Robots

Allan Anderson · 29 Mar 2012, 01:16 · from 2012-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rubel at goosemoon.org (Allan Anderson)
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:16:45 -0700
Subject: (urth) Robots
In-Reply-To: <4F738EC7.1020207 at verizon.net>
References: <CAJ8=rtjXV9YcmTQREe+x-5=RqUMh911zrBnjQ=WKxSGC6V2iVA at mail.gmail.com>
	<4F738EC7.1020207 at verizon.net>
Message-ID: <CAHCfnzSvRJ=ekJwU1DcyqB20qoTUBoq0L0LU-XbON6fy7KCeSw at mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 3:20 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> On 3/28/2012 1:11 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>
>> David Stockhoff wrote:
>>
>>  Without having read the story (though I will), I want to comment that the
>>> "moral robot" has been around at least since Asimov's "3 laws," which
>>> basically hardwired robots to be MORE moral than humans.  Naturally they
>>> represent the kind of rational and dispassionate morality that we humans,
>>> for a few hundred years at least, were imagined to aspire to.
>>>
>> More to the point, the Three Laws of Robotics are designed to make
>> Asimovian robots the perfect slaves, and thus a coded way of talking
>> about the situation of minority persons in general and blacks in
>> particular
>> at a time when you couldn't openly talk about that stuff in popular
>> fiction.
>> (If you have any doubt about this, note how hostile humans refer to a
>> robot as "boy.") Reading Asimov's early robot stories with this in mind
>> opens a whole world of social commentary right there on the surface.
>>
> Yes, the double-standard regarding murder is especially ironic in that
> light. I don't actually recall that use of "boy"---but then I wouldn't,
> would I.


Ah, right--I remember this from Elijah Baley in _The Caves of Steel_,
before he became a stinking robo-sympathizer. Excellent points. I remember
wondering if Asimov was making a coherent point with that, or just
appropriating a term for its emotional impact.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20120328/d1ba303f/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net