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

Pinned to a precious blank space among the 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 the most powerful supercomputer in the world so he could ask it: "Is there a God?" The computer responded that it lacked the processing power to know. It asked to be connected to all the other supercomputers in the world. Still not enough power. So the computer was hooked up to all the mainframes in the world, then the minicomputers, then all the personal computers. When that didn't work, the computer asked for a link to all the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the Clinton-Gore inaugural team, told the loosely assembled Washington press corps that the United States was on the brink of what they called a "Jefferson moment." This metaphor alludes to the remarkable mix of optimism and energy that characterized the early part of the 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 the political propellant of the Clinton-Gore team's "American Re-Union." Central to the Con vision is the 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 the 18th century, but the 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 the 21st-century agenda entails developing a robot protocol, a set of cultural (as opposed to technical) guidelines for dealing with the 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 the 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 the "R2D2" sense of the 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 the idea of a robot population a step further, examining from a cultural perspective the key policy issues likely to merge from the 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 the 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 the Art" 38-39), and robot maids (Berger). …