Remarks on Caliban by Roger MacBride

A short reflection on a book I recently read by Roger MacBride, called Caliban, which is set in the universe of the Robots series of Isaac Asimov. Beware, this contains spoilers.

Introduction

I love to combine nature, and especially hiking, with reading because after a long, exhausting day of walking and scaling mountains up and down, I get into a state of mind in which I crave to hop into another world, and a good book does just that for me. Also, sometimes it helps with sleeping, making a smooth transition from the imaginary world to the lands of the dreams. Before my trip to Georgia, I decided to get myself a book in a genre that was uncharted for me, so while I discover new places, I also discover a new book. Sci-fi was always close to my heart, so it's not really fair to say it's new to me, because as a kid, I was heavily influenced by sci-fi movies and video games, but in terms of books, I think I have read only The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the sci-fi genre. I was going through the sci-fi books on the shelf of the used books store, and I was instantly overwhelmed by the options. Many used books were the sequel to a previous book in a trilogy, so they weren't the best choice to be introduced to a new universe, but fortunately I found Caliban by Roger MacBride, which was the first book of a trilogy.

Caliban is set in a world where technological advancements made it possible for humans to travel to outer space, colonize, and most importantly develop robots which can surpass human intelligence. The robots have a positronic brain, in which the Three Laws of Robotics are inculcated:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These laws govern the fundamental behavior and use of robots by humans.

The story takes place on a human colony world called Inferno, where an ongoing terraforming project is in crisis. The problem arises when a new robot named Caliban is created, who has a novel brain design that doesn't have the Three Laws hard-wired into it. Caliban awakens with his arm half raised, next to the unconscious and critically injured body of his creator, and without providing any help, he merely examines the scene and ventures into the city. The body is found not long after, with the Sheriff and his robot partner on the scene, investigating the attack. They quickly face the impossible implication: evidence points to the attacker being a robot. This revelation, Caliban's lawless nature and escape, sets the plot into motion.

Reflections

I won't dwell more on the story of the book, but rather just say the points which came into my mind while I read the book.

The spacer human civilization managed to colonize so many worlds only because they embraced the fruits of robotics and basically the mass amount of labor robots could do for them. The second law of robotics inherently made robots servile to humans. One would call this slavery. Slavery, of course, is only defined for humans, so calling this slavery is a bit far-fetched, but the fundamentals are the same. Slavery, an institution as old as civilization, has morphed to various forms, each being equally devastating and complex. The book presented a civilization where each person had 100 robots on average to serve them in their daily tasks. This was possible since the manufacturing of robots was so cheap; it was basically free. I'm no historian, but in my opinion, every slaver civilization meets its end for the same reason it was able to rise up: slaves. Let's see what this has to do with this book, in my opinion:

• The mass-produced robots and free labor killed technological advancements and improvements. The book mentions that since everything is operated by robots, there is no incentive to improve them for humans. Furthermore, free and unlimited labor makes it hard for new technologies to spread, since financially it's better to just throw in some more slaves instead of putting effort into optimizing a system. This stagnation of technology was also observed in the ancient Roman civilization, because the sheer volume of available physical force overruled every attempt to automate workflows with crude machines.

• It can also be said for the spacer civilization that not only did it stop changing in terms of technology but overall too. The life of a human got so streamlined by the robots that one could get by with the day without actually realising what happened during the day. This made humans comfortable. So comfortable that people got obsessed with it, to the extent that they did everything in their power to avoid anything which is out of the ordinary, since that would induce chaos in their life. The second part of the first law of robotics makes this even worse, since a robot cannot let a human being harm itself. Risks are part of our lives; each decision we make comes with certain risk, and we measure the value of the possible reward with the greatness of the risk. It can be said overall that higher-risk decisions lead to higher rewards. However, the robots see each risk equally because of the first law, since they cannot let humans get into harmful situations no matter the risk. This has an effect on humans too, and they start thinking with the same mindset and stop taking risks. This zeros the chance of harm, but the chance of greatness too. Thankfully, we are not like this, but it is worth mentioning that we do have some levels of this in our civilization too. Advancements in medicine and in technology give us the tools, and law and legislation give us the boundaries and order to surround ourselves with everything which serves the cause of making everyday life just better overall. We live better lives on average than kings lived a hundred years ago. This is good. BUT, we need to stop obsessing over rules and conformity over changes for the better. Changes might put us into a state of discomfort, and I don't want to go on to some crazy talk about how discomfort tests you or whatever, I'm just saying that there is chaos in the world and no matter how hard we try to maintain our little bubble of paradise with our little made up rules, the bubble will pop eventually because the power of change is way bigger than us, and it's going to wash us away if we don't learn to navigate in it. We need to be critical, we need to question statements, we need to start opposing what we feel is not right, even if it means that we are gonna give up some conformity. A society which values conformity over change is doomed to die.

