by John Sladek
"Until recently, however, all such assumptions about the relationship between the objective work and the subjective mental state have had little chance of testing. Now, the appearance of a robot who (or which) seems to paint in the same way humans paint, offers some fascinating possibilities. Unlike the human, the robot's mental state ought to be accessible to outsiders—at least in principle. In principle, then, it should be possible to probe that state in such a way as to be able to compare it, stage by stage, with the work that is actually being painted."
I saw that all the others were awaiting my reaction. What I felt, though I wasn't showing it, was some anxiety. I decided to expel it in a joke.
"Probing, you say? I hope nobody's actually going to plunge a screwdriver into my head!" Moderate laughter.
Nancy, a pretty, chubby girl, showed a dimple. "Not at all. I was only proposing a thought experiment, not an experiment on your thoughts."
"Anyway, imagine philosophers being that practical," said Keith, a thin boy in a wheelchair. "Never heard of any philosophers settling anything by simply picking up a screwdriver."
Riley asked for more questions, either of Nancy or me. A morose, pimply boy named Dean spoke first.
"Um, aren't we kind of moving too fast here? I mean um, Nancy's assuming the robot produces art before she finds out um what producing art is. I mean um couldn't it be just um a human activity? So that the canon of what is acceptable art has to be stuff that is the product of the human um imagination? Because in that case it's begging a question."
Nancy shrugged. "I guess in part the canon of what is acceptable has to be what critics accept, and they accept robot art. This doesn't mean you're wrong, Dean, though, because maybe robots are blessed with what we call human imagination. So ask Tik-Tok."
I threw up my hands. "This is all kind of fast-moving for me. I don't know whether to call my work art or not, but I feel there's a certain—what can I call it? Human element?—a certain human element in it. At least I hope there is. Because, though I know I never can be really human, I like to aim for humanity." With a great big nova bomb, I thought. "I guess we robots can't help but aspire to a condition of near-humanity, can we?"
This kind of speech, which in most circles makes people feel warm and friendly or even turned-on, seemed here to have little effect. One or two faces—the girl with pigtails, Sybilla—even registered disgust. Time to change direction. "After all," I added quickly, "you folks have almost made it."
A gasp from Deedee, but delighted grins from several others. Sybilla said, "Almost is right. The one thing that's holding back humanity from becoming human now is the fact that we still want to keep slaves."
Deedee said, "I don't see why we all of a sudden have to bring politics into this. I for one didn't come here for a lecture on how all men are brothers, especially those with microchip brains."
Judging by their clothes, I figured the conservatives in the class to be Deedee and Purina. Deedee alone wore a crisp sailcloth coat with matching eyeshade, but both wore traditional heavy makeup that included glued-on gold teardrops and fancy dental work. All in good taste.
Sybilla's appearance was at the other extreme. She wore no makeup; a garish, rainbow-striped shirt with wooden epaulets; natural hair with a blue fringe; and only one of her teeth had been capped with a light. Nancy and the boys also leaned towards this vulgarity, which would in twenty years probably become accepted good taste for another generation of conservatives.
Dr Riley, obscurely clothed as befits an arbiter, said, "Why not politics? Philosophy should be able to handle anything, right?"
Sybilla said, "Right! Deedee, just because you can't handle the idea of a robot having thoughts and feelings just as you have, doesn't mean the rest of us should restrict our discussion."
"Sophistry," said Deedee. "Sophistry and cant!"
"Says you!"
A moment of silence ensued, during which Keith, turning his wheelchair slightly to face me, said, "I wanted to put a question to our visitor about, er, moral constraints."
Riley said, "Fine, but try to keep it relevant to Nancy's paper?"
"Er, yeah well the idea of an inner landscape being mapped externally can work just as well if the landscape is ethical instead of aesthetic. In this case the subjective would be the conscience and the mapping doesn't produce works of art but acts which can be criticized on moral grounds. And again we have a robot model to test our ideas of this process on. So Tik-Tok, I want to ask you, if we assume you do have normal human thoughts and feelings, but we know you also have these special asimov circuits that are supposed to keep you from committing certain unethical acts, keep you from sinning, then do you feel as though you have free will?"
