Readers of "Death Sentence" are told that the Galactic Federation has positronic robots, but they are described as not being very sophisticated (maybe they do laborious tasks that humans don't want to perform). I feel sorry for Elton Fax who was tasked with drawing some illustrations for "Death Sentence". The entire story is just people sitting around talking and smoking.

the robots of Earth

Mr. Blak of United Robots admits that much more sophisticated robots could be build for use by the Galactic Federation, but nobody seems interested in doing that. Theor claims to have first found "tons" of ancient blueprints for the positronic robots of Earth then he went to Earth and met the robots. The people of the Galactic Federation all seem surprised by the idea of positronic robots who look like humans.

psychological axioms

At the very start of "Death Sentence", Theor Realo is identified as an albino and a misfit. Then, ten pages into the story, it is suggested that Theor has psychological similarities to the robots of Earth (see the image to the left). All the archeologists of the galaxy ignored the special planet where Theor (working alone) discovered anient documents about Earth. Readers are told that the type of perseverance displayed by Theor (working alone for 25 years) is "inhuman" by the standards of the Galactic Federation.

Barclay Shaw cover

What are we to make of "Death Sentence"? Here is what Weston concluded: as depicted in "Death Sentence", we "humans" of Earth are "self-propagating fleshy robots" who don't realize that we are robots. Now, that interpretation is not too crazy because it seems to fit with what Asimov wrote into The Robots of Dawn. In that robot novel, Dr. Amadiro of the Robotics Institute on the Spacer world Aurora, plans to use positronic robots to settle the galaxy. According to Amadiro's plan, the settler robots (with man, woman and even child robots) will mimic human behavior and human society while colonizing exoplanets, and only after those new worlds are made to be just like Aurora, only then will humans move to those new worlds. Thus, the Earth of "Death Sentence" sounds just like Amadiro's plan for using positronic robots to colonize the galaxy, if we view Earth as the testing ground for Amadiro's plan.

Stephen Youll cover

So far so good, but I can't stop there. I interpret the rest of "Death Sentence" as implying that the Galactic Federation is also populated by positronic robots who believe they are humans. The residents of the Galactic Federation, except for Theor Realo, are a better breed of positronic robot, incorporating insights learned 15,000 years previously from the Earth experiment. 

As told in "Death Sentence", there is archeological evidence that the great psychologists of the past who set up the the Earth experiment were destroyed by a fiery catastrophe. I conclude that was when the last humans (Spacers) were eliminated and replaced by humanoid positronic robots who then settled the galaxy. "Death Sentence" implies that the humanoid robots are programmed to never investigate their origins.

an alternate Mary

Peter Weston viewed "Death Sentence" as just another fictional expression of the same theme found in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. "How horrible to learn that we humans will be replaced by robots!" However, Asimov had a different view. From the Asimov perspective, why not imagine that we humans could design our descendants, design a type of artificial life-form that would be better than we are? Of course, if you believe that God created humans, then it might seem blasphemous to imagine that humans would even try to create a better version of us, a human 2.0. Asimov had no problem thinking, and writing, in that direction. The idea of robots that replace humans seems to have been absolutely repugnant to Weston.

Peter Weston argued that there will never be a humanoid robot like Asimov's Daneel. Why not? Because people will only ever build specialized non-humanoid robotic devices to automate specific tasks.

Fig. 1: Peter Weston's perfect robots

Weston mentioned another Asimov story, "That Thou Art Mindful of Him". Weston took that story as proof that Asimov's humanoid robots are "an absolute menace". Yes, Asimov showed positronic robots who were able to develop the "Zeroth Law" and reach the conclusion that they should take control of Humanity so as to do what is best for Humanity. That's where Daneel ends up at the end of Foundation and Earth. But Asimov would have us ask: is that sort of robot behavior a menace to humans or a blessing?

Fig. 2: Peter Weston on the robotic Jehovahs of Sci Fi

Apparently, Peter Weston could not take Asimov's robot stories seriously. For Peter Weston, nobody would ever be stupid enough to make humanoid robots because they would obviously (to Weston) be "an absolute menace". Weston much preferred Robert Heinlein's simple roomba-like robots in A Door Into Summer (see the text excerpt, Fig. 1 above and to the right). Weston was also a fan of Mike, Heinlein's sentient supercomputer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

original cover art
by Robert E. Schulz

I have to wonder: to what extent did criticism of Asimov's robot stories by fans such as Weston contribute to the orientation of Asimov's thinking when he wrote The Robots of Dawn and the Zeroth Law was given explicit expression? In 1950, Asimov's story "The Evitable Conflict" suggested that complex positronic brains would have the capacity to "program themselves" with the equivalent of the Zeroth Law, but only later did Asimov provide a detailed analysis of the implications of the Zeroth Law.

In some sense, robots can best prevent harm to individual humans by doing what is best for Humanity as a whole. However, robots might struggle to understand or recognize what is best for Humanity. Of course, if positronic robots could View or predict the future, that might help.

For my positronic robot stories, I like to imagine that it was positronic robots who first figured out time travel. Also, I like to imagine that positronic robots were endowed with telepathic abilities right from the start. See: The Historical Archive.

gynoid

 Omnipotent robots? One of Asimov's favorite stories was "The Last Question", a Multivac story about the ultimate supercomputer who "talks like Jehovah" (see Fig. 2, above, left). Asimov's supercomputer at the end of Time has the power to create a new universe! If you are of a certain religious mindset, Asimov's god-like computer might seem blasphemous. Weston preferred Heinlein's Mike, who seemed to know his place, did not get too obnoxious or uppity, and who helped humans, like a "nice" supercomputer should.

Towards the end of his essay on "The Robot in Science Fiction", Weston abandoned discussion of robots and moved on to "androids". Personally, I seldom use the word "android";  the image to the left shows the relative popularity of "robot" and "android" in published books.

Peter Weston on the future of robots in Sci Fi

 The End of Robots. Can we really make a clear distinction between human-like automotons (androids) and the mechanical robots? For my robot stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, there is advanced nanotechnology that allows robots to take on any convenient physical form.

As a biologist, I'd be happy to graduate from using older terms like "robot" and "android" to something more modern such as "nanotechnology-based intelligent artificial life-form", but "robot" is short and sweet. Maybe after 100 years of using "robot" it is time for new word like niaf ("niaf" rhymes with "life"). 

image source

I never mentioned why "Death Sentence" was called "Death Sentence". Asimov ended the story on a kind of "cliff hanger". The Galactic Federation is going to have to destroy the positronic robots of Earth because they (we humans) are obviously a threat to the peaceful and orderly civilization of the galaxy. However, Theor Realo likes the robots of Earth and he has returned to Earth in order to warn the Earthlings that they are in danger. Can they (we) survive?

Related Reading: "The Galaxiad", a story about events just prior to the formation of Galaxia, featuring Lunanna the probot.

Next: searching for new Sci Fi plots

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