I participated in ICRES 2024, the conference about ethics around robotics and AIs. The president of SFWJ, Dr. Osawa, introduced me to a keynote speech. I titled my speech The Dignity of Silicon: Envisioning a Future of Respectful Synergy with Artificial Beings. As an SF writer who writes about AIs, I am interested in how we will live with them in the future.
In this keynote, I spoke about Asimov’s Three Laws of Robots and read my flash fiction “Mother Under the Glass.” I selected this classic theme because generative AI’s development changed the situation.
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
These laws are an excellent example of how imaginative regulation can be envisioned. Unlike Frankenstein’s monster seeking revenge on its creator or the robots in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. attempting to replace humans, Asimov designed these constraints to portray robots as companions to humans and industrial products. It is a good one, but these laws were compiled 80 years ago, before the modern computer age. Asimov and his editor made these in 1940 (or around these two years) when a year after Alan Turing started to develop Bombe. In those years, the idea that natural language might be compiled as a machinery rule might be natural. Asimov’s idea, algorism was not software running on hardware; it was made of wiring positron chips directly. The First Noiman computer was worked (1951) after Asimov published I, Robot. Asimov’s robots were born in a different situation, surrounded by computers.
Three Laws got older. However, the development of generative AI has brought them to our attention. Today, watch the rules, you shall imagined prompts. Many AI followers mess around with the natural language to operate computers, and some work, like Three Laws. Then I speech about it.
I told them how these laws work in fiction writing and discussed the development of thrillers with talking on Liar! (1941). I also picked Bicentennial Man for its complex theme around the Third Law. Different from 1st and 2nd Law those are limitations, 3rd Law is for will. And Andrew, the protagonist of Bicentennial Man, decides to cut it off to be human-being. It’s quite a complex story, but it is well acceptable. I pointed it out.
The Second part of my keynote was reading fiction about AI, Mother Under the Glass. I wrote it up as flash fiction to read the whole story during the keynote. I’ll rewrite it as a short story and will submit it somewhere.
This is excerpts of Mother Under the Glass.
Mother Under the Glass
I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport Terminal 1, circled the round terminal building, and chose one of the many escalators flying between the atriums. The escalator, slightly faster than those in Japan, quickly transported me to the arrival floor crowded with tourists. I walked through the corridor near to the bus terminal where we had agreed to meet. As I rounded half of the building, I spotted my mother standing beside a large suitcase. Slender for her age, she wore a white blouse and beige slacks I had not seen before.
“Welcome to Paris, Mom.”
I called out as I approached her. I placed my hand on her shoulder, made a kissing sound against her cheek as the French do. My mother, wide-eyed, grabbed my fingers from her shoulder and squeezed it tightly in front of her breast.
“My, you’ve grown so much. I have such fond memories of Paris.”
I just smiled. If I asked her about it, she would tell me how she struggled to find a bakery when English failed her, got heatstroke in front of the Pompidou Center, or drunken with wine.
However, she has never been to Paris.
And this isn’t even the real Paris. This is Paris Twin Classic, a Virtual Reallity space operated by the City of Paris. The meticulously recreated Charles de Gaulle Airport, down to each stained tile, is merely an avatar spawn point. And as for my mother… Today is the first time I’ve met her in person. It’s also the first time I’ve known her height. Until today, she was a generated image seen under the glasses. My mother is a child developing AI personality created by a large-scale language model in the late 2020s…
