The Caves of Steel (Robot, #1)

by Isaac Asimov

produced artificial human beings designed to do the labor of the world and to free humanity for a life of creative leisure.

Even as a youngster, though, I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely. After all, this has been the human challenge since a certain group of primates became human in the first place. Any technological advance can be dangerous. Fire was dangerous from the start, and so (even more so) was speech—and both are still dangerous to this day—but human beings would not be human without them.

“Sure you can,” said Gold. “How about an over-populated world in which robots are taking over human jobs?” “Too depressing,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to handle a heavy sociological story.” “Do it your way. You like mysteries. Put a murder in such a world and have a detective solve it with a robot partner. If the detective doesn’t solve it, the robot will replace him.” That struck fire. Campbell had often said that a science-fiction mystery story was a contradiction in terms; that advances in technology could be used to get detectives out of their difficulties unfairly, and that the readers would therefore be cheated. I sat down to write a story that would be a classic mystery and that would not cheat the reader—and yet would be a true science-fiction story.

They were so many fingers, groping upward. Their walls were blank, featureless. They were the outer shells of human hives.

It was just one more complication of modern life. Baley thought: It was simpler once. Everything was simpler. That’s what makes Medievalists.

Think of the inefficiency of a hundred thousand houses for a hundred thousand families as compared with a hundred-thousand-unit Section; a book-film collection in each house as compared with a Section film concentrate; independent video for each family as compared with video-piping systems.

It was a matter of timing. It took so long to shinny down the ramp, so long to squirm through the grunting standees, so long to slip along the railing and out an opening, so long to hop across the decelerating strips. When he was done, he was precisely at the off-shooting of the proper stationary. At no time did he time his steps consciously. If he had, he would probably have missed.

It was as Jessie said; the first problem of living is to minimize friction with the crowds that surround you on all sides.

“It’s your silly loyalty index. I’m so tired of hearing everyone praise you for being so full of a sense of duty. Think of yourself once in a while. I notice the ones on top don’t bring up the topic of their own loyalty index.”

“So you took the expressway?” “Yes.” “All the way from Washington to New York?” “Oh, I’ve done it before. Since they built the Baltimore-Philadelphia tunnel, it’s quite simple.” So it was. Baley had never made the trip himself, but he was perfectly aware that it was possible. Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had grown, in the last two centuries, to the point where all nearly touched. The Four-City Area was almost the official name for the entire stretch of coast, and there were a considerable number of people who favored administrational consolidation and the formation of a single super-City.

It is easier to have robots imitate the human shape than to redesign radically the very philosophy of our tools.”

“Built-in index,” the roboticist said, proudly, his voice a little muffled because of the way in which the viewer covered his mouth. “I constructed it myself. It saves a great deal of time. But then, that’s not the point now, is it?

It was that way with Jessie. No emergency, no crisis could make her tell a story in any way but her own circuitous one.

“We can’t ever build a robot that will be even as good as a human being in anything that counts, let alone better. We can’t create a robot with a sense of beauty or a sense of ethics or a sense of religion. There’s no way we can raise a positronic brain one inch above the level of perfect materialism. “We can’t, damn it, we can’t. Not as long as we don’t understand what makes our own brains tick. Not as long as things exist that science can’t measure. What is beauty, or goodness, or art, or love, or God? We’re forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can’t be understood. It’s what makes us men.

could not all have burst full-grown into his mind. Things did not work so. Somewhere, deep inside his unconscious, he had built a case, built it carefully and in detail, but had been brought up short by a single inconsistency. One inconsistency that could be neither jumped over, burrowed under, nor shunted aside. While that inconsistency existed, the case remained buried below his thoughts, beyond the reach of his conscious probing. But the sentence had come; the inconsistency had vanished; the case was his.

Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good.”