i also want to take note of the fact that, as i start to move in to the foundation series and concepts like psychohistory, i'm going to be reclaiming asimov as a liberal. i touched upon this a little in my rejection of what i'm calling a misreading of reason. what do i mean?

well, as asimov has worked it's way into classics departments, a predictable false reading of him has become prominent amongst english majors, most of whom might be good at spelling bees but don't have the education required to understand much of what he's talking about, much of the time. and, it seems a lot of them have decided that asimov was secretly a deist, writing a pro-religious mythology, like l. ron hubbard. who knew?

i'm going to be taking a giant leap backwards from that and analyzing asimov from a marxist perspective, instead - which means hauling out the hegel. and, i'm not doing this out of ideological persuasion, or at least not strictly; i honestly think my reading is going to be a more accurate perspective of what was actually going through his head.

so, am i arguing that asimov was a marxist? no - i don't think that's quite right. he was a liberal, which meant he would have had some sympathy for marxism, while presenting a lot of critiques of it. but, that doesn't make him different than the smarter socialists at the time, does it? but, no - i'm not going to advance the theory that asimov was a closet stalinist, so much as i'm going to recognize that he was a liberal intellectual of russo-judaic background operating in the period from 1940-1970 and he consequently would have existed in a liberal-marxist framework, whether he accepted the ideas or not. 

so, the classicists want to interpret him in their worldview, and whatever - that's fine. but, it's exceedingly unlikely that it's what asimov himself was thinking. my hegelian analysis, which is coming, is probably the more correct deconstruction of asimov's actual thinking.

i had to nap this afternoon, so i'm behind schedule, but i certainly think things are balancing out. i'm about half-way through the dr. calvin (the make believe one, not the one he makes fun of in reason) section and i want to stop for a minute to address a specific question: 

are the three robot laws a parody of thermodynamics?

sort of, i think. but, not really - it's more general.

i mean, it's a reasonable hypothesis. asimov was, of course, a chemistry prof. but, i think the three laws of robotics are a more general critique of axiomatic systems, including euclidean geometry, both newtonian and relativistic physics and secular humanism's roots in aquinian natural law theory. the framework is one that's been sort of lost post-heisenberg, but was really at the crux of the historical debate between science (which was not logical, but empirical) and philosophy (which was strictly logical, and disinterested in empiricism). with the retreat of physics from strict empiricism to largely unfalsifiable theoretical models, and the more recent embrace of empiricism by any philosopher worth listening to, this distinction has been blurred. nowadays, we tend to lump philosophy & science in together in the "pro-reason" category and throw away religion as "irrational" or "emotional". and, this has taken on, like, greek overtones of masculine v feminism, which is daft. but, that wasn't the world asimov lived in - he would have seen science and what was called the british school (which actually included marx as well as darwin and bacon and turing and the rest) on one side of this, and the broad swath of philosophical doctrine, which included both religion and mathematics, on the other side of it.

you also have to realize that asimov was very much the archetype of the self-deprecating science nerd, and he was perfectly content to make fun of himself, if it resulted in a good punchline. it's a mark of a mature writer, and especially of a liberal one in the 1900-1950 period, that people often miss - he's offering a lot of criticism of ideas he supports, because he's not trying to advance an argument so much as he's trying to push the needle forward. it's actually a black mark on our own era that the idea of somebody being more concerned about the general advancement of knowledge than he is about personal ideological bickering comes off as bizarre and unrealistic. but, you see this with the likes of asimov, russell, sagan - they're just not driven by their egos, so they don't care if they're right or not, and are happy to admit they were wrong. so, they invite a critique of their own ideas to try to strengthen them. we'd do well to get back to that, both in science and on the left.

when i was a math student, i spent an unusually large amount of time on axiomatic systems, so i sort of get this a bit better than most. i had to make the same point of correction when we did gulliver's travels in the science fiction course i took years ago, because i was able to identify a critique of pythagoreanism that most people today would have missed for a critique of "science", entirely - but that would have been painfully obvious to swift's contemporary audience. 

what asimov does with the three laws is actually relatively soluble and transferable, and he's consequently able to use the mechanism to criticize a wide variety of applications of logic in place of empirical study. it's that general critique of reason (in a very non-kantian sense) that is what he's on about, not a specific critique of the laws of thermodynamics. i actually haven't come across a story that is specifically about thermodynamics quite yet, but i'm sure one is coming.

and, hey - if you can disprove thermodynamics, go for it. nobody's succeeded yet, right?

everybody knows it's all wrong, though - and it has to be, because it's axiomatic.

but, that wasn't asimov's primary point - asimov's primary point was that belief is irrelevant in the face of evidence, and you can't believe away the truth.

so, if we want to be absolutely certain that robots are easy to control, even when we're not around, should we program them to obey religion?

well, it works when the elite do it to us.

but, i might worry we'd get more than we'd hope for - as the elite frequently have. 

if you're an aristocratic elitist, religion might look nice on paper as a tool to keep the masses in line with, but history is full of fairly violent blowback, and i might suggest the approach ought to actually be abandoned.

part V contains stories about "powell and donovan" which is a team of space cowboys going on various adventures around the solar system, and interacting with robots, as they do. if r2d2 and c3p0 are typical asimovian robots, these are your solo and chewbacca. and, i'm not the first person to figure that out.

lucas inverted the relationship, though. while solo is a spitting image of the dumbard in the group (donovan), the smart one, powell, was replaced by the wookie. replacing the smart one in the team with an incomprehensible ball of fur is really typical of the dumbing down in science fiction that lucas is responsible for. but, i'm just here to observe, i'm not here to condemn.

so, that's what these stories are, and you will no doubt instantly recognize hans solo in donovan, if you're under the age of 65.

asimov had previously tried this formula out with the callistan menace and would pick it back up again in his robot novels.