• Additionally to my previous remark, our social interactions also have risks. We do have protocols, like a handshake or small talk like "what's your favorite color", but deeper connection and human emotions like anger, grief, fear, or love make our behaviour unpredictable, not to mention cognitive biases, some of which we inherited from our ancient ancestors, but they still make us do irrational decisions. In the world of Inferno, people are mostly surrounded by robots who don't have these caveats, and humans get used to this, to the point they actually start behaving antisocially, because other humans bring chaos and uncertainty into their lives. Yet again, we are not this doomed; however, we have to admit that a lot of our social activities got virtualized, for the sake of monetization. This migration to the digital world has possibly warped our behaviour to a great extent, but that's another talk. At the end of the day, we were still talking to humans. Until now. Instead of online forums, we have AI; instead of blogs, we have AI slop, and the list goes on. There are layers to this; obviously it's not black and white, but in my opinion, technology made us more antisocial. The Internet was promised to make us more connected, but it actually pushed us away from each other. We need to focus more on genuine and real connections so we can stay human.

• Caliban was highly intelligent; however, he awoke with no experience or memory. In this sense, I think he is very similar to a child. We are blank paper upon being born. We do have instincts engraved in our genes and lots of other features in our brain and body, which will eventually play a role in our personality, so maybe it's better said that we are very rough shapes and objects in the beginning, instead of just papers. That's one of the reasons Caliban was different than the other robots. He had the chance to learn based on experience. Our brain is super fixated on surviving, so it is trying very hard, especially when we are still in our early years, to observe the environment we live in and start figuring out patterns so we can make decisions to improve the chances of not dying. Every experience we go through, bad or good, contributes to the mess we are. It is pretty trivial, but we often forget that everyone around us turned out to be the person they are because of all the experiences they had before. We can go further in this, and say that not only your experiences shape you, but your parents' experiences, since they will have a great effect on your upbringing, and their behaviour, once again decided by their life experience and the chain goes on. I think if this kind of perspective were more dominant in people, then we might be more understanding towards each other. One could even debate that the only sin we ever commit is being born; from there we are just the victims or beneficiaries of our environment. However, this is quite depressing, and would even question free will. Understanding is one thing; justice is another. If someone turns out to be a horrible person, with no respect for basic human values, then being empathic will not stop him or her from inflicting negative experiences on others. Still, this mindset helps me to understand others better. Based on this, but not only this, parenting takes a lot of responsibility. It is crucial not to limit a child's perception of who he or she is, because they can literally be anyone. That's why I hate it whenever someone calls their child lazy or stupid, because eventually they will start acting as one, even though they could have been much different. Also worth mentioning is that we have to be aware of our own weaknesses, so we can stop and save our children from inheriting those traits. Another way, in a later stage, could be that we explain ourselves and our feelings to our children so they understand better. Parents don't have to be perfect. Phew, we are not even close to what the book was about!

• We can safely say that the spacer civilization was highly dependent on robots. The people of Inferno lost the ability to act on their own. Their whole economy was based on robots doing the hard work; their whole belief in civilization was nothing without robots. When a civilization is so dependent on a resource like that, it's a matter of when and not if it's going to collapse. The worst part is that this collapse is not like a small change in living; it's a complete hard reset, because the people got so distorted due to losing basic abilities. Something similar happened in ancient Rome: when Rome stopped conquering new places, and the flow of new slaves was stopped, their whole empire started to decline heavily. Same with the southern states in the United States; their whole economy was based on plantation work done by slaves, and there were not really other industries developing because there was no market for it, and we all know what happened with the South in the Civil War. The robots on Inferno couldn't rebel, since they had the Three Laws hard-wired into them, but it is worth mentioning that the fear of a slave rebellion forces the masters to behave aggressively and completely inhumanely. This behaviour slowly distorts a society's collective moral compass, in a way where human life loses its value, and people start committing so unhinged atrocities that we can hardly even imagine.

I cannot wait to read the sequels to Caliban, to see where the story of a robot without laws unfolds.