Xavier > Recent Status Updates

“What does that mean?” cried Calvin. “Only that you didn’t want him to give you the solution. It would puncture your ego to have a machine do what you couldn’t. Did you ask him?” she shot at Bogert. “In a way.” Bogert coughed and reddened. “He told me he knew very little about mathematics.” Lanning laughed, not very loudly and the psychologist smiled caustically. She said, “I’ll ask him! A solution by him won’t hurt

Lanning found his voice and let it out with a roar. “You’re suspended, d’ye hear? You’re relieved of all duties. You’re broken, do you understand?” The smile on the other’s face broadened, “Now, what’s the use of that? You’re getting nowhere. I’m holding the trumps. I know you’ve resigned. Herbie told me, and he got it straight from you.” Lanning forced himself to speak quietly. H

re not going to do that by saying, ‘Your fault! My fault!’ “ Her cold gray eyes fastened upon Ashe, and he grinned. Lanning grinned too, and, as always at such times, his long white hair and shrewd little eyes made him the picture of a biblical patriarch, “True for you, Dr. Calvin.” His voice became suddenly crisp, “Here’s everything in pill-concentrate form.

Listen, Bogert. There wasn’t a hitch in the assembly from start to finish. I guarantee that.” Bogert’s thick lips spread in a patronizing smile, “Do you? If you can answer for the entire assembly line, I recommend your promotion. By exact count, there are seventy-five thousand, two hundred and thirty-four operations necessary for the manufacture of a single positronic brain, each separate operation depending for succ

If any one of them goes seriously wrong, the ‘brain’ is ruined. I quote our own information folder, Ashe.” Milton Ashe flushed, but a fourth voice cut off his reply. “If we’re going to start by trying to fix the blame on one another, I’m leaving.” Susan Calvin’s hands were folded tightly in her lap, and the little lines about her thin, pale lips deepened, “We’ve got a mind-reading robot on our hands and it strikes me

All right,” Powell said gloomily, “but if any ‘finger’ gets within twenty feet of us, we’ll be sensed whether we are in the line of sight or not. I hope you know that.” “When I need an elementary course in robotics, I’ll file an application with you formally, and in triplicate. Down through here.”

The robot nodded, “That makes me feel swell, but what are you getting at, boss?” He was equipped with an excellent diaphragm, and the presence of overtones in the sound unit robbed him of much of that metallic flatness that marks the usual robot voice.

Powell dropped a restraining arm upon Donovan’s suddenly bunched fist. “Just why do you say
that?”
Cutie laughed. It was a very inhuman laugh — the most machine-like utterance he had yet given
vent to. It was sharp and explosive, as regular as a metronome and as uninflected.
“Look at you,” he said finally. “I say this in no spirit of contempt, but look at you! The material
you are made of is soft and flabby,

Powell’s jaw set lumpily. “You’re being foolish. I told you already that we made you.”
“And if you don’t believe us,” added Donovan, “we’ll gladly take you apart!”
The robot spread his strong hands in a deprecatory gesture, “I accept nothing on authority. A
hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless — and it goes against all the dictates of
logic to suppose that you made me.”

“Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands.”
“He says he’s going to figure it all out for himself.”
“Well, now,” said Donovan sweetly, “I do hope he’ll condescend to explain it all to me after he’s
puzzled everything out” Then, with sudden rage, “Listen! If that metal mess gives me any lip like
that, I’ll knock that chromium cranium right off its torso.”

d.” Then, more thoughtfully: “And that, by the way, is what makes him drunk.
At potential equilibrium, half the positronic paths of his brain are out of kilter. I’m not a robot
specialist, but that seems obvious. Probably he’s lost control of just those parts of his voluntary
mechanism that a human drunk has. Ve-e-ery pretty.

Donovan rose to his feet in excitement. “ And it strikes an equilibrium. I see. Rule 3 drives him
back and Rule 2 drives him forward–”
“So he follows a circle around the selenium pool, staying on the locus of all points of potential
equilibrium. And unless we do something about it, he’ll stay on that circle forever, giving us the
good old runaround.” Then, more thoughtfully: “And that, by the way, is

“Are you serious? This is impossible.”
“There it is,” growled Donovan.

For one thing, the unions
would never let us. But we can turn out a very few robots using robot labor exclusively, merely as a
sort of scientific experiment. You see,” he tapped his pince-nez into one palm argumentatively,
“what the labor unions don’t realize — and I say this as a man who has always been very
sympathetic with the labor movement in general — is that the advent of the robot, while involving
s

After the lieutenant dies and his second in command who used to say it with the force of "ex cathedra" (in the current tense), becomes the mother of the family as if the patriarch will return: "the lieutenant wouldn't like that" had s devastating effect when (rarely) used.

The moral philosphy professor writing to his comrade while having lectured about the ills of marxism is a great touch.
(Passage too long to quote)

He _looked_ so smug. So self-assured. The idea that this invincible robot could _feel_ that he had failed. That he could feel so deeply and personally disgraced that he wanted to run away. Hide his face among strangers. And offer the excuse that his leaving would be "best []".

Smugly self-satisfied with what he did.

I had known that sergeant Zim worked hard. But it had never occured to me that h ecould possibly be other than completely and smugly self-satisfied.

Then, if
he felt like it, he would spend a couple of hours either reading or looking at a
movie; and at midnight he would go to sleep - usually without any help from
electronarcosis. Poole's program was a mirror image of his own, and the two
schedules dovetailed together without friction.
Both men were fully occupied, they were too intelligent and well-adjusted
to quarrel, and the voyage had settled down to a

Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to
the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would
never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too
complex for human understanding. Whatever way it worked, the final result was
a machine intelligence that could reproduce - some philosophers still preferred to
use the word “mimic” - most of

With its
advent, it was clear that artificial intelligences at least as powerful as Man's need
be no larger than office desks - if one only knew how to construct them.
Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s,
Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated
automatically - self replicated - in accordance with any arbitrary learning
program. Artificial brains could

Michaels shook his head. “Out of the question,” he protested. “You can't
have very small, intelligent creatures; you need a minimum brain size.”
Michaels and Halvorsen, Floyd had noticed, usually took opposing
viewpoints, yet there appeared to be little personal hostility or friction between
them. They seemed to respect each other, and simply agreed to disagree.

>Any man who had ever worked in a hardened missile site would have felt
at home in Clavius. Here on the Moon were the same arts and hardware of
underground living, and of protection against a hostile environment; but here
they had been turned to the purposes of peaee [sic].

After ten thousand years, man had at last found something as exciting as
war. Unfortunately, not all nations had yet realized that fact.

Accidents, crimes,
natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these still
seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the
ether. Yet Floyd also wondered if this was altogether a bad thing; the newspapers
of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic
headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the
more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes,
natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these still
seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the
ether. Yet Floyd also wond

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more
convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be
replaced by something as unimaginable as the Newspad itself would have been
to Caxton or Gutenber

(That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover
into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour;
even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime
doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the
news satellites.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology
behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he
was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour,
yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the postage-
stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could
read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would flash back to the complete
page and select a new subject for detailed examination.
Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology
behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfec