Utopia

Caliban was the first of her projects to go badly wrong. Fredda had long wanted to conduct a controlled, limited experiment on how a robot without the Three Laws would behave. But for long years, the very nature of robotics, and the positronic robot brain, had rendered the experiment impossible. Once the gravitonic brain was in her hands, however, she moved quickly toward development of a No Law robot-Caliban. He had been intended for use in a short-term laboratory experiment. The plan had been for him to live out his life in a sealed-off, controlled environment. Caliban had, unfortunately, escaped before the experiment had even begun, becoming entangled in a crisis that had nearly wrecked the government, and the reterraforming program on which all else depended.

The second disaster involved the New Law robots, such as Prospero. Fredda had actually built the first of the New Law robots before Caliban. It was only because the world had become aware of Caliban first that people generally regarded him as preceding the New Laws.

But both the New Laws and Caliban were products of Fredda’s concerns that robots built in accordance with the original Three Laws were wrecking human initiative and tremendously wasteful of robot labor. The more advanced robots became, the more completely they protected humans from danger, and the fewer things humans were allowed to do for themselves. At the same time, humans made the problem worse by putting the superabundance of robot labor to work at the most meaningless and trivial of tasks. It was common to have one robot on hand to cook each meal of the day, or to have one robot in charge of selecting the wine for dinner, while another had as its sole duty the drawing of the cork. Even if a man had only one aircar, he was likely to have five or six robot pilots, each painted a different color, to insure the driver did not clash with the owner’s outfit.

Both humans and robots had tended to consider robots to be of very little value, with the result that robots were constantly being destroyed for the most pointless of reasons, protecting humans from dangers that could have easily been avoided.

Humans were in the process of being reduced to drones. They were unproductive and in large part utterly inactive. Robots did more and more of the work, and were regarded with less and less respect. Work itself was held in lower and lower esteem. Work was what robots did, and robots were lesser beings.

The spiral fed on itself, and Fredda could see it leading down into the ultimate collapse of Spacer society. And so she had developed the New Law robots. The New First Law prevented them from harming humans, but did not require them to take action in order to protect humans. The New Second Law required New Law robots to cooperate with humans, not just obey them blindly. The New Third Law required the New Law robots to preserve themselves, but did not force them to destroy themselves for some passing human whim. The deliberately ambiguous Fourth Law encouraged New Law robots to act for themselves.

The New Laws had seemed so reasonable to Fredda, so clearly an improvement over the original Three Laws. And perhaps they would have been an improvement, if it had been possible to start over, completely from scratch. But the New Law robots came into being on a world where Three-Law robots were already there, and on a world that seemed to have no place for them.

The New Law robots were more catalyst for the second major crisis than actual cause of it. Through a complex series of events, the mere existence of the New Law robots, and the shortage of Three-Law robot labor, had ultimately set in train Governor Chanto Grieg’s assassination. If not for the calm and steady hand of Alvar Kresh, that crisis could have been far worse.

In neither case had the robots, New Law or No Law, Prospero or Caliban, actually malfunctioned. All that was required for disaster and crisis to happen was for people to fear robots that were different. Inferno was a world that did not much like change, and yet it was one that had change thrust upon it. It was a world that punished boldness, and rewarded caution.

And Fredda had suffered punishment enough. Small wonder, then, that Fredda had built herself such a cautious, stolid, lumpen robot as Oberon. But small wonder too that she was already tired of caution.

Fredda shut off the needle-shower and activated the air blowers to dry herself off. She smiled, and reminded herself that even the simple act of taking a shower by herself, bathing herself, represented a revolution. Ten years before, such a thing would have been unthinkable, scandalous. There would have been a waterproofed domestic robot to take her clothes off for her, activate the shower system for her, push the dry button for her, and dress her again, in clothes selected by the robot.