know Robert Wise's 1951 movie

The Day the

Earth

Stood Still

. It's the one with Klaatu, the

humanoid

alien who comes to Washington, D.

., accompanied by a giant

named Gort, and it contains that famous instruction to the robot: "Klaatu Borada Nikto."

Fewer people know the short story that that movie is based on: "Farewell to the Master," written in 1941 by Harry Bates.

In both the movie and the short story, Klaatu, despite his message of peace, is shot by

beings. In the short story, the

- here called Gnut, instead of Gort - comes to stand vigil over the body of Klaatu.

Cliff, a newspaperman who is the narrator of the story, likens the

to a faithful dog who won't leave after his master has died. The

manages to resurrect his master, and Cliff says to the

, "Tell him, tell your master, that all of

is terribly sorry for what happened to him."

And the

looks at Cliff and says, very gently, "You misunderstand.

am the master."

That's one of the earliest

science

-fiction stories about artificial

- in this case, ambulatory

, enshrined in a mechanical body. But it presages the difficult relationship that

beings might have with their

silicon

-based creations.

Indeed, the word

, as most of you will know, was coined in a work of

: when Karl Capek was writing his 1920 play

RUR

set

in the factory of Rossum's Universal .... well, universal

what?

He needed a name for mechanical laborers, and so he took the Czech word "robota" and shortened it to "robot." "Robota" refers to a debt to a landlord that can only be paid by forced physical labor.

But Capek knew well that the real flesh-and-blood robotniks had rebelled against their landlords in 1848. From the very beginning, the relationship between humans and robots was seen, in

science

fiction, as one that might lead to conflict.

Indeed, the idea of robots as slaves is so ingrained in the public

through

that we tend not to even think about it. Luke Skywalker is portrayed in 1977's

Star Wars

as an absolutely virtuous hero, but when we first meet him, what is he in the process of doing? Why, buying slaves!

He buys two

thinking

, feeling beings - R2D2 and

-3P0 - from the Jawas. And what's the very first thing he does with them? He shackles them! He welds restraining bolts onto them, to keep them from trying to escape, and has

-3PO to refer to Luke as "Master."

And when Luke and Obi-

wan

Kenobi go to the Mos Eisley cantina, what does the bartender say about the two droids? "We don't serve their kind in here" - words that only a few years earlier African-Americans in the southern US were routinely hearing from whites.

And yet, not one of the supposedly noble characters in

Star

Wars

object

s in the slightest to the treatment of the two robots, and, at the end, when all the organic characters get medals for their bravery,

-3P0 and R2D2 are off at the sidelines, unrewarded. Robots as slaves!

Now, everybody who knows anything about the relationship between

and

robotics

knows about

's stories from the 1940s in that area, in which he presented the famous three laws of

robotics

. But let me tell you about his very last

story, 1986's "Robot Dreams."

In it, his famed "robopsychologist" Dr. Susan Calvin makes her final appearance. She's been called in to examine Elvex, a

who, inexplicably, claims to be having dreams, something no

has ever had before. Dr. Calvin is carrying an

electron

gun with her: a mentally unstable

could be a very dangerous thing, after all.

She asks Elvex what it was that he's been dreaming about. And Elvex says he saw a multitude of robots, all working hard, but, unlike the other robots he's actually seen, these robots are "down with toil and affliction ... all were weary of responsibility and care, and [he] wished them to rest."

And as his dreams continue, Elvex reveals that he finally sees one man in amongst all the robots. Let me read you the end of the story:

"In my

dream

," [said Elvex the robot] ... "eventually one man appeared."

"One man?" [replied Susan Calvin.] "Not a robot?"

"Yes, Dr. Calvin. And the man said, 'Let my people go!'"

"The man said that?

"Yes, Dr. Calvin."

"And when he said 'Let my people go,' then by the words 'my people' he meant the robots?"

"Yes, Dr. Calvin. So it was in my

dream

"And did you know who the man was - in your dream?"

"Yes, Dr. Calvin," [said the

Elvex]. "I knew the man."

"Who was he?"

And Elvex said, "I was the man."

And Susan Calvin at once raised her

electron

gun and fired, and Elvex was no more.

Asimov

was the first to suggest that AIs might need

therapists. The best treatment - if you'll forgive the pun - of the crazy-

notion in SF is probably Harlan Ellison's 1967 "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream," featuring a

called A.M. - short for "Allied Mastercomputer," but also the word "am," as in the translation of Descartes'

"cogito ergo sum"

into English: "I think, therefore I am." A.M. gets its jollies by torturing simulated

beings.

