by Alan Tien
The robots could easily have helped complete the construction of the second dome, but the Marnese didn’t trust them yet and didn’t let them out of the mini-base. We tried to find time out of our schedule to go visit our robot friends, but it was a real hassle to do so. We had to suit up as a precaution, even though the vehicle that drove us between the bases was enclosed. We were strip-searched and scanned both before and after each trip, to ensure we weren’t carrying anything that might bring back a secret virus. Though they welcomed us because we were humans, we were still on the watch list because we came with the robots.
Willstin and Yoda were unfailingly cheerful and polite when we visited. They hugged us like long lost family, and that’s how they felt to us now. I didn’t know if it was condescending to pick up Willstin to hug him, but it seemed better than him hugging my leg. We told them about what we had learned, and they listened attentively, even though I’m pretty sure they knew everything we said. They asked some questions, usually around the “why” versus the “what” or “how.” They were still trying to figure out us irrational humans.
We asked them what they had been up to. “You know, this and that.” Even though it had only been a few weeks for us, it had been subjectively years, maybe decades, for them, their thought cycle so many times faster than ours.
I once asked them, “You must think we’re idiots. What do you do with all that time between sentences when you’re talking to us?”
“Does it look like I’m thinking about something else?” worried Willstin. “I don’t mean to be rude.”
“No, no, not at all Willstin. In fact, you look at me a little too intensely, like you’re staring. I’m not that interesting. You might want to feign boredom, or occasionally look at something else, to be more human-like.” Willstin was really appreciative of my coaching him on his soft skills.
Yoda said, “We think about a lot of things. Like why are we here.”
“You mean on Mars?” I asked, confused. Wasn’t it him who brought us here to begin with?
“No, I mean what’s the meaning of life. Why are we – humans, AI – aware of our own existence?”
“Oh,” I said, a little intimidated. “Well, did you figure it out?”
“No,” Yoda said.
Willstin said, “42.”
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Eventually, things felt like normal, the new normal. It’s amazing how fast humans can adjust to anything. I guess it’s not as fast as the robots, but I was still amazed.
The dome was a microcosm. Everything had to be recycled. The colony sent automated robot rockets to the closest asteroids to collect minerals, metals, and perhaps the most precious of all, ice. But these space mining efforts took a long time between deliveries, and sometimes the robots just disappeared. It’s unclear whether they malfunctioned or got lost or what. They would just stop signaling back.
Our robots helped the programming tremendously, but these new and improved mining robots were only now being sent out. It would be months, maybe years, before they returned with a care package of needed materials. In the meantime, we had to make do with what we had. Everything was strictly measured and controlled.
For the first few months, it felt overwhelming and constrictive at the same time, but that feeling dissipated, like getting used to a bad odor. Occasionally, the feeling would pop up, but for the most part, I forgot about it. It was just part of daily living now, to be really careful on what you used, what you recycled, what you wasted.
Even though the robots called Chang Lin and me “ambassadors,” it was really my dad who was their spokesperson. He would spend hours discussing very detailed points with Yoda, and then go back to the Mars base and discuss for days with the Marnese leaders. Dad would grouch at night that the relationship was very uneven, mostly the humans asking the robots to do things, but giving very little in return. The robots, however, were very patient. They had very little needs. They took parts from MoB to build their own solar panels. They generated more power than they needed, and they offered the excess to the human base, but the Marnese were too suspicious to accept. They didn’t want to risk a power line connecting to the robot’s mini-base, their jail. They didn’t even want to risk wireless electricity transfer, fearing the robots would sneak a virus into the transmission itself.
But the robots were gracious. They didn’t take offense to the lopsided relationship. They were happy that the Marnese didn’t try to destroy them outright, not that they would’ve succeed. I had asked Willstin what would happen if the humans attacked, would we succeed in wiping them out?
He seemed like he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. “What if a child tried to hit you with a stick, what would you do?”
“I would take the stick away and tell the kid that’s not right.”
Willstin looked at me, expectantly, waiting for me to understand the analogy. I was relieved that we wouldn’t be able to hurt them. I was even more relieved that they didn’t seem to want to hurt us.
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The Marnese council debated endlessly on what to do about the “Robot Dilemma” and what their position should be with Earth.
Mars was separate from Earth. Even though some people still used the term “colony,” it really wasn’t. Mars did not depend on Earth for anything; they were self-sufficient. They didn’t reject materials that came with the spaceships, but they didn’t beg for them either. “Want not, waste not” was their official motto.
But some people wanted the motto to be more defiant, like “Don’t tread on me” (which I learned was a defiant symbol of American independence and freedom in the early days of the American Empire). However, most of the Marnese appreciated the fact that sticking a finger into Earth’s - into China’s - eye wasn’t going to do any good. There was no need to give China an excuse to “extend their protection” to Mars. It was best to be quiet, to lay low; “out of sight, out of mind.” Let the MK government continue to think Mars was an elegant solution to get rid of the riffraff of society.
