Asimov felt that the
real problem of human evil is that people have a moral choice.
People could be good, but they could also choose to be evil, and
that's a bother, because you have to persuade people to be moral and
all. His robots are superior because they are denied that choice. The
robots are Asimov's vision of a perfectible man; one from whom free
will is eliminated and who can be literally programmed to be morally
good. It is telling that Asimov never came to grips with the
dilemma posed by such a creature. Is a robot good if it is
without the option of moral choice? If morality, as Lewis points
out, is something that is merely programmable, then why should
the programmers follow any morality rather than their own base or
mischievous whims? If someone had told me that they had
programmed a machine that was morally superior to himself, I'd wait a
long time before I'd buy any stock in his company.
By
the 1950s. Asimov was writing stories about how his robots eventually
ended up ruling the Earth. Naturally, their superior intelligence
made them not just better than man, but omniscient and omnipotent.
They were capable of solving any human problem without the slightest
danger of error and there wasn't even the chance of fooling them into
error through feeding them false data, because they could predict
infallibly what the correct data should have been! It goes without
saying that they neatly guided humanity to a new golden age by, bluntly, removing
free will from man as man had from the robot.
In later years, the
reasoning that the robots used to justify this takeover was codified
by Asimov
as a fourth law of robotics:
Law Zeroth:
A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow
humanity to come to harm.
This is a recipe for disaster if there ever was
one. Asimov did not think very deeply into his ideas and he
never realised that this sort of abstraction upon abstraction could
be, and has been, used to justify anything up to and including
genocide. No price is too great to pay and no brutality too
horrible to inflict if it can be justified that the good will be so
much more than the evil needed to impose it. It's the sort of ledger mentality that fills up death
camps from Dachau to Cambodia
Asimov said that he created his version of the
robot to counter the clichés of fiction about robots turning on their
masters and displacing mankind. It's ironic that his robot
stories ended up going full circle. As a total, they really are RUR,
only slower and with a bland veneer of benign hypocrisy glossed over the usurption.
