(There are supplantation myths among other cultures, too, even in our own-as the one in which Satan tried to supplant God and failed; a myth that reached its greatest literary expression in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.)
And was Zeus safe? He was attracted to the sea nymph Thetis and would have married her had he not been informed by the Fates that Thetis was destined to bear a son mightier than his father. That meant it was not safe for Zeus, or for any other god, either, to marry her. She was therefore forced (much against her will) to marry Peleus, a mortal, and bear a mortal son, the only child the myths describe her as having. That son was Achilles, who was certainly far mightier than his father (and, like Talos, had only his heel as his weak point through which he might be killed).
Now, then, translate this fear of irreversible change and of being supplanted into the relationship of man and machine and what do we have? Surely the great fear is not that machinery will harm us-but that it will supplant us. It is not that it will render us ineffective-but that it will make us obsolete.
The ultimate machine is an intelligent machine and there is, only one basic plot to the intelligent-machine story-that it is created to serve man, but that it ends by dominating man. It cannot exist without threatening to supplant us, and it must therefore be destroyed or we will be.
There is the danger of the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice, the golem of Rabbi Loew, the monster created by Dr. Frankenstein. As the child born of our body eventually supplants us, so does the machine born of our mind.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which appeared in 1818, represents a peak of fear, however, for, as it happened, circumstances conspired to reduce that fear, at least temporarily.
Between the year 1815, which saw the end of a series of general European wars, and 1914, which saw the beginning of another, there was a brief period in which humanity could afford the luxury of optimism concerning its relationship to the machine. The Industrial Revolution seemed suddenly to uplift human power and to bring on dreams of a technological utopia on Earth in place of the mythic one in Heaven. The good of machines seemed to far outbalance the evil and the response of love far outbalance the response of fear.
It was in that interval that modern science fiction began-and by modern science fiction I refer to a form of literature that deals with societies differing from our own specifically in the level of science and technology, and into which we might conceivably pass from our own society by appropriate changes in that level. (This differentiates science fiction from fantasy or from “speculative fiction,” in which the fictional society cannot be connected with our own by any rational set of changes.)
Modern science fiction, because of the time of its beginning, took on an optimistic note. Man’s relationship to the machine was one of use and control. Man’s power grew and man’s machines were his faithful tools, bringing him wealth and security and carrying him to the farthest reaches of the universe.
This optimistic note continues to this day, particularly among those writers who were molded in the years before the coming of the fission bomb-notably, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and myself.
Nevertheless, with World War I, disillusionment set in. Science and technology, which promised an Eden, turned out to be capable of delivering Hell was well. The beautiful airplane that fulfilled the age-old dream of flight could deliver bombs. The chemical techniques that produced anesthetics, dyes, and medicines produced poison gas as well.
The fear of supplantation rose again. In 1921, not long after the end of World War I, Karel Capek’s drama R.U.R. appeared and it was the tale of Frankenstein again, escalated to the planetary level. Not a single monster was created but millions of robots (Capek’s word, meaning “worker,” a mechanical one, that is). And it was not a single monster turning upon his single creator, but robots turning on humanity, wiping them out and supplanting them.
From the beginning of the science fiction magazine in 1926 to 1959 (a third of a century or a generation) optimism and pessimism battled each other in science fiction, with optimism-thanks chiefly to the influence of John W. Campbell, Jr.-having the better of it.
Beginning in 1939, I wrote a series of influential robot stories that self-consciously combated the “Frankenstein complex” and made of the robots the servants, friends, and allies of humanity.
It was pessimism, however, that won in the end, and for two reasons:
First, machinery grew more frightening. The fission bomb threatened physical destruction, of course, but worse still was the rapidly advancing electronic computer. Those computers seemed to steal the human soul. Deftly they solved our routine problems and more and more we found ourselves placing our questions in the hands of these machines with increasing faith, and accepting their answers with increasing humility.
All that fission and fusion bombs can do is destroy us, the computer might supplant us.
The second reason is more subtle, for it involved a change in the nature of the science fiction writer.
Until 1959, there were many branches of fiction, with science fiction perhaps the least among them. It brought its writers less in prestige and money than almost any other branch, so that no one wrote science fiction who wasn’t so fascinated by it that he was willing to give up any chance at fame and fortune for its sake. Often that fascination stemmed from an absorption in the romance of science so that science fiction writers would naturally picture men as winning the universe by learning to bend it to their will.
In the 19508, however, competition with TV gradually killed the magazines that supported fiction, and by the time the 1960s arrived the only form of fiction that was flourishing, and even expanding, was science fiction. Its magazines continued and an incredible paperback boom was initiated. To a lesser extent it invaded movies and television, with its greatest triumphs undoubtedly yet to come.
This meant that in the 1960s and 19708, young writers began to write science fiction not because they wanted to, but because it was there-and because very little else was there. It meant that many of the new generation of science fiction writers had no knowledge of science, no sympathy for it-and were in fact rather hostile to it. Such writers were far more ready to accept the fear half of the love/fear relationship of man to machine.
As a result, contemporary science fiction, far more often than not, is presenting us, over and over, with the myth of the child supplanting the parent, Zeus supplanting Kronos, Satan supplanting God, the machine supplanting humanity.
Nightmares they are, and they are to be read as such.
– But allow me my own cynical commentary at the end. Remember that although Kronos foresaw the danger of being supplanted, and though he destroyed his children to prevent it-he was supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for Zeus was the better ruler.
So it may be that although we will hate and fight the machines, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the universe, climbing to heights we ourselves could never aspire to.
The New Profession
Back in 1940, I wrote a story in which the leading character was named Susan Calvin. (Good heavens, that’s nearly half a century ago.) She was a “robopsychologist” by profession and knew everything there was to know about what made robots tick. It was a science fiction story, of course. I wrote other stories about Susan Calvin over the next few years, and as I described matters, she was born in 1982, went to Columbia, majored in robotics, and graduated in 2003. She went on to do graduate work and by 2010 was working at a firm called U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. I didn’t really take any of this seriously at the time I wrote it. What I was writing was “just science fiction.”