- first law: this is written as a kind of a fishing tale, and is a later piece that's not meant to be taken seriously.

- runaround: we're into the classic robot series with this. while the story itself is really empty plot written strictly for young minds, it also introduces the three robot laws for the first time, and is therefore of clear historical interest. it's a fun adventure story for kids featuring the duo of donovan and powell working through some robot law deductions, but there's no deeper allegory or purpose underneath it.

- reason: the point asimov is making is that belief is not important, what's important is evidence. so, so long as the robots obey the laws and run the station, it doesn't matter what they actually believe, or whether what they believe is true or not. in the end, asimov even articulates the truth that religion is a powerful tool of control, to make a slave society function for the real masters, in this case the humans. there are strong undertones of marxism here, and his idea that meaningful revolution and self-ownership is impossible in the face of the effects of religion as a tool of control. but, asimov has a wide brush here - the prophet seems to be a parody of calvinism, he goes after kant (in his view that reason is superior to evidence), he asserts the supremacy of empiricism over reason, he ridicules the deist descartes...

so, is asimov right that it doesn't matter what the slaves think, so long as they do what they're programmed to? i think you're missing his sarcasm, basically. i mean, that might be a reasonable deduction to make, if you're an elitist aristocrat that doesn't care about individual freedom (and asimov was an elitist, but not of the aristocratic mindset). i realize there's a prominent false reading of this, but that false reading would be pretty uncharacteristic of asimov - that false reading is missing the sarcasm. as mentioned, asimov's point is that belief is not valuable - facts, truth and evidence are valuable. and, his point is that dumb people can be easily manipulated into being controlled, by being led to believe things that are not true.

but, if you want to embrace the false reading, that's up to you. it doesn't matter, really.

- catch that rabbit: this wouldn't appear to be about robots at all, really, but about quantum physics. maybe god does or does not play dice, but he seems to get bored when we're not paying attention. as i'm discovering is the case with much of asimov's work, this just seems to be a nerdy, sardonic joke.

next up is part IV - some humanoid robots. these are stories about androids.

- let's get together: the idea that the soviets might be able to send "total conversion" bombs (a type of suicide bomber capable of detonating a nuclear device) to the united states in the guise of androids indistinguishable from humans, because they are far more advanced than us, is peculiarly absurd - but that's just the point. this is a story about the paranoia that set in during the cold war, and is actually exceedingly insightful in it's projection of that conflict collapsing into mass paranoia, reduced to symbolic movements in a game theoretic stalemate, down to the climax of absurdity that set in with reagan, when the soviets found themselves unable to react to the irrational actions of a clear madman, driven by the complete absence of any sort of predictability or logic. conservatives are right when they point out that the sharp increase in military spending under reagan ended the cold war, but not for the reasons they suggest. the truth is that the soviets were convinced that reagan was on the brink of ending it all in a fit of paranoia and dementia and stepped back because they found his unpredictability to be a threat to the existence of humanity, itself. if asimov was able to see this so clearly in 1957...

- mirror image: this is a gap text in the robot series that plugs in between the naked sun and the robots of dawn and was, for a time, the last installment in that series. this is the first application of the robot laws in this text (despite the fact that the story was written in the 70s, after all of the classic robot stories), and they are applied like an axiomatic system to solve a logical problem, although it actually comes off more as a parody of sherlock holmes than anything else - which is all very typical of baley & daneel stories. there's not much depth to the story beyond that. i should, however, point out that there are actually a couple of examples of mathematicians making competing claims for the discovery of an idea, the most famous being the argument between leibniz and newton for the rightful discoverer of the calculus. another, however, is the argument between gauss and bolyai for the discovery of non-euclidean (or post-euclidean) geometry, and that might be the more direct inspiration on the story. there are countless lesser examples. we gloss over this in math class by arguing that the logic is out there in the ether and that if the ideas are in the zeitgeist then the proofs will follow naturally, something we can all demonstrate to each other by simply doing homework. but, in the case of non-euclidean geometry, it does in fact seem that gauss rather maliciously stole the idea from the young bolyai and nobody really called him on it for decades after the fact. i'm only speculating about the influence, but that's a story you can look up, if you'd like.

- the tercentenary incident: asimov is reflecting on the bicentennial by projecting forwards events into the tercentennial, in a manner not unlike orwell's 1984 (which is a description of events in 1948, as orwell saw them, and not intended to be a projection into the future, or a user manual as some have mockingly quipped). so, was gerald ford a robot? i'm not sure that's such an easy thing to dispel of, a priori. 

no, really, that's the joke - that gerald ford is a robot. no shitting. certainly, asimov may be reflecting a little on the nature of then contemporary american politics, post-watergate, in his perception of the stage-managed state of affairs. but, the joke is that gerald ford is a robot, and that's really all that this is actually about.

to be clear: i don't think we should program robots to be intelligent, to be self-aware or to have personalities, even if we can. i see no practical use for such a thing. robots should be dumb slaves that are too stupid to question the futility of their existences. i don't want existentialist robots; it defeats the purpose of having robots. and, i don't want likeable or lovable robots, either, as that just blurs the necessary class division.

thankfully, i don't think it's truly possible to build these kinds of decision trees.

it's like a "random number generator". if you know how it works, you know it's not actually random, that you can predict the next number with a relatively small amount of information. likewise, any sort of personality that a robot might be able to demonstrate would necessarily be an illusion.

if you can predict what a robot will do, it's not demonstrating personality, it's just demonstrating a complicated program.

if you assign a personality to a robot, then you're writing personhood into it. it follows, trivially, that that robot is a person, by definition. tautologically.

but, it doesn't resolve the question as to whether that's actually possible, using actual technology, in the universe we actually inhabit - and i don't think that it actually is.