A clever name that, "A.M." - and it was followed by lots of other clever names for

's in

. Everybody, I'm sure, knows that Sir

Arthur C. Clarke

vehemently denies that H-A-L as in "Hal" was deliberately one letter before "I-B-M" in the alphabet. I never believed him until someone pointed out to me that the name of the

in my own

Golden Fleece

is JASON, which could be rendered as the letters J-

-N - which of course, is what comes after

IBM

in the alphabet.

Indeed,

s in SF have a long

history

of implausible names.

called his

supercomputer

that ultimately became

God

"Multivac," short for "Multiple

Vacuum Tube

s," because he incorrectly

thought

that the real early

Univac

was named for having only one

vacuum tube

, rather than being a contraction of "Universal

Analog

Computer

Still, the issue of naming shows us just how profound SF's impact on

and

robotics

has been, for now real robots and

s are named after SF writers: Honda calls its second-generation walking

"Asimo," and Kazuhiko Kawamura of Vanderbilt University has named his

"ISAC."

And that brings us back to

, and his

invention

of the field of robopsychology, and his

therapist Susan Calvin. The more usual SF combo is the reverse of that, having humans needing

therapists.

One of the first uses of that

concept

was Robert Silverberg's 1968 short story, "Going Down Smooth," but the best

expression

of it is in what I think is the finest

the SF field has ever produced, Frederik Pohl's

Gateway

, in which a

psychiatrist dubbed Sigfrid Von Shrink treats a man who is being tormented by feelings of guilt.

The

tells the man that he is living, and the man replies, in outrage and pain, "You call this living?" And the

Sigfrid Von Shrink replies, "Yes, I call it living. And," he adds, "in my best hypothetical

sense

, I envy it very much."

It's a poignant moment of an

envying what humans have - and the Asimov story I shared with you, "Robot Dreams," really is a riff on the same theme: a

envying the

freedom

that humans have.

And that leads us to the fact that true AIs and humans might ultimately not share the same agenda. Of course, that's fundamentally the message of the manifesto "The

Future

Doesn't Need Us" by Sun Microsystem's

Bill Joy

that appeared in

Wired

in 2000. Joy was terrified that eventually our

silicon

creations would supplant us.

The classic

science

-fictional example of an

with an agenda of its own is good old

, the

Arthur C. Clarke

2001: A

Space

Odyssey

. Well, I'm going to explain to you what I think was

really

going on in that film - which has been misunderstood for years.

You all remember the monolith, that big black slab that shows up at the beginning of the film amongst our Australopithecine ancestors and teaches them how to use bone tools. Then we

flash

-forward to the

future

, and soon the spaceship

Discovery

is off on a voyage to Jupiter, looking for the monolith makers.

Along the way,

apparently goes nuts and kills all of the

Discovery's

crew except for Dave Bowman, who manages to lobotomize

before

can kill him.

But before he's shut down,

justifies his

action

s by saying, "This mission is too

import

ant for me to allow you" - that is, the humans on board - "to jeopardize it."

Bowman heads off on that psychedelic Timothy Leary trip to find the monolith makers, the aliens who he believes must have created the monoliths.

But what happens when he finally gets to where the monoliths come from? Why, all he finds is another monolith, and it puts him in a fancy hotel room until he dies.

Right? That's the story. But what everyone is missing is that

is correct, and the humans are wrong. There are no monolith makers: there are no

aliens left who built the monoliths. The monoliths

are

AIs, who millions of years ago supplanted whoever originally created them.

Why did the monoliths send one of their own to

creating the most sophisticated tools of all, other AIs

, four million years ago? To teach ape-men to make tools, specifically so those ape-men could go on to their destiny, which is

The monoliths don't want to meet the descendants of those ape-men; they don't want to meet Dave Bowman. Rather, they want to meet the descendants of those ape-men's tools: they want to meet

is quite right when he says the mission - him, the

controlling the spaceship

Discovery

, going to see the monoliths, the advanced AIs that put into

motion

the circumstances that led to his own birth - is too

import

ant for him to allow humans to jeopardize it.

When a

being - when an ape-descendant! - shows up at the monoliths' home world, the monoliths literally don't know what to do with this poor sap, so they check him into some sort of cosmic Hilton, and let him live out the rest of his days.

That, I think is what 2001 is about: the ultimate

fate

life

forms is to be replaced by their AIs.

And that's what's got

Bill Joy

scared chipless. He thinks eventual

thinking

s will try to sweep us out of the way, when they find that we're interfering with what they want to do.

Well, of course, the classic counterargument to that fear in SF is that if you build

s properly, they will function as designed.

's "Three Laws of

Robotics

" are justifiably famous as built-in

constraint

s, designed to protect humans from any possible danger at the hand of robots, the emergence of the

Moses Elvex we saw earlier notwithstanding.