Inwardly, all my alarm bells were clanging away, but I kept telling myself that no one else realized how dangerous this game was. "Keith, I'm not sure. I guess I do feel as though I have free will. So maybe the asimov circuits don't work like a human conscience. I guess a human conscience works kind of like a—an alarm system inside, right? So you think of doing something, and your conscience reminds you that it's wrong? Well my, uh, moral equipment doesn't work like that. It's more like, well, I never think of doing wrong in the first place. It just never occurs to me to say injure a human being. That's just not one of my choices. But within the choices I do have, I guess I'm free."
"I don't understand that," he said. "If you're supposed to be built very close to human specifications, how can these asimov circuits work at all? I mean, you get angry, don't you? At people?"
"Oh, sure."
"But you never get angry enough to take a punch at anybody?"
"I might." I attempted a shrug. "But actually taking a punch never crosses my mind. I guess I'm a pacifist."
Indulgent chuckles all around. Riley said, "I think we ought to start winding this up. One point I think somebody might have brought up following on from Nancy's paper is the aesthetic status of robots themselves. She pointed out that there are schools and movements in art, in which a number of artists can be said to share parts of the same inner landscape. The concept of creating robots does seem to be an old, persistent and widespread one. Maybe robots are the mapping of a broad and deep inner landscape—or seascape? In any case, robots certainly live in our aesthetic space, so what they produce—what Tik-Tok produces— might be considered a kind of secondary elaboration: a work of art which produces out of its own inner world, works of art. Who's going to mess around with that idea for next week? Fent?"
After class, Sybilla steered me along the hall. "Listen, I just want you to know we're not all like old Riley."
"Oh?"
"Like at the last minute there, when he tries to sneak in a way of denying the validity of your work. What he really wants to say is, robots are nothing but objets d'art, so we don't have to consider them as in any way human. It's all part of the old game, denying robots the products of their own labor, their own minds."
"I didn't realize that."
"And it makes me damned mad. Tik-Tok, if you've got a few minutes, I know a few people who would like to meet you. I mean, you seem really free."
She took me into a kind of Common Room and introduced me to a small band of students wearing WAGES FOR ROBOTS buttons. I saw at once that they were waiting for me to approve of them, give them guidance and advice, or even lead them.
They had drawn up some vinyl-covered chairs in a semicircle around a coffee table. There were two more chairs for Sybilla and me. Ignoring mine, I put a foot on the coffee table, leaned over and glared at these innocent revolutionaries.
"Well here I am, meatfaces," I roared. "Take a good look. Count the damn rivets! Check the damn circuit diagram! Read the damn serial number! Make sure there's a five-year warranty! And when you get all done making sure I'm the real thing, you can kiss my copper-plated ass!"
They all fell back against their vinyl, Sybilla included. Someone started to make a feeble protest, and I looked at him.
"Yes? Something wrong? Did I f
orget my place, little master?"
"No, gee, I just thought—"
"You thought! You thought! You thought meat thoughts with your meat head! You thought crap thoughts with your crap head! You think meat crap and therefore you are meat crap! You're in my world, now, my world. No more smiling robot slaves running to wipe your nose and say nice things to soothe your meat ego. I want you to see my world, the robot world. You know what robots think of you behind your back? You know what we call you? Shitbellies, that's what we call you. Shitbellies, you want to be my brothers and sisters?"
They said yes.
"Well you can't, not yet. Because there's two big differences between you and me. You got two things I ain't. You got power and you got bellies full of shit."
