The science-fiction authors are interested in writing about the robots which develop the ability to behave or think like the human being. Isaac Asimov and Brian Aldiss are two of these authors. These authors exaggerate the influence of the robotic contribution to the human life. Even, they try to develop the idea of replacing humans with the robots as relatives more than being a part of productions humans need. I will compare and contrast the two authors’ stories in this paper. The main subject I will discuss is the idea of robots can play an essential role in human lives is an approach for curing the loneliness and for satisfying some needs of the people in a crowded world according to the two authors.
Isaac Asimov, in his short story "Reason", talks about the relation between human workers and a robot in an energy production plant on another planet far away from the earth. The two human workers activate an old robot by fixing and joining its broken parts. After the activation, the robot starts developing its logic, and a contradiction occurs between the ideas of the human workers and the robot. The human workers claim that they fixed the robot, and the robots have to obey the human workers. However, the robot develops a belief different from the human workers assumptions. The robot believes that the weak creatures cannot be masters over the robots. The robots can think and function better about the human workers. Therefore, the master has to be something relatively better than the robots. Finally, the robot finds out that all the energy the mankind and the robots need are generated by an energy converter. This information leads the robot to believe that the energy converter is the master. Also, the robot develops the idea of being relatively more advantageous over the human workers, and the robot claims that he is the prophet who can understand the energy converter, and conveys its messages to the other robots and the human workers.
Isaac Asimov defines the robot as a metallic unity which cannot understand the human logic. However, the story implies that the robot could develop the eagerness that many people do in their lives. This eagerness is like developing a dictatorship which is not open to listening to the other people. The robot rejects developing an understanding of what the human workers tell him. Instead, he insists on the belief he has developed. We observe this behavior in the dictators' lives. The dictators or the stubborn people, without listening to the people, they develop a strong belief. The stubborn ideas of the robot cause dangerous situations for both humans and robots (Asimov, 2016).
The human workers in the story treat the robot as a complementary accessory. However, one of the workers feels that the robot starts thinking like a human. The human workers have some strong assumptions, and similar to them, the robot develops his strong assumption. The worker feels that the robots are not only servants of the people. The other robots obey the robot calling himself the prophet, and that indicates that all the robots might develop the same belief. Realizing this makes a shocking influence on the human worker. It is kind of scary for the worker, and then he feels that he can communicate and persuade the robot to negotiate. The story does not give enough inside about how the relation is developing between the robot and the human workers; it implies that there might be a negotiation between them. However, the robot informs the human workers that they might stop the human workers from functioning. Therefore, it is not so clear how much the human workers could develop the communication with the robot. The robots are willing to replace the human workers by themselves (Asimov, 2016).
Brian Aldiss develops a different approach to the robots. The robots in his short story are the servants, and one of the robots serves the family as their son. Because of the very high population, the government has limited the right of having children. For having children in a natural way, the couples have to get permission from the ministry of population control. Getting permission is taking long years, and the couples feel to satisfy their needs of having children by adopting robots as family members. The woman feels very lonely, and she is sharing her feelings only with his husband. However, because her husband is a busy business person, she feels very lonely. Although she has a robot son, she cannot accept him as a real son. On the other side, the robot son and the servant robot has developed a communication. The story implies that the robots have developed some feelings of sadness. The robot son even has spread this feeling to the other servant robot. Also, the robot son is spending the effort to connect with his mother, and he is aware that she is not accepting him (Aldiss, 2016).
Regarding providing comfort, the people are happy with the robots; however, they cannot imagine the robots as social actors in the community. Also, the business in the robot industry is profitable among all the other sectors. Therefore, it is assumable that the demand for the robots is high in the world. The robots have gone into houses and private lives of the people. There is not much clue given about the community live, and how the robots have changed the social life; however, we can derive some information from one family’s experience of the interaction between humans and robots (Aldiss, 2016).
Both stories are made up of the fact of the highly-crowded world. The rapidly increasing world population has changed the needs of the people, and the robots have an essential role in humans' lives by providing many different services from being the son to being energy plant workers. The increasing population requires relatively more energy resources, more servants, higher quality, higher complexity in the supplied services and the goods. Human workers might not be efficient for supplying their human labor to complete the tasks in a highly crowded world (Freeman, 2015). Therefore, the need for something which is relatively superior to the human being is required to be developed. The robots have filled this need.
However, the robots in both stories have passed the limits the people have set for them. They have started feeling and developing their logics. In the Aldiss story, the robots are still controllable while in the Asimov's story, the robots have passed the limits set for them. In the Asimov's story, the robots explicitly express themselves and claim to be the authority over the human being. In the Aldiss’s story, the robots are still passive against the human being. The Aldiss’s story is giving some clues those the robots are not comfortable with the treatments they receive from the people; however, the story does not provide any information about a resistance of the robots.
The people are not expecting anything negative from the robots about a change in their social lives (Ashrafian, 2015). That is why the human workers in the Asimov’s story are shocked for receiving unexpected responses from a robot. They reacted to these responses, and tried to convince the robot; however, the robot has shocked them more and more by developing an unacceptable logic for the human workers. In the Aldiss’s story, the woman does not care the robot son, and the other servant robots; however, if she would learn what topics the robots discuss between them, probably she would be shocked as well.
The Aldiss’s story has created a negative understanding of the robots, and it only describes some machines assisting the humans. The Asimov’s story is describing the robots a little like monsters. In the Aldiss’s story, the robots are not an important threat to the human life while the other story indicates that the robots might create important problems for the sustainability of the human being.
Consequently, the robots can make an enormous contribution to the human life, and the fantasy part about the robots has been the subject of the authors. Considering that the experiments on changing the genes and the DNAs of the plants have reached a stage where they cause new trouble for people, and the animals, the developments in the robot industry might bring us the fantasy written by the authors into our lives. The George Orwells' 1984 and the Animal Farm are two essential science-fiction stories which came true in the modern world. Mainly, spying on the people and making plans for controlling people's social behaviors are used in many developed and developing countries (Freeman, 2015). Similarly, the robots will have an essential role in the human life, and the studies indicate that the robots will change our social lives, working conditions, labor market, food market, and all the other areas in our lives. However, we do not know what will happen next. The new machinery we use in our houses like kitchen robot etc. have comforted us; however, the relatively more sophisticated robots will make difficult things easier for the people while they will be into our social and private lives (Stone & Lavine, 2014). Even the subject of replacement of some workers by the robotic systems will genuinely change our lives.
References
Aldiss, B. (2016). Super-Toys Last All Summer Long. WIRED. Retrieved 7 June 2016, from http://www.wired.com/1997/01/ffsupertoys/
Ashrafian, H. (2015). Intelligent robots must uphold human rights. Nature, 519(7544), 391-391. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/519391a
Asimov, I. (2016). Reason. Talin University of Technology. Retrieved 7 June 2016, from http://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/Techno-Psy/Isaac_Asimov_-_I_Robot.pdf
Freeman, R. (2015). Who owns the robots rules the world. IZA World Of Labor. http://dx.doi.org/10.15185/izawol.5
Stone, R. & Lavine, M. (2014). The social life of robots. Science, 346(6206), 178-179. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.346.6206.178