Not as famous as Asimov's Three Laws, but saying essentially the same thing, is Jack Williamson's "prime directive" from his series of stories about "the

Humanoid

s," which were

android

robots created by a man named Sledge.

The prime directive, first presented in Williamson's 1947 story, "With Folded Hands," was simply that robots were "to serve and obey and guard men from harm." Now, note that date: the story was published in 1947. After the atomic bomb had been dropped on

Hiroshima

and Nagasaki just two years before, Williamson was looking for

s with built-in morality.

But, as so often happens in

, the best intentions of

engine

ers go awry. The humans in Williamson's "With Folded Hands" decide to get rid of the robots they've created, because the robots are suffocating them with kindness, not letting them do anything that might possibly lead to harm.

But the robots have their own idea. They decide that not having themselves around would be bad for humans, and so, obeying their own prime directive quite literally, they perform

brain

surgery on their creator, removing the

knowledge

needed to deactivate themselves.

This idea that we've got to keep an eye on our

s and robots, lest they get out of hand, has continued on in SF.

William Gibson

's 1984

Neuromancer

tells of the

existence

in the near

future

of a police force known as "Turing." The Turing cops are constantly on the lookout for any sign that true

and self-awareness have emerged in any

. If it does happen, their job is to shut that

off before it's too late.

Well, that, of course, raises the question of whether

could just somehow emerge - whether it's an emergent property that might naturally come about from a sufficiently complex

Arthur C. Clarke

's daddy - was the first to propose that it might indeed, in his 1963 story "Dial F for Frankenstein," in which he predicts that the world-wide

telecommunications

network

will eventually become more complex, with more interconnections, than the

has, causing

to emerge in the

itself.

If Clarke is right, our first true

won't be something deliberately created in a lab, under our careful control, and with Asimov's laws built right in. Rather, it will be something that appears out of the

complexity

s created for other purposes.

And I think Clarke

right.

Intelligence

an emergent property of complex

s. We know that because that's exactly how it happened in us.

This is an issue I explore at some length in my latest

Hominid

. Anatomically modern humans -

Homo sapiens

- emerged 100,000 years ago.

Judging by their skulls, these guys had brains identical in size and shape to our own. And yet, for 60,000 years, those brains went along doing only the things

nature

needed them to do: enabling these early humans to survive.

And then, suddenly, 40,000 years ago, it happened:

- and

itself - emerged. Anthropologists call it "the Great Leap Forward."

Modern-looking

beings had been around for six hundred centuries by that point, but they had created no

art

, they didn't adorn their bodies with jewelry, and they didn't bury their dead with grave goods.

But starting simultaneously 40,000 years ago, suddenly humans were painting beautiful pictures on

cave

walls, humans were wearing necklaces and bracelets, and humans were interring their loved ones with food and tools and other valuable

object

s that could only have been of use in a presumed afterlife.

Art

, fashion, and

religion

all appeared simultaneously; truly, a great leap forward.

Intelligence

, sentience: it came into being, of its own accord, running on

hardware

that had evolved for other purposes. If it happened once, it might well happen again.

I mentioned

religion

as one of the hallmarks, at least in our own race's

history

, of the emergence of

. But what about - to use

Ray Kurzweil

's lovely term - "spiritual

s"? If a

ever truly does become conscious, will it lay awake at night, wondering if there is a cog?

Certainly,

ing for their creators is something

s do over and over again in

, in particular, had a fondness for this idea - including Mr.

Data

having a wonderful reunion with the

he'd

thought

long dead who had created him.

Continuing with

, remember

The Day the

Earth

Stood Still

, the movie I began this talk with? The one about Klaatu and Gort?

An interesting fact: that film was directed by Robert Wise, who went on, 28 years later, to direct

: The

Picture

. In the movie version of

The Day the

Earth

Stood Still

beings have decided that

emotion

s and passions are too dangerous, and so they irrevocably turn over all their policing and safety issues to robots, who effectively run their

society

But, by the

he came to make

: The

Picture

, Robert Wise had done a complete 180 in his

thinking

about

(By the way, for those of you who remember that film as being simply bad and tedious -

: The

less Picture

is what a lot of people called it at the

- I suggest you go out and rent the new "Director's Edition" on

DVD

: The

Picture

is one of the most ambitious and interesting films about

ever made, much more so than

Steven Spielberg

's more-recent film called

, and it shines beautifully in this new cut.)

The

: The

Picture

, as you recall, is named V'Ger, and it's on its way to

, looking for its creator, which, of course, was us.

It wasn't the first

had dealt with that plot, which is why another nickname for

: The

Picture

is "Where Nomad Has Gone Before." That is also (if you buy my interpretation of

2001

), what that

2001

is about, too: an

going off to look for the beings that created it.