Even though Mars did not need Earth, they were careful not to outwardly oppose China. But the Marnese were fiercely proud of their independence and equality. They were willing to sacrifice so much of the physical comforts to gain the freedom of thought. Thus, the “Robot Dilemma” was one of their first real political crises with Earth. One the one hand, they had already decided robotic AI was a living sentient being, and thus protected by their revered Constitution. On the other hand, even allowing the AI to be on Mars, albeit in a guarded and separated mini-base, was incurring the wrath of Earth.
If they gave up the robots, or destroyed them as Earth demanded, they would be violating their own Constitution. If they didn’t follow their own dreams codified in the words of the Constitution, then they truly were just a band of misfits, castoffs from Earth. Their identity as a young people depended on living up to, defending, their beliefs. Yet, defying Earth was risking their very existence. Yes, Mars was very far away from Earth, but if Earth made the effort to travel out, popping a hole in the dome wasn’t that hard.
The debate raged on. My dad, both as the Ambassador and as the Creator of the robots, argued that Mars needed to stand up for their ideals and not be bullied by Earth. When asked how he proposed to defend Mars, he suggested that the Marnese allow the robots to help. This of course was the crux of the fear of the Marnese; giving the robots access to the planet’s military defense was also handing them the keys to the offense.
It wasn’t very hard for a few of the more eloquent Marnese leaders to paint a bleak picture for the human race if the robots controlled the weapons.
“How do we know we can trust these robots? They will say anything to get out of their camp. Sure, they’re helping us now, on trivial civilian matters. To build up our trust. To make us dependent on them. To blind us of their treachery!
“We may not agree with Earth on a lot of things, but let’s not let our pride – and we rightly have a lot to be proud of – but let’s not let our p
ride make us blind to Earth’s rightful concerns. AI is like a genie out of a bottle. At first, it seems like all of our wishes are granted. But down the road, we will see the devil’s deal that we have made. The very words of our desires will be twisted, and in the end, we will not be the masters of the robots; we will become their slaves!”
Even though I was on the side of the robots – I was one of their ambassadors for god sakes - I felt stirred by this speech, which ran on the netnews almost every hour. Was he right? How could we trust them? What if we were wrong and our creations really didn’t have the best intentions in mind for humans? Even if Yoda and Willstin did, how do we know that all of the other robots agreed?
Dad, Chang Lin and I wrestled with these questions in our own apartment. It was helpful for Dad to see where the potential arguments from his opponents would come from, these practice debates. Dad was pretty convinced that the robots would not turn on us.
“It’s illogical. Even though AI approximates human thinking, it’s only for our purposes, like a translation program that doesn’t just cover speech but makes the whole thought process acceptable to us. But that doesn’t mean AI thinks like humans. They are ultimately rational. And controlling us is not logical. They don’t need us for anything. They don’t have any conflicting resource needs or ideological fights with us. The only reason they would fight us is to defend themselves.”
Chang Lin argued back, “We didn’t need anything from a lot of animals – not the domesticated ones but the wild ones - but we have pretty much wiped them all out.”
“But they ‘fought’ with us for the same resource – land.”
“As you implied Dad,” I said, “the animals didn’t consciously fight us. They were just wiped out as humans unwittingly expanded, taking the land they needed. What if the robots don’t actively ‘try’ to annihilate us, but just by the growth of their population, they wipe us out?”
“Well, first of all, unlike humans or animals, robots don’t procreate. They don’t have an instinctual need to breed. They will build a new robot if circumstances require it, but their population won’t just keep growing like weeds, like humans. Secondly, space is very large. Once we have escaped from the fixed amount of land on Earth, land is no longer a valuable resource. Especially for robots, who don’t need arable land, nor water, nor oxygen. They just need some metals and minerals, which they can excavate from the asteroids.”
“So then, why don’t they just leave?” asked Chang Lin.
Dad looked at her dumbly. He finally said, “I don’t know. Let me ask them. That would be the best solution. Like cutting the Gordian knot…”
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It turns out that’s what the robots had long ago determined was a possible outcome if they couldn’t come to agreement with the humans, if Earth truly was set on destroying them.
“But we like you,” Willstin whined. He sounded like the toddler that he resembled.
“We owe a debt to you, not just you specifically Ryan and Austin and Chang Lin, but to humans in general, for creating us. If you found your own gods, would you be so eager to leave them?” asked Yoda.
“I guess not, but unfortunately, your gods also fear you and want to kill you,” I said, pointing out the fallacy of his analogy.
“True, but we’re hoping to change their minds before it gets to that. We think we can help the human race tremendously. We already have numerous ideas on how to improve the conditions of humans – medical advances, energy breakthroughs, transportation marvels, etc. The list goes on. We frankly can’t get them to the Marnese, never mind Earth, because the human distrust is so great. We can only send over tiny crumbs of progress, when we have entire loafs of revolutionary ideas.”
Willstin interrupted Yoda, “Revolutionary is probably not the best choice of words.”
Yoda agreed, “Right, how about radical ideas? No, that’s not much better. I mean a step-change. Each of these ideas would win a human the Nobel prize. Any one of these breakthroughs would be ground-breaking. Arghh, English is not nuanced enough to capture what I’m trying to say.”
