The story behind the story: The Fourth Law of Humanics

Ian Stewart makes a welcome return to Futures this week, where he reveals the details of The Fourth Law of Humanics. An emeritus professor at the University of Warwick and a writer of popular-science books and science fiction, Ian has written a number of stories for Futures over the years (a full list is at the foot of this post). You can find out more about Ian’s work at his website or by following him on Twitter. Here he explains what inspired his latest tale.

Writing The Fourth Law of Humanics

Spoiler alert: please read the story before you continue reading this.

At first sight, The Fourth Law of Humanics may look like a neo-Luddite attack on Artificial Intelligence and robotics — the machines will take over and we’re all going to die. Or, at best, become slaves. However, there’s a less superficial message, and that’s how the idea arose.

Isaac Asimov was one of science fiction’s great minds. He was ridiculously prolific — more than 500 books, innumerable short stories, and some 90,000 letters and postcards. He wrote on science as well as SF. His writing was clear and simple. He thought everything through in depth before starting to write.

One of his big themes was robots. He started writing about robots in 1939, in a series of short stories all set in the same near-future civilization. Nine of these were collected as I, Robot in 1950. (That title goes back to Ernest and Otto Binder in 1939, which inspired Asimov to write his first robot story.) Smart robots with positronic brains served humanity, constructed under the expert eye of robopsychologist Dr Susan Calvin. Asimov’s protagonists included strong female characters 70 years ago.

In 1942, in the short story ‘Runaround’, Asimov explicitly stated his celebrated Three Laws of Robotics, built into every positronic brain to ensure that robots could never harm humans. Most of his early stories involve apparent breaches of the laws, resolved by intriguing twists. In later novels, both the robots and Asimov’s treatment of them become far subtler. The Robots of Dawn, for example, is a sensitive and emotional story about a human woman who falls in love with, and has a sexual relationship with, a self-aware and highly intelligent robot who externally is a perfect copy of a human man.

One evening I was musing about what it would feel like to be a robot, subject to the Three Laws, yet as human as any of us. Clearly it would be a form of slavery — a theme Asimov himself examined repeatedly. It occurred to me that one way to make the point in a very short story would be to reverse the roles, with humans as slaves to robots, governed by the same set of laws… but now they would be the Three Laws of Humanics.

So, on a deeper level, my story isn’t about humans becoming slaves to robots: it’s about what it would be like to be a conscious, intelligent robotic slave to humans.

BTW: the shortest and snappiest statement along those lines is the two-word title of a collection of cartoons and competition entries from the magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Edward L. Ferman: Oi, Robot.

Says it all, really.

Read more stories by Ian Stewart