I steal

Image: Vikash Singh
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By PALACE MARKERS*

Considerations on Isaac Asimov's book that turns 75.

During the 40s, the celebrated science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) wrote a series of short stories featuring robots in their relationships with human beings.

In 1950, it emerged I, Robot (I steal), a collection that brings together these stories and celebrates its 75th anniversary.

Unlike most science fiction literature, which tends to age quickly, the stories of I steal remain current and provide a counterpoint – to a certain extent optimistic – to negative or even apocalyptic views surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) which, in recent years, has become the focus of attention and disputes, both of technophilia and technophobia.

The collection brings together nine short stories, presented through an interview with Dr. Susan Calvin, a 'robotic psychologist' and employee of US Robots and Mechanical Men, the mega-company that produces positronic robotic brains and their application to different types of automatons.

– Excuse me. I believe I heard your name correctly: Dr. Susan Calvin, is that right?

– Yes, Mr. Byerley.

– You are the psychologist at US Robots, it is not?

– Psychologist roboticist

– Oh! Are robots mentally different from men?

– Very different (…) Robots are essentially decent.

What is a Homo sapiens? A being with a high capacity to think and act logically and intelligently? Is this the essential characteristic in defining a human being? Or is it precisely the irrational in us, that which lies below (or beyond?) intelligence – our feelings, our fears, our passions – that makes us truly human? Can a machine dream, have hallucinations, obsessions, desires, wants? Or ask itself about the meaning of being in the world? Can it be taught to love? Or is loving and arousing the feeling of love in Others an exclusively human attribute, an innate quality, part of our genome?

the tales of I steal revolve around questions like these, based on multiple situations arising from the coexistence between humans and robots.

The “I,” in the collection’s title, is a clear indication of Isaac Asimov’s intention in each of the narratives: a dive into the subjectivity of machines in their relationship with humans. A relationship of affection and trust between a child and his mechanical caregiver; a robot that systematically lies so as not to hurt feelings or cause harm; the impasse between obeying or self-preservation; the suspicions that a robot is pretending to be human in order to run for high political office, are some of the situations explored in the pages of I steal. The plots are completed with the conflicts, dramas and comedies between the human characters involved.

Isaac Asimov elaborates and explores situations in which intelligence, rationality, feelings, and consciousness begin to – dangerously – become confused and fused, in the increasingly complex mathematical equations involved in the construction of increasingly sophisticated positronic brains. The culmination, in one of the short stories in the collection, is the appearance of a robot capable of theological musings that, through logical reasoning, begins to disbelieve that it was created by humans:

“Look at you,” he said finally. “I don’t say this in a derogatory way… but look at you! The material you’re made of is soft and flabby, devoid of strength and resistance, and whose energy depends on the inefficient oxidation produced by organic material like… that.” He pointed disapprovingly at the remains of Donovan’s sandwich. “You periodically go into a coma, and the slightest change in temperature, air pressure, humidity, or radiation intensity compromises your efficiency. You’re temporary. I, on the other hand, am a finished product. I absorb electrical energy directly and utilize it with an efficiency of almost one hundred percent. I am made of strong and resistant metal, I remain continuously conscious, and I can easily withstand extreme changes in environment. These are the facts that, supported by the obvious proposition that no being is capable of creating another being superior to itself, completely destroy your foolish hypothesis.”

Yuval Harari, perhaps the most well-known and media-savvy author of science today, in a recent interview, reinforced the already widespread fears that humanity will end up a victim of its own technological development and vehemently called for the production of artificial intelligence tools to be subject to strict controls, as in the case of cars and medicines: “Artificial intelligence is the most powerful technology ever created by humanity, because it is the first that can make decisions: an atomic bomb cannot decide who to attack, nor can it invent new bombs or new military strategies. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, can decide on its own to attack a specific target and can invent new bombs” (Folha de S. Paul, 03/09/2024).

