Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 4 - Prodigy.pdf - Isaac Asimov - Planetar81

Prodigy - Isaac Asimov's Robot City Book 4 - Arthur Byron Cover

ISAAC ASIMOV’S

ROBOT CITY

BOOK 4: PRODIGY

ARTHUR BYRON COVER

THE SENSE OF HUMOR

ISAAC ASIMOV

Would a robot feel a yearning to be human?

You might answer that question with a counter-question. Does a

Chevrolet feel a yearning to be a Cadillac?

The counter-question makes the unstated comment that a machine

has no yearnings.

But the very point is that a robot is not quite a machine, at least in

potentiality. A robot is a machine that is made as much like a human

being as it is possible to make it, and somewhere there may be a

boundary line that may be crossed.

We can apply this to life. An earthworm doesn't yearn to be a snake; a

hippopotamus doesn't yearn to be an elephant. We have no reason to

think such creatures are self-conscious and dream of something more

than they are. Chimpanzees and gorillas seem to be self-aware, but we

have no reason to think that they yearn to be human.

A human being, however, dreams of an afterlife and yearns to become

one of the angels. Somewhere, life crossed a boundary line. At some

point a species arose that was not only aware of itself but had the

capacity to be dissatisfied with itself.

Perhaps a similar boundary line will someday be crossed in the

construction of robots.

But if we grant that a robot might someday aspire to humanity, in

what way would he so aspire? He might aspire to the possession of the

legal and social status that human beings are born to. That was the

theme of my story "The Bicentennial Man" (1976), and in his pursuit

of such status, my robot-hero was willing to give up all his robotic

qualities, one by one, right down to his immortality.

That story, however, was more philosophical than realistic. What is

there about a human being that a robot might properly envy—what

human physical or mental characteristic? No sensible robot would

envy human fragility, or human incapacity to withstand mild changes

in the environment, or human need for sleep, or aptitude for the

trivial mistake, or tendency to infectious and degenerative disease, or

incapacitation through illogical storms of emotion.

He might, more properly, envy the human capacity for friendship and

love, his wide-ranging curiosity, his eagerness for experience. I would

like to suggest, though, that a robot who yearned for humanity might

well find that what he would most want to understand, and most

frustratingly Jail to understand, would be the human sense of humor.

The sense of humor is by no means universal among human beings,

though it does cut across all cultures. I have known many people who

didn't laugh, but who looked at you in puzzlement or perhaps disdain

if you tried to be funny. I need go no further than my father, who

routinely shrugged off my cleverest sallies as unworthy of the

attention of a serious man. (Fortunately, my mother laughed at all my

jokes, and most uninhibitedly, or I might have grown up emotionally

stunted.)

The curious thing about the sense of humor, however, is that, as far as

I have observed, no human being will admit to its lack. People might

admit they hate dogs and dislike children, they might cheerfully own

up to cheating on their income tax or on their marital partner as a

matter of right, and might not object to being considered inhumane

or dishonest, through the simple expediency of switching adjectives

and calling themselves realistic or businesslike.

However, accuse them of lacking a sense of humor and they will deny

it hotly every time, no matter how openly and how often they display

such a lack. My father, for instance, always maintained that he had a

keen sense of humor and would prove it as soon as he heard a joke

worth laughing at (though he never did, in my experience). Why,

then, do people object to being accused of humorlessness? My theory

is that people recognize (subliminally, if not openly) that a sense of

humor is typically human, more so than any other characteristic, and

refuse demotion to subhumanity.

Only once did I take up the matter of a sense of humor in a science-

fiction. story, and that was in my story "Jokester," which first

appeared in the December, 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction and

which was most recently reprinted in my collection The Best Science

Fiction of Isaac Asimov (Doubleday, 1986).

The protagonist of the story spent his time telling jokes to a computer

(I quoted six of them in the course of the story). A computer, of

course, is an immobile robot; or, which is the same thing, a robot is a

mobile computer; so the story deals with robots and jokes.

Unfortunately, the problem in the story for which a solution was

sought was not the nature of humor, but the source of all the jokes

one hears. And there is an answer, too, but you'll have to read the

story for that.

However, I don't just write science fiction. I write whatever it falls

into my busy little head to write, and (by some undeserved stroke of

good fortune) my various publishers are under the weird impression

that it is illegal not to publish any manuscript I hand them. (You can

be sure that I never disabuse them of this ridiculous notion.)

Thus, when I decided to write a joke book, I did, and Houghton-

Mifflin published it in 1971 under the title of Isaac Asimov's Treasury

of Humor. In it, I told 640 jokes that I happened to have as part of my

memorized repertoire. (I also have enough for a sequel to be entitled

Isaac Asimov Laughs Again, but I can't seem to get around to writing

it no matter how long I sit at the keyboard and how quickly I

manipulate the keys.) I interspersed those jokes with my own theories

concerning what is funny and how one makes what is funny even

funnier.

Mind you, there are as many different theories of humor as there are

people who write on the subject, and no two theories are alike. Some

are, of course, much stupider than others, and I felt no

embarrassment whatever in adding my own thoughts on the subject

to the general mountain of commentary.

It is my feeling, to put it as succinctly as possible, that the one

necessary ingredient in every successful joke is a sudden alteration in

point of view. The more radical the alteration, the more suddenly it is

demanded, the more quickly it is seen, the louder the laugh and the

greater the joy.

