Mr. Jefferson's Wolf: Slavery and the Suburban Robot

Abstract

Pinned to a precious blank space among flotsam and jetsam of my office bulletin board is a copy of a joke that one of my dents gave me. It goes this.A theologian programmed most powerful supercomputer in world so he could ask it: Is there a God? The computer responded that it lacked processing power to know. It asked to be connected to all other supercomputers in world. Still not enough power. So computer was hooked up to all mainframes in world, then minicomputers, then all personal computers. When that didn't work, computer asked for a link to all remaining computer chips--in cars, microwaves, VCRs, digital watches, and so on. The theologian asked one final time: Is there a God? The computer responded: There is now. (Wall Street Journal)As part of a presentation at Southern Humanities Council Annual Conference (February 1993), on technology, personhood and postmodernism, I told this joke to a roomful of academics who specialize in exploring scientific future from a humanistic perspective. Their response fell into three clearly discernible camps. The literature and linguistics people laughed. The history and anthropology people laughed uneasily. Several people, who I later discovered were from NASA, didn't really laugh at all.The people who work in Artificial Intelligence--don't seem completely comfortable chuckling over prospect of a computer that knows more than they do...and which is, itself, aware of that act. At a press conference in January 1993, Drs. Daniel Jordan and Merrill D. Peterson, historical advisors to Clinton-Gore inaugural team, told loosely assembled Washington press corps that United States was on brink of what they called a moment. This metaphor alludes to remarkable mix of optimism and energy that characterized early part of historical era that Thomas Jefferson inhabited and sometimes dominated. The signature trait of that time was a blending of widespread economic opportunity and reformist social impulse, a combustible mixture that has been recycled as political propellant of Clinton-Gore team's American Re-Union. Central to Con vision is philosophy of government upon which rested Jefferson's Own poal thought-nay, that all things are possible in a responsible, educated, democratic society.But now we Americans confront not 18th century, but 21st, and we find it populated with fantastic figures, not all of them human. Intuitive machines. Computers with attitude. Intelligent, creative robots. One absolutely crucial, but much neglected, item for 21st-century agenda entails developing a robot protocol, a set of cultural (as opposed to technical) guidelines for dealing with intelligent machines upon which we have already come to depend, and for actually living with heir humanoid descendants.And to permit them to live with us. Earlier work (Harvey, Adam's Other Rib) has focused on institutional challenges presented whenever a free labor society evolves into a cultural and economic system dependent primarily on slave labor--specifically, on artificially intelligent and emotionally robust synthetic beings. Robots, in R2D2 sense of word--the large-scale production of which we are used to associating with science fiction programs, but which many scientists claim is a rapidly approaching reality.This article takes idea of a robot population a step further, examining from a cultural perspective key policy issues likely to merge from integration of a meaningful robot population into human life. That the robots are coming is, to some extent, a foregone conclusion. Already, industry experts are predicting onset of an entirely new robot industry, a domestic assistant market with applications for home and industrial use (Berger; Schodt; Squires). Already available are robot security guards (Category), robot conference hosts (State of Art 38-39), and robot maids (Berger). …