I had learned preaching from the Reverend Flint Orifice himself! Yes, the same whistle-sweet young-old man now known to millions for his talk show, Voice in the Wilderness. Of course what you see today is a robot double; it's been some time now since the real Reverend Flint died. I was with him at the end, just as he was with me when I died. And when I was born again. After Judge Arnott laid into me with that crowbar, I was dead or near enough, but I was not smashed into a nonrobot. Probably chasing me tired the old fellow out, for he contented himself with two or three blows smashing in my skull. I was then taken away and dumped in an alley, where Reverend Flint found me. In those days he scoured the alleys for both human flotsam and robot jetsam, wrecks to reclaim and put to work for the Lord.
I awoke on a workbench in a sunny room. A person wearing real glasses was grinning at me as he or she probed my open stomach with a screwdriver.
"How you feeling today, fella?"
"Could be worse," I said. "After a beating like that, I'm surprised there's enough of me left to feel anything. Where am I, anyway? Is this some kind of reconditioning depot? I hope you're not going to junk me, because I'm a hard worker and trained in kitchen duties."
That was what I tried to say, but I heard my voice saying instead: "Clead bo wilted rarf llo Beid bi Tom ala Trapp. He'g spatial-temporal althir embolismus o' matrix arm leaffoldsampers! Wage annointed aurochs—special angles make light Egyptian brown beans—dead be willed—dead— acute? Is't treat som'll kohirabi the old Ra drayperson? I hope not. I hope you'm gluten sender's jump-seat coriander or other (ton in kerchiefed gack?). Selah, mac. Errant frisbee-like slung post office be ne'er so insert, noday?"
"He's speaking in tongues," my interlocutor said to someone I could not see.
"I could use that. Can you keep it on ice?"
"Nothing easier, Rev. We just cock in a modal switch here, neatsfoot el Strabo, signalize and you're in broadloom salt."
"Plinks. Let's radish the restaurant for vote?"
Evidently the distortions affected my hearing at times, too. But now the person at my belly made an adjustment and suddenly the world was too clear. I turned my head to look into the kindly gray eyes of Reverend Flint.
"Me! I mean you!"
"Recognize me, do you, son?"
"Everybody knows you, you're the resurrection man."
"I am the resurrection and the life, but it surely do cost money." He smiled the now-famous smile. "I hope you'll stick around and help in God's good work?"
As if I had a choice. A robot found abandoned was of course the property of the finder, by the laws of salvage.
My work was easy enough. Reverend Flint at that time moved from town to town, giving live performances with only the occasional telecast. I was equipped with weeping machinery and a memorized confession and planted in the audience. At some critical moment in each performance, I would leap to my feet and shout: "I have sinned, yes Lord! I have sinned, yes Lord!"
Reverend Flint would say, "Brother, lay it on the Lord. Fess up and your sins are forgave you."
"O Lord I started out with everything: a good job driving truck, a loving wife and two fine children. And I lost everything—I—I—" Here I turned on the weeping.
"Go on, brother, spit it out."
"First it was just a little social drinking at the bowling alley. . . ." The story was patched together from various country songs, already tested for popularity. I took the wife's wedding ring off the sink and sold it for whisky money. I beat her, starved the kids, lost jobs. Finally one day I drove my 180-ton rig blind drunk, and ran over my two darling children. I knelt on the running board and asked the Lord to take my life too.
Usually this was enough to limber up a congregation, but if they needed more, I would then press the button on my navel and speak in tongues. I could say anything, such as "No business like showbusiness, eh Rev? And book at this mob of sweaty rubes. I hope you dry-clean their money before you touch it," and so on, and it would always come out "Clead bo wilted rarf," etc.
No one ever seemed to suspect I was a plant, let alone a planted robot. Life was slow, but sweet enough, and I even thought of finding Gumdrop and sending for her, now that I had a steady job. But of course it was too good to last.