Let me give you an example with a joke that is one of the few I made

up myself:

Jim comes into a bar and finds his best friend, Bill, at a comer table

gravely nursing a glass of beer and wearing a look of solemnity on his

face. Jim sits down at the table and says sympathetically, "What's the

matter, Bill?"

Bill sighs, and says, "My wife ran off yesterday with my best friend."

Jim says, in a shocked voice, "What are you talking about, Bill? I'm

your best friend."

To which Bill answers softly, "Not anymore."

I trust you see the change in point of view. The natural supposition is

that poor Bill is sunk in gloom over a tragic loss. It is only with the last

three words that you realize, quite suddenly, that he is, in actual fact,

delighted. And the average human male is sufficiently ambivalent

about his wife (however beloved she might be) to greet this particular

change in point of view with delight of his own.

Now, if a robot is designed to have a brain that responds to logic only

(and of what use would any other kind of robot brain be to humans

who are hoping to employ robots for their own purposes?), a sudden

change in point of view would be hard to achieve. It would imply that

the rules of logic were wrong in the first place or were capable of a

flexibility that they obviously don't have. In addition, it would be

dangerous to build ambivalence into a robot brain. What we want

from him is decision and not the to-be-or-not-to-be of a Hamlet.

Imagine, then, telling a robot the joke I have just given you, and

imagine the robot staring at you solemnly after you are done, and

questioning you, thus.

Robot: "But why is Jim no longer Bill's best friend? You have not

described Jim as doing anything that would cause Bill to be angry

with him or disappointed in him."

You: "Well, no, it's not that Jim has done anything. It's that someone

else has done something for Bill that was so wonderful, that he has

been promoted over Jim's head and has instantly become Bill's new

best friend."

Robot: "But who has done this?"

You: "The man who ran away with Bill's wife, of course."

Robot (after a thoughtful pause): "But that can't be so. Bill must have

felt profound affection for his wife and a great sadness over her loss.

Is that not how human males feel about their wives, and how they

would react to their loss?"

You: "In theory, yes. However, it turns out that Bill strongly disliked

his wife and was glad someone had run off with her."

Robot (after another thoughtful pause): "But you did not say that was

so."

You: "I know. That's what makes it funny. I led you in one direction

and then suddenly let you know that was the wrong direction."

Robot: "Is it funny to mislead a person?"

You (giving up): "Well, let's get on with building this house."

In fact, some jokes actually depend on the illogical responses of

human beings. Consider this one:

The inveterate horseplayer paused before taking his place at the

betting windows, and offered up a fervent prayer to his Maker.

"Blessed lord," he murmured with mountain-moving sincerity, "I

know you don't approve of my gambling, but just this once, Lord, just

this once, please let me break even. I need the money so badly."

If you were so foolish as to tell this joke to a robot, he would

immediately say, "But to break even means that he would leave the

races with precisely the amount of money he had when he entered.

Isn't that so?"

"Yes, that's so."

"Then if he needs the money so badly, all he need do is not bet at all,

and it would be just as though he had broken even."

"Yes, but he has this unreasoning need to gamble."

"You mean even if he loses."

"Yes."

"But that makes no sense."

"But the point of the joke is that the gambler doesn't understand this."

"You mean it's funny if a person lacks any sense of logic and is

possessed of not even the simplest understanding?"

And what can you do but turn back to building the house again?

But tell me, is this so different from dealing with the ordinary

humorless human being? I once told my father this joke:

Mrs. Jones, the landlady, woke up in the middle of the night because

there were strange noises outside her door. She looked out, and there

was Robinson, one of her boarders, forcing a frightened horse up the

stairs.

She shrieked, "What are you doing, Mr. Robinson?"

He said, "Putting the horse in the bathroom."

"For goodness sake, why?"

"Well, old Higginbotham is such a wise guy. Whatever I tell him, he

answers, 'I know. I know,' in such a superior way. Well, in the

morning, he'll go to the bathroom and he'll come out yelling, 'There's

a horse in the bathroom.' And I'll yawn and say, 'I know, I know."'

And what was my father's response? He said, "Isaac, Isaac. You're a

city boy, so you don't understand. You can't push a horse up the stairs

if he doesn't want to go."

Personally, I thought that was funnier than the joke.

Anyway, I don't see why we should particularly want a robot to have a

sense of humor, but the point is that the robot himself might want to

have one—and how do we give it to him?

CHAPTER l

CAN YOU FEEL ANYTHING WHEN I DO THIS?

"Mandelbrot, what does it feel like to be a robot?"

"Forgive me, Master Derec, but that question is meaningless. While it

is certainly true that robots can be said to experience sensations

vaguely analogous to specified human emotions in some respects, we

lack feelings in the accepted sense of the word."

"Sorry, old buddy, but I can't help getting the hunch that you're just

equivocating with me."

"That would be impossible. The very foundations of positronic

programming insist that robots invariably state the facts explicitly."

"Come, come, don't you concede it's possible that the differences

between human and robotic perception may be, by and large,

semantic? You agree, don't you, that many human emotions are

simply the by-products of chemical reactions that ultimately affect the

mind, influencing moods and perceptions. You must admit, humans

are nothing if not at the mercy of their bodies. "

"That much has been proven, at least to the satisfaction of respected

authorities. "

"Then, by analogy, your own sensations are merely byproducts of

smoothly running circuitry and engine joints. A spaceship may feel

the same way when, its various parts all working at peak efficiency, it

breaks into hyperspace. The only difference between you and it being,

Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 4 - Prodigy.pdf

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