Isaac Asimov's robots, at least in theory, do not need external controls, as Yuval Harari demands, since they are internally governed by inflexible principles, implanted in their positronic brains, the famous Three Laws of Robotics, invented by the author: (i) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. (ii) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where these orders would conflict with the First Law. (iii) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

At first glance, the Three Laws seem to constitute an absolute guarantee that intelligent machines will not exceed limits that could endanger humans. They are a counterpoint to the so-called Frankenstein Complex, the idea that robots are inherently threatening or evil and that humans will sooner or later create machines that will turn against them. However, all the stories in the collection, in one way or another, are articulated precisely around the tensions and conflicts between the three laws, leading to crisis situations, sometimes with potentially paradoxical or disastrous results.

In the 1940s, when the tales of I, robot were collected, computers were still machines that worked with hundreds or thousands of valves, weighed tons and occupied entire floors of a building. It is interesting to recall, through the temporality expressed in the stories, how Asimov, at that time, imagined what the future would be like in the 21st century, that is, what is today our present, our past or our very near future.

In the collection, 1996 appears as the zero year for the creation of the first robots, conceived as domestic helpers: nannies, butlers, cooks, all very efficient and safe, but completely mute. The first talking robot would only appear in 2002, but in 2007 the automatons would be restricted to bases and colonies outside of Earth. In the futurist vision of Isaac Asimov, in 2015, we would already be mining on Mercury and other planets in the solar system, with the help of robots; in 2029 the 'hyperspace leap' was about to happen, allowing the establishment of human colonies on the planets of the stars closest to the Milky Way, in the following decades.

If Isaac Asimov's expectations regarding interplanetary travel and exploration went beyond the technological advances and achievements of our reality, his predictions regarding robotics and artificial intelligence come considerably closer to real developments in this field.

Broadly speaking, what has been happening is a gradual incorporation of artificial intelligence and robotics into our daily lives, in a continuous, subtle and inescapable way. It is easy to give an example: in 1997, Garry Kasparov, the then world chess champion, was defeated by Deep Blue, an IBM computer program; if we are not already mining on Mercury, as anticipated by Isaac Asimov, we have Rovers NASA exploring the surface of Mars since 2004, and humans living in space stations fully controlled by Artificial Intelligence.

Delicate surgery is now much safer and more effective if performed by robots; the use of automatons in large-scale industrial processes is widespread; robots are used with great efficiency in the search for missing people in large-scale natural disasters; virtual assistants Alexa and Siri are now part of many families; we cross the world on transatlantic flights in the hands of 'autopilots' and few drivers today venture to navigate a large city without the help of Waze or Google Maps.

Journalism has been increasingly supported, if not entirely produced, by generative Artificial Intelligence; we carry shops, restaurants and all kinds of services (as well as our bank accounts to pay for them!) in our pockets; education and artistic creation, in all areas, are strongly supported by Artificial Intelligence resources and large-scale scientific research, such as genetic mapping, depends decisively on it, as does espionage, wars, terrorism, and the panoptic surveillance of the common citizen.

In the same year that I steal was released, British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) created a test, that bears his name, to identify interactions between humans and between a human and a machine, through a written question-and-answer protocol. Last year, ChatGPT-4.0 reportedly passed the Turing Test, even if there is objections and proposals for more refined tests for use in the area of ​​Natural Language Processing (NLP).

In fact, given other recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, perhaps the Turing Test has become anachronistic. If not, let's see: I asked ChatGPT 4.0: “Write a sonnet about Hunger, in the style of João Cabral de Melo Neto”. Here is the result:

Sonnet of hunger

Hunger is a blade that cannot be seen,
cuts from the inside, bleeds without a slope;
it is a dull knife that, even absent,
engraves on the body what he does not believe in.

It is not a word, nor a verse, nor a song,
but cold iron in the dry crackling air;
it is ground without plants, a wall that does not speak,
it is a hollow house that breathes tears.

In the dead mouth, nothing chewed;
in the opaque eye, the cutting silence,
Hunger is a stone that does not turn sideways.

Don't ask, take, in constant time;
and what it devours, always remains marked:
in the hard flesh, in the distant dream.

