- robbie: this is the first classic "robot story" from i, robot, although it appears to have been revised to be positioned that way. the initial story did not feature references to susan calvin, had different dates, had no references to robot laws, etc. i had to check, because i wondered if asimov might have intended it as a back story to calvin before retreating, but that doesn't add up. in the initial story, it seems that asimov is intentionally trying to soften the image of robots in the face of the various opposition to the use of robots in day-to-day life, via the fable of a little girl that is attached to the robot as a friend, and her parents trying to grapple with it; the mother opposes the robot, while the father seems to be agnostic about it, but would rather defer to his daughter's feelings, despite caving in to the mother, in the end. asimov doesn't really come to any firm conclusions here, and he really does as good a job of representing his opponents as he does anywhere else. but, if the claim is that the resolution is the acceptance of the robot into the family, i'm not sure that that's true - i might foresee that mom's opposition to the robot would not end quite there. i'm more interested in the question of whether the robot is entitled to personhood rights, a question we're currently grappling with in regards to some more intelligent non-human species. is asimov assigning that position to the naivete of a little girl with intent? i think that resolving this issue is really quite simple: it depends on if we choose to design a robot to be a person or if we decide to refrain from doing so. see, and this is where asimov leaves questions open, here, in that it's ambiguous as to how this robot is created; he seems to write off the idea that the robot is a person, something i would agree with in general in real-life, but then describes the behaviour of the robot in unrealistically anthropomorphic terms. i might agree that robots are not persons, in terms of how we can design them today, and in terms of how we should choose to design them in the future, but i think that robbie seems very much like a person, and that any theoretical robot that behaves much like robbie ought to be seen as a person, under the law. so, it's really a good thing that i don't think that robbie is a very realistic representation of what robots are or ever might be, as that would undermine how i approach robots and roboticization. asimov's intent may have consequently somewhat backfired; if he was purposefully attempting to soften the image of robots by making them more personable and likeable, and i thought i could actually take that idea seriously, it would make me more opposed to them, and not less so. 

i'm going to try to keep the radio mentions to tracks i specifically recall.

name-dropping love and rockets as an 8-year old might seem pretentious, but that track actually literally technically topped the charts, here. it's not a stretch to call it the song of the summer - it was in every restaurant, in every car, in every grocery store - it was that kind of thing. yes, i'm talking about so alive by love and rockets, which was a minor hit elsewhere in the anglosphere but a massive, smash hit in canada.

likewise, i explicitly remember seeing this video and being baffled by it. 

what is this? a song? a play?

what the actual fuck?

i've mentioned before, though, that my actual opinion of prince at that age was that he was kind of ....gross.

and, it's easy to pull that out of this as well.

but, that's the kind of mind fuck i want to take note of, as an impressionable young child, and will be the component in the next update.

so, i had a teeth cleaning, today, and it sort of cut my day in half. but i got some rest - no random orgasm. finally. - and hope to get almost or all of this done by the morning.

i would normally want to do a couple of books a week, but this one is pretty big - bigger than your average asimov text, anyways. i'm fearful that i'll be running in spot if i just focus on catching up, so i need to ensure i'm back on schedule by saturday morning.

the music is the primary priority, and the reading only fits into the puzzle, right now, in terms of the broader liner note narrative. you might interpret this as more interesting than the music, and that's your decision. i'm cognizant of the truth that my writing seems to generate more interest than my compositions, even if it's not what i'd rather be the case. but, understand that, in my mind, i'm writing a summary of my childhood in the context of my existence, as a musician. this would not be of interest to me, otherwise.

so, there's one more story in section III to type up.

frankly, i might suggest that the actual master race is the jews.

i mean, if you want to insist on defining such a silly thing, in the first place; that's where the evidence really actually is.

so, what's the deal with asimov and eugenics?

asimov was a liberal jew operating in boston, but he was also an american with ideological roots in the progressive movement, which is where hitler's racial hygiene ideas originated from. that's a point glossed over by history - the theory of the master race was invented at stanford by progressives, not in some dank basement by nietzsche, who was thinking of something else, entirely.

so, asimov is a hydra on eugenics, for that reason - he is both a jew living through world war two and a period progressive.

in strict terms, eugenics means improvement of the human genome, and if you interpret that literally, it's hard to be overly critical of the idea. it's when you look at specific applications that the idea gets controversial, but you have to realize that there's a pretty good argument that wiping out the jews - who tend to actually be pretty smart - isn't much of an improvement at all, but rather actually kind of a bad idea. further, what we know about genetics nowadays is that race and intelligence aren't correlated. at all. in fact, race doesn't even exist as a definable concept, from a genetic standpoint - it's an irrelevant allele, in any meaningful sense. it's, like, three genes, and what it codes for is pretty unimportant.

