Geeklook: Eve no Jikan 02

After epically failing my attempt at personally checking out all the new offerings last season, I’m gonna revert to my lazy-blogger’s method of doing seasonal picks – reading other people’s blogs :P I’m having too much fun with these other random shows to stop now anyway.

Episode 2 was another great episode. I’ll give plunging head-first into philosophy a pass for now since that’ll probably be further developed in later eps. So inspired by dai1313, I’m gonna attempt to do some geek-analysis of the going-ons instead.

The title and centerpiece of this episode was Sammy (weird name for a woman robot), who goes to the Time of Eve cafe and is compelled by the first law to keep that fact hidden from her master. We also got to see a number of other robots, compelled by the same law, collaboratively and discretely working to prevent her master from discovering her in the cafe. Accompanying all this is the revelation that a robot is able to lie deliberately, and while we can think of plenty of interesting implications for that, most of them are fairly well explored in Asimov’s works, in which robots lied freely.

What’s interesting is this – the collaboration. In all of Asimov’s works that I can remember, his robots have evaluated the laws of robotics individually unless explicitly designed as a collaborative team – and then the laws will be evaluated from the perspective of that team only. What we witnessed this episode, though, is very intimate synergy between apparently unrelated robots. First law notwithstanding, a robot is only able to prevent harm on a human being if it knows what is able to harm said human. How did Akiko, or the little girl who stole the guy’s glasses, know that he was Sammy’s master? How did they know the precise nature of the two’s relationship to deduce the conclusion that their meeting in the cafe will cause the master harm? How did they even know when, or that Sammy was coming at all in the first place (they had smoothly lost his glasses a good while before Sammy even walked in)?

Networks are probably the most logical conclusion. These robots are machines, very very complex machines that are undoubtably both fast and turing-complete, so it isn’t at all inconceivable for them to be equipped with signal receivers/broadcasters like the ones our puny mobile phones/laptop computers come with. The question is – what exactly are these robots broadcasting into what must be some sort of a wide-area wireless mesh? For Sammy (who doesn’t know her master is in the cafe) to have, consciously or unconsciously (if that even makes sense for a robot), communicated to the robots in the cafe that they needed to get rid of his glasses, it would have had to be some pretty private information, at least by today’s standards.

So what, does it mean that humanity has somehow evolved to be able to actually stomach full and free exchange of personal information online? I doubt it. A more likely possibility is that robots have completely succeeded the computers of our age, and that (taking from Asimov’s world), robots cannot be manifactured without first hard-wiring the three laws. Hence robots are the only things able to actually tap into the information network, and hence private information is always protected from inappropriate disclosure by the first law.

And here come the questions. What is the implication? This means robots have exclusive control of our most valuable (and dangerous?) information, since we can only get to the information if a robot ‘approves’ the retrieval. It would mean a kind of surrender and admittance that robots are better able to handle information – about our own selves – than us. And what’s more? Those robots are really really smart. They have to be or we would never have put them in such a position of absolute power. They have to be to have been able to understand the implication of Sammy coming to the cafe and smoothly compute the necessary course of action (removing the guy’s glasses) simultaneously and coordinate the tasks so flawlessly, all in an instant. And yet they are equipped with wireless receivers and networking capabilities. They can do arithmetic a hundred thousand times faster than any of us. Conclusion – they are superhuman.

If you are still with me and my wild fantasies, here’s the final question. We humans have always assumed our right to rule this earth (if rule this earth we do) on the grounds that we are the most intelligent and superior species. Should we then be also ruling over superhumans, just because they submit to us?

(Yeah yeah yeah, I know I came back to philosophy anyway. Cut me some slack :) )