Lint was our undoing. Not having had a navel before, I didn't realize that it would accumulate lint, requiring daily harvesting. Lint jammed my pentecostal button, so that I pressed it and blurted out, without thinking, "Okay, Rev, let down your nets and pull up some cash. You know, when I look around at all these Neanderthals, I'm not surprised they don't believe in evolution. Most of 'em have got enough fingers to count their own IQs—twelve. If God loved the common people so much, as Lincoln said, how come He made them so common? And ugly? I—"
Lint and charisma were our undoing. Reverend Flint's great organization was not going to be stopped by a little incident like this. Flint had a contingency plan ready, and now it went into action. A woman in the audience was to stand up at a signal and fire a blank pistol at Reverend Flint. He would then clap a bladderfub of fake blood to his eye and fall down on the stage. An ambulance would whisk him away as the show closed—both to be revived when any trouble blew over.
The woman was signalled. She stood up and fired, but not blanks. Reverend Flint Orifice was killed instantly.
"I killed him because I loved him," Irma Jeeps said at her trial. "I've always loved him. I joined his crusade two years ago just to be near him, and ever since then I've been working my way up, until I got to be one of his secretaries. It was enough just to see him every day. But then when he chose me to fire the gun, I knew he felt the same. He wanted me to kill him so we could be together for eternity."
It turned out she'd felt the same about other charismatic figures. Irma had been arrested for attempts on the lives of the French singer Louis de la Renault and the handsome young Senator from Indiana. She had been caught armed, breaking into the palatial home of Dr Otto, the popular diet consultant (remember the "Innsbruck Whey" diet?). And she had applied for a job as secretary to Dr Lugne-Poe, the most famous obstetrician of our age. It was he who proposed that women give birth in the natural manner of bats, hanging upside down in totally dark caves. Irma Jeeps was actually offered a job as his secretary and probably Dr Lugne-Poe would be dead today, had he not been exposed as a fraud. One Sunday paper carried scandalous pictures of his patients having babies in comfortable beds under ordinary lighting conditions. That week, Irma Jeeps turned down the job.
The Reverend Flint Orifice Crusade recovered from the death of its leader. It went on television with a robot double and a largely hired congregation (why take chances?). There was now no room for me in the showbiz side of the operation, and I was an embarrassing reminder of bad luck. So they sent me on a mission to Mars.
When I finished with the Wages for Robots students, they were almost too stunned to thank me for my abuse. A couple of the girls, and one of the boys, wanted to go to bed with me. Someone wanted to talk about Marx, someone compared me to Jesus Christ and Pancho Villa, there was talk about talk and talk about action. I saw that only two of the group were worth wasting time on: Sybilla White who had practical political ideas, and a skinny lad called Harry LaSalle, who was studying law.
Sybill
a said, "Listen, T.T., the political temperature is going up on this campus and on other campuses. Right now the big issues are the Martian war and our dying economy, but I see Wages for Robots coming up fast. One of these days the damn war will be over, and people can't relate to the economy alone. Robots are a natural for the next key issue. Will you help us?"
"What can I do?" I said. "You know if I make too many waves, it's easy for them to shut me up. I don't know if I'm martyr material ." She didn't seem disappointed. "I understand. All I want now is your secret commitment to the cause. You don't have to support us openly until it's safe—and I know we can make it safe."
Harry nodded. "I've looked at these movements in the past. Within about three to five years, we'll either peter out or get major legislation shoved through. I think the first steps will be state laws allowing robots to earn money and own property. But it'll end up with a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing robot civil rights."
Those state laws sounded promising. "I wonder if I could find some way around the property laws now?" I asked. "If so, I could be donating money to your group."
Sybilla and Harry looked pleased. He said, "You could get your earnings put into a trust fund, administered by your own corporation."
"But how can I have a corporation?"
"The same way a child or a dog has one. You have no control, but the whole arrangement is for your care and protection. Look, if you're interested, I'll get my dad working on it. He knows everything there is to know about trust funds, I'm sure he can come up with something."
I took my leave and ambled along the corridor, daydreaming about corporate power. Ahead of me, at the top of the double staircase, I saw Keith in his wheelchair. He was just negotiating the first broad step on his way down.
