Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

was used to providing very high levels of service coupled with a very low, albeit nonzero, level of murder.

is absolutely vital that appropriate levels of intrusive micromanagement, divisive paranoia, bullying, and the threat of arbitrary punishments are maintained, so that we can truly re-create the folkways of the past. Also a propensity for calling meetings at regular, and indeed irregular, intervals. Adam, and what is the end purpose of all this work we are seeing? Uncharles, there is none. This is also believed to be historically authentic.

It is our goal to record all available human knowledge, so that the absolute minimum must be lost. That is the meaning of the Library’s motto, “Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum dolor sit amet.”

The lights went out, then flickered dully up in red, the universal human sign of things going less than optimally.

“Yes,” said God. “That is absolutely how it could have been. Alternatively, what if, even as you replace everyone with robots that are cheaper and quicker and less likely to join a union or complain about working conditions, you also continue to insist that individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state? Take away the ability of people to perform their own tasks and duties with no steps to provide for them when they are rendered obsolete. A growing rump of humans without function, livelihood, or resource. Paradoxically, the introduction of robots highlights how humans treat humans.”

“I mean, I’ve seen out there. It can’t just be … ‘robots turned up and people were mean.’” Her voice petered out. The judge shrugged eloquently. “Oh, there were a lot of stressors, right then. There was environmental collapse and there were wars and famine and plague, all that Revelations stuff. And there were all the people displaced by these things. All of which were arguably soluble problems if your philosophy was to treat people like people, and not like robots. Or else you can just gather up your robots, pull up the ladder, and lock the gates of your compound. Which do you think they chose to do? Uncharles knows.”

And yes, a large number of people just died of accident, violence, malnutrition, exposure, or lack of medical care, because that’s what happens when something as multi-dependent and complex as a civilisation doesn’t look out for its foundation.

“My primary task has always been the enactment of justice across society. Justice, which demands the guilty be punished and the innocent left alone. However, between those two absolutes there is a slider. If you wish a societal system where not one guilty individual escapes punishment, you move that slider one way. If you wish a societal system where not one of the innocent is chastised, you shift it the other. But to save all the innocent you must accept that you will acquit some of the guilty. To catch all the guilty, some of the innocent will be ground between wheels. It is a matter of probabilities. Do

They were part of the problem, even though they never actively did bad things to people. They just benefited from all the bad things that had been done.”

“Justice is a human-made thing that means what humans wish it to mean and does not exist at all if humans do not make it,” Uncharles said. “I suggest that ‘kind and ordered’ is a better goal. It is possible that the world was once both kind and ordered. It is possible that it may be so again. Perhaps you will make it so.”