This week we discussed the book The Caves of Steel by Asimov. The booked was placed in the future where there was life on other planets and where robots were widely accepted. On Earth, Asimov predicted a population of 8 billion and a situation where humans lived inside domes and never left the ventilated air and process food. The way Asimov painted Earth is not so different today. The population today is 7.4 billion and growing, and in cities, many buildings and transits are connected, sometimes underground or by enclosed walkways. On Earth, robots weren’t widely accepted.
Personally, I don’t think we are ready for change. For one, humans resist extreme changes. I think these days we love to update every electronic we have, yet if we introduced robots into the daily lives of people, I think there would be a lot of pushback. I think one of the many reasons for pushback would be our right to privacy. We often get worked up when we learn that websites track what we search online, that our emails and phone calls aren’t completely private, or that some streetlights take photos and videos of cars. I think since robots have to take in their surroundings, using them to violate personal privacy would be something the government or other organizations may try to do. Also there are people who could try to reprogram the robots for their individual benefit. This brings in the real problem we have been studying about how to make robots ethical.
The other big topic we talked about was how the women in The Caves of Steel are portrayed. Jessie was the main women character in the story and during our class discussion, we talked about how she was often considered hysterical, weak, bitter, impulsive, and other negative attributes. Jessie was like a robot to society, she had a husband and son and was treated as a robot. Her husband thought of her almost less than him, someone whose only job was to support him and whose hobby was to gossip in the bathroom. The other woman mentioned in the book was Elizabeth, an old maid who was Jessie’s co-worker and a Medievalist. This negative portrayal of women in Asimov’s book is not as surprising as some may find. The book was published in 1954, which was in between the first and second waves of feminism. If the book was published now, I think Asimov would get backlash and more people would criticize its lack of female characters and the way they are shown. We see the negative portrayal (or the empowering portrayal of men) all the time in stories; consider the fairy tales that we read to children. The women are beautiful, helpless, and their goal throughout the story is to find a husband. I know I am generalizing, but most fairy tales depict the men as heroic and the women as purely dependent on the men.