War with the Robots

Like human slaves or serfs, robots will not need — from the point of view of their masters, anyway — any unnecessary education. A serf "needs" to know only such information as relates to fanning, and how to do what he’s told — fast. Anything more is pointless, and potentially dangerous, since it tends to raise such nasty questions as, is this the way it should be? And next thing you know, faithful Wamba is studing out ways to burn down the manor house and sharpening his sickle meaningfully… It’s too soon to know if robots would react the same way, but they, too, will only "know" what they have to — expense alone would see to that.

Yet some robots will have to have access to Information that they have no immediate need for. For example, a robot librarian would need a well-stocked memory just to answer a simple question….

THE ROBOT WHO WANTED TO KNOW

THAT WAS THE TROUBLE WITH Filer 13B-445-K, he wanted to know things that he had just no business knowing. Things that no robot should be interested in — much less investigate. But Filer was a very different type of robot.

The trouble with the blonde in tier 22 should have been warning enough for him. He had hummed out of the stack room with a load of books, and was cutting through tier 22 when he saw her bending over for a volume on the bottom shelf.

As he passed behind her he slowed down, then stopped a few yards further on. He watched her intently, a strange glint in his metallic eyes.

As the girl bent over her short skirt rode up to display an astonishing length of nylon-clad leg. That it was a singularly attractive leg should have been of no interest to a robot — yet it was. He stood there, looking, until the blonde turned suddenly and noticed his fixed attention.

"If you were human, Buster," she said, "I would slap your face. But since you are a robot, I would like to know what your little photon-filled eyes find so interesting?"

Without a microsecond’s hesitation, Filer answered, "Your seam is crooked." Then he turned and buzzed away.

The blonde shook her head in wonder, straightened the offending stocking, and chalked up another credit to the honor of electronics.

She would have been very surprised to find out what Filer had been looking at. He had been staring at her leg. Of course he hadn’t lied when he answered her — since he was incapable of lying — but he had been looking at a lot more than the crooked seam. Filer was facing a problem that no other robot had ever faced before.

Love, romance, and sex were fast becoming a passionate interest for him.

That this interest was purely academic goes without saying, yet it was still an interest. It was the nature of his work that first aroused his curiosity about the realm of Venus.

A Filer is an amazingly intelligent robot and there aren’t very many being manufactured. You will find them only in the greatest libraries, dealing with only the largest and most complex collections. To call them simply librarians is to demean all librarians and to call their work simple. Of course very little intelligence is required to shelf books or stamp cards, but this sort of work has long been handled by robots that are little more than wheeled IBM machines. The cataloging of human information has always been an incredibly complex task. The Filer robots were the ones who finally inherited this job. It rested easier on their metallic shoulders than it ever had on the rounded ones of human librarians.

Besides a complete memory, Filer had other attributes that are usually connected with the human brain. Abstract connections for one thing. If he was asked for books on one subject, he could think of related books in other subjects that might be referred to. He could take a suggestion, pyramid it into a category, then produce tactile results in the form of a mountain of books.

These traits are usually confined to homo sapiens. They are the things that pulled him that last, long step above his animal relatives. If Filer was more human than other robots, he had only his builders to blame.

He blamed no one — he was just interested. All Filers are interested, they are designed that way. Another Filer, 9B-367-0, librarian at the university in Tashkent, had turned his interest to language due to the immense amount of material at his disposal. He spoke thousands of languages and dialects, all that he could find texts on, and enjoyed a fine reputation in linguistic circles. That was because of his library. Filer 13B, he of the interest in girls’ legs, labored in the dust filled corridors of New Washington. In addition to all the gleaming new microfiles, he had access to tons of ancient printed-on-paper books that dated back for centuries.

Filer had found his interest in the novels of that by-gone time.