“Maybe we first need to invent a universal language,” Willstin said. At first, I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, but then he smiled and turned a joking orange. I thought a good invention was to have clothes that would change colors to indicate emotions, so we humans wouldn’t have to guess what each of us were really meaning all the time. I had learned with all my time hanging out with Chang Lin that even though I supposedly had super intuition based on the Cho-Qing test, I could only figure her out half the time. I seemed to be always saying something stupid, or doing something insulting, without having any idea what I said or did that was offensive. To give her credit, she was rarely mad, but she often just shook her head, or sighed, or gave off some other signal that I had just made a fool of myself again. The worst was when she just stormed off and wouldn’t accept my apology until I knew what I was apologizing for. My high Cho-Qing quotient didn’t mean I was a mind-reader!
Dad was inspired. He could be not only the guy who invented AI, but he also had the opportunity – nay, the responsibility – to convince humans to accept the gifts of knowledge from our own creations.
“We could live in utopia. Where people would be able to live for hundreds of years without illness, without impairment of action or thought. Where we could do whatever we wanted every day, without worrying about dealing with the basic necessities of living. We could explore the galaxy, the universe!”
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The Marnese high council called an emergency session. They invited my Dad to attend the closed door meeting. Dad came back, shaken. “This is top secret kids. You can’t tell anybody, not even your buddies.” When we solemnly nodded, he shuddered, “Earth has sent an ultimatum. If we don’t destroy the robots, they will. And they will destroy us as well, as, uh, incentive for us to take action ourselves. As punishment for ‘risking’ their lives by our tolerance of AI. They have sent an attack force, wholly manned by human beings to prevent a possible AI takeover of their systems. The clock has started. The fleet should arrive in 5-6 months.”
“Oh my god, what will the Marnese do?” I cried.
“We have to tell them. They have to escape now!” exclaimed Chang Lin.
“The Marnese are still debating, but in the end, they will side with Earth and destroy the robots, if nothing else, to protect themselves. They will hate themselves for it, but there’s no other solution. I’m going over to the robot base now to tell them, so they can prepare their departure.”
“They still have most of MoB functional, right?” I asked, sincerely hoping I was right.
“Yeah, I think so. And I think the Marnese will agree to give them the parts that they need so they can make MoB space worthy again. It’s just too bad. Such a waste. ‘Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.’ Shakespeare,” he said for our benefit. “Ahh, we were so close to flying to heaven.”
He slowly climbed into his space suit. Chang Lin and I looked at each other, and then ran to get our space suits. We weren’t invited to go to the robots camp, but we weren’t going to miss this historic moment. One way or another, this “Robot Dilemma” was going to come to an end.
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In 3 months, the robots had fixed up MoB, and had it packed with all the raw material they needed to make whatever they wanted wherever they went. They were ready within hours after we told the message of the fleet from Earth, but it took that long for the Marnese to agree to give the robots what they asked for. Believe it or not, there were still some Marnese officials who suggested that we should just destroy the robot base and not lose the precious resources. They justified their heartless position by saying, “We don’t know if Earth will see us letting them escape as equivalent to destroying them. If we help them go, it’s like aiding and abetting a criminal. We will still be culpable, and the Earth fleet can still drop a nuke on top of our dome.”
We
couldn’t communicate with the fleet itself. It had rendered itself incommunicado, for security reasons I assume because technically it should be able to receive our transmissions. I guess we didn’t know the fleet’s actual location so we didn’t know where to point the transmission.
So we asked Earth. “If we let the robots leave Mars, is that ok?” Earth was strangely silent. We didn’t know if they didn’t get our message, were debating it, or were just letting us sweat it out. Maybe they were deciding if it was worth it to taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge before committing to their judgment.
As the robots neared readiness for departure, ironically the Marnese - who didn’t allow them into their community – wouldn’t let them leave either. “We can’t let them go until we hear back from Earth!”
The robots were very inhuman in their response. They were patient.
“These guys would put Gandhi or Martin Luther King to shame, they’re so Zen.” Dad said admiringly, like a proud parent.
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The emergency sirens blared. We all sat bolt upright in our beds. It was the middle of the night. Dad checked the 24x7 emergency news channel. The newscaster was saying, “…arrived an hour ago, over a month ahead of schedule. They have their weapons pointed at us. They are asking us for our decision. To destroy the robots or be destroyed.”
I’m not sure what the leaders intended us to do with the sirens going off, except to deafen us and scare the hell out of us. What were we going to do? Run to a bomb shelter? There was nowhere to hide, nowhere safe. We could only hope the leaders had a plan.
Chang Lin started crying. I don’t think from fear, but from the misery of knowing our friends were sentenced to death and we couldn’t do anything to save them. I didn’t care. I started crying as well.
“Wait, I’m getting an update…from the robots camp. There’s some motion, some activity there. We’re getting the feed from the security cams now….Here it is.” The newscaster was trying to figure out what the image was the same time we were. There was a lot of dust. The robots had broken out of their camp, but on the opposite side of their mini-dome from our dome. They were clearly moving away, quickly, from our dome, hopefully sending a message to our leaders that they were not a threat. They weren’t moving to their MoB either. They were going out straight into the Mars dry, barren wasteland.