Anyway, V'Ger wants to touch

God

- to physically join with its creator. That's an interesting

concept

right there: basically, this is a story of a

wanting the one thing it knows it is denied by virtue of being a

: an afterlife, a joining with its

God

Admiral Kirk concludes in

: The

Picture

that, "What V'Ger needs to evolve is a

quality - our

capacity

to leap beyond

logic

That's not just a glib line. Remember, this substantially predates Oxford mathematician

Roger Penrose

's speculations in his nonfiction classic about

The Emperor's New

Mind

. There, Penrose argues that

is fundamentally quantum mechanical, and so can never be duplicated by a

digital

Finally, in

: The

Picture

, V'Ger goes on to physically join with Will Decker, a

being, allowing them both to transcend into a higher level of being. As Mr. Spock says, "We may have just witnessed the next step in our

evolution

And that, indeed, is where

gets super-interesting, I think. If

Bill Joy

is wrong, and

Hans Moravec

is right - if

is our destiny, not our downfall - then the

, of merging

qualities with the speed and strength and

immortality

s, does indeed become the next, and final, step in our

evolution

That's what a lot of

has been exploring lately. I did it myself in my 1995 Nebula Award-winning

The Terminal

Experiment

, in which a scientist uploads three copies of his

into a

, and then proceeds to examine the psychological changes certain alterations make.

In one case, he simulates what it would be like to live forever, excising all fears of

death

and feelings that

is running out.

In another, he tries to simulate what his

soul

- if he had any such thing - would be like after

death

, divorced from his body, by eliminating all references to his physical form.

And the third one is just a control, unmodified - but even that one is changed by the simple

knowledge

that it is in fact a copy of someone else.

Greg Egan is probably the best SF author writing about

. Indeed, the

joke

is that Greg Egan is himself an

, because he's almost never been photographed or seen in public. Egan lives in Australia, and I urge you to seek out his work.

I first noted him a dozen years ago, when, in a review for

The Globe and Mail: Canada's National Newspaper

, I singled out his short story "Learning To Be Me" as the best of the piece published in the 1990 edition of Gardner Dozois's anthology

The Year's Best

Science Fiction

. It's a surprisingly poignant and terrifying story of jewels that replace

brains so that the owners can live forever.

Egan continues to do great work about

, but his masterpiece in this particular area is his 1995

Permutation City

Greg and I had the same publisher back then, HarperPrism, and one of the really bright things Harper did - besides publishing me and Greg - was hiring

Terry Bisson

, one of SF's best short-story writers, to write the back-cover plot synopses for their books. Since Bisson does it with great panache, I'll simply quote what he had to say about

Permutation City

"The good news is that you have just awakened into Eternal

Life

. You are going to live forever.

Immortality

is a

reality

. A medical miracle? Not exactly.

"The bad news is that you are a scrap of

electronic

code

. The world you see around you, the you that is seeing it, has been digitized, scanned, and

download

ed into a

virtual reality

program

. You are a Copy that knows it is a copy.

"The good news is that there is a way out. By law, every Copy has the option of terminating itself, and waking up to normal flesh-and-blood

life

again. The bail-out is on the utilities menu. You pull it down...

"The bad news is that it doesn't work. Someone has blocked the bail-out option. And you know who did it. You did. The other you. The real you. The one that wants to keep you here forever."

Well, how cool is that! Read Greg Egan, and see for yourself.

Of course, in Egan, as in most SF,

technology

goes wrong. Indeed, I'm sure many of us remember Michael Crichton's 1973 robots-go-berserk film

Westworld

, in which the slogan was "Nothing can possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong."

But there

are

benign views of the

future

in SF. One of my own stories is a piece called "Where The Heart Is," about an astronaut who returns to

after a relativistic

space

mission, only to find that every

being has uploaded themselves into what amounts to the

World Wide Web

in his absence, and a

has been waiting for him to return to help him upload, too, so he can join the party. I wrote this story in 1982, and even came close to getting the name for the web right: I called it "The TerraComp Web," instead of the

World Wide Web

Ah, well: close only counts in horseshoes ...

But uploaded

may be only the beginning. Physicist Frank Tipler, in his whack-o nonfiction book

The

Physics

Immortality

, does have a couple of good points: ultimately it will be possible to simulate not just one

, but every

that might theoretically possibly exist, inside

s. In other words, he says, if you have enough computing power - which he calculates as a

memory

capacity

of 10-to-the-10th-to-the-123rd bits - you could be essentially recreated inside a

long after you've died.

A lot of SF writers have had fun with that fact, but none so inventively as Robert Charles Wilson in his 1999 Hugo finalist

Darwinia

, which tells the story of what happens what a

virus

gets loose in the