Having read the poem, we may have differing assessments regarding its literary value or its proximity to the poet's style, but faced with it perhaps the most pertinent Asimovian question is: “At some future time, will Artificial Intelligence be able to understand the sonnet it created?”

Humanoid robots are not yet circulating in large numbers among us, but we certainly live and interact daily with the 'electronic brain' (Gilberto Gil, 1969), on a scale of such vast proportions that it leads to the naturalization of these processes.

If he exaggerated in some technological predictions, Isaac Asimov was absolutely right in one cultural detail: smoking persisted in his 2021st century, with one of his characters – human, of course – smoking cigars in 2052, and another lighting a cigarette in 2029. And yet, his predictions of the future slip up on a small detail that would make a Millennial smile: in XNUMX, on a military and scientific base located on an asteroid, a photograph taken during an experiment still had to be chemically developed in order to be seen!

In 2004, a film with the same title was released, directed by Alex Proyas, but it is not an adaptation of the book, but rather a police film, with a rather loose use of the characters and ideas from Isaac Asimov's short stories, centered around a murder plot. Nothing that, cinematically, can compare to remarkable productions on the theme of thinking machines, such as Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), which pioneered the introduction of Maria, the first cinematic android; 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), with the powerful and crazy supercomputer Hall 9000; or Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), with the unforgettable Rachael, a replicant so perfect that she even had memories of a childhood she never lived.

But maybe it is AI – Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001) the cinematographic work that most closely portrays the themes and concerns of I steal. Structured like a fairy tale, Steven Spielberg's film shares with this literary genre the characteristic of situating the actions of its characters between the sweetest fantasy and pure terror, between the magical and the dark.

As you would expect, I steal and the work of Isaac Asimov in general have been the subject of countless critical reviews, literary articles, and the subject of academic dissertations and doctoral theses. At the end, I compile a short list of readings of this genre.

If it is true that science fiction often ages badly, Isaac Asimov's robots are still young and doing well, thank you very much. If you don't know them, it's time to do so; if you do, it's time to get to know them again.

*Marcos Palacios, sociologist, retired professor of Social Communication at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).

Reference

Isaac Asimov. I steal. Translation: Aline Storto Pereira. New York, New York, 2014, 320 pages. [https://amzn.to/4gOV8sU]

REFERENCES

BALKIN, JM (2024) The Three Laws of Robotics in the Age of Big Data, Fundamental Rights and Democracy Magazine, Vol. 29 (2), Curitiba. Here.

COSTA, Monize FV & ARAUZ, Valéria AR (2018) Limits and possibilities of automaton characters in “I steal”, by Isaac Asimov, XXII National Congress of Linguistics and Philology, Rio de Janeiro. Here.

GOMES, Miguel R. (2012). Deus ex machina: History and Utopia in Isaac Asimov, E-topia: Electronic Journal of Studies on Utopia (13), Porto. Look here.

LAZARINI, L. (2022) Dimensions of the unconscious in the short story “Robot Dreams”, by Isaac Asimov, Literartes, (17), p. 249/254, Sao Paulo. Look here.

MELO, Karen Stephanie (2016). Isaac Asimov's robots: an analysis of the relationship between man and machine in science fiction literature and cinema, Doctoral Thesis, Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, São Paulo. Look here.

ORSI, Carlos. (2019). In Isaac Asimov's 'I, Robot', robots are distraction, With Science, Electronic Journal of Scientific Journalism, Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science, April 2019. Here.

PEREIRA, Ivo S. (2006) I steal and strong artificial intelligence: man between mind and machine, Science & Cognition, v.9, p. 150/157, Nov. 2006, Rio de Janeiro. Look here.

PEREIRA, Fernanda L. & PISETTA, Lenita M. (2020). Cases of polysemy and translation choices in the short story “The Little Lost Robot”, by Isaac Asimov, TradTerm, v.35, June/2020, p. 25-48, São Paulo. Here.

SEIFFERT, Andreya S. (2018) Asimov's Robots and the Future of Humanity, ANPHLAC Electronic Journal, (24). Sao Paulo. Look here.

TIMELINE OF COMPUTER HISTORY -Computer History Museum – 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94043 Here.


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