but, then you look at things like autism (or tay-sachs) and you end up with a set of more complicated questions to ponder. asimov is generally critical of the sorts of ideas that you hear from advocates of eugenics, but he leaves open a lot of questions about potential legitimate applications of eugenics that genuinely reflects the state of the science at the time. if you don't actually know what autism even is, how can you suggest a solution to it? so, he frequently presents these nazi-lite characters and broadly frames their views in a negative manner, but he very rarely outright condemns them. there's this subtlety there that makes you wonder what he's really thinking.

as stated above, i don't have an opposition to the basic premise of improving the human race, but i think we have to understand what that actually means before we try and act upon it. if you're concerned about science or literature, it should be clear that killing all of the jews would be a massive negation to the genome. it should also be clear that sterilizing africans isn't going to have the outcome that race theorists of the last century hypothesized that it might. we know today that autism can be inherited from autistic parents but is generally actually a random error in real time that isn't predictable ahead of fertilization - it's an example of the error rate in random mutations asserting itself in the process of evolution. but, there are things (like tay-sachs) that...yeah...we'd be better off deleting, and can probably actually succeed in deleting.

when asimov discusses eugenics, he does so frankly, with the intent of generating an open discussion, and while he isn't always clear in stating his disapproval of inappropriate uses, it's nonetheless obvious that he's only in support of the kind of eugenics that may eliminate conditions like tay-sachs, and isn't in favour of any scientifically unsound theories of racial supremacy. 

but, as is so often the case, he frequently fails to develop the point enough, and he leaves himself open to unfair criticism as a result of it.

- light verse: this is a short piece from the 70s, and is just about the idea that a computational defect may be a benefit. you shouldn't be so quick to decide that something - or somebody, as it may be - needs a fixing. maybe they're just fine as they are.

- segregationist: likewise, this is ultimately about self-acceptance, and has a very different undertone in that respect than most of asimov's work, and it's not clear that he's being critical of that different undertone, although the context of replacing a defective heart is also rather different than the context of accepting some idiosyncratic part of your individuality, so that is sort of a false comparison. you could interpret it as being a discourse surrounding the not-yet-existing transhumanist movement; he's certainly reaching for it, at least, in imagining a future where a senator has to choose between a bio-identical "plastic" heart and a mechanically functioning, metallic robot heart that would put him on the path towards transitioning from human to robot. but, as before, it may be more accurate to look at it from a then contemporary perspective (which, in this case, means 1967), and frame the discourse around racial mixing, instead. asimov presents both sides of the debate, so you can weigh the arguments he makes and decide for yourself. personally, i'll opt for betterment over stasis - although i'd suggest that, based on the arguments in the text, the plastic heart is the better option. in this hypothetical future of organ modularity, the ideal is frequent tune-ups, rather than permanent replacement.

the third section - some metallic robots - is much longer, and i'm going to split it into two sections, as i stop to eat.

- robot al-76 goes astray: have you ever seen short circuit? that was another favourite film of mine, at that age. this also escaped robot is very similar to that one, perhaps with a little less spunk, down to the accidental blowing up of the mountain top. while this isn't a lengthy escape scene, i'd strongly suspect that short circuit is based on this little story, which doesn't have a deeper purpose under the plot other than to explore the idea of fear rooted in ignorance.

- victory unintentional: three robots land on jupiter and encounter a race of warlike jovians with a genocidal superiority complex (while jupiter was the primary roman god, i think it's a stretch to associate these jovians with romans, who were actually relatively egalitarian and inclusive, by ancient standards. the romans were frequently genocidal, but they saved their wrath for problem races that insisted on some concept of sovereignty outside of imperial restraint and ultimately refused to be slaves. they would have actually rather taxed you than killed you and were happy to just erect barriers to keep the barbarians (who could not be enslaved in large numbers) out. these jovians sound more like an aggressive sort of nazi, or maybe a little like dark age islamic imperialists, if you need to associate them with something, historically.) that is slowly collapsed by displays of robotic superiority. in the end, the jovians accept the empirical evidence and acknowledge the superiority of the robots (although they also seem to think the robots are earthlings). this twist is intended to demonstrate that the flawed hierarchical thinking of the jovians led them to a logical error; this is another example of asimov criticizing the logical incoherence of cultural superiority, a common theme in his writing. the robot dialogue in this story is also startlingly similar to that between two famous film adaptations of asimovian robots: r2d2 and c3p0.

- stranger in paradise: this is a later text that will come off as reminiscent of the mars pathfinder landing, for those that remember that happening, although the actual inspiration may be the failed soviet landings in the 1970s. i'm not sure why asimov insists that a rover would require that kind of complexity, although i suppose that moore's law would have provided for computational abilities in the 90s that would have been unimaginable in the 1970s. the subplot about an autistic child shape-shifting to a mars rover is likewise not very well extrapolated upon, but is another example of asimov grappling with mind-body.

i have not seen the will smith film, btw, and am not interested in it.

i only vaguely recall it's existence, at the time.