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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   17444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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I thought positronic robots were superintelligent. They end up infiltrating positions of power and taking over the world out of human control

In most Asimov stories and novels, the robots appear to be human intelligence at best. The plot of most robot short stories revolves around humans debugging robots which try to follow the Three Laws with limited cognitive capacity.

There are two stories I recall where a non-robotic AI can be reasonably thought to be smarter than the average human, one is the galactic AC in "The Last Question", the other is another short story about an Earth-bound administrative AI which ends up plotting to reduce the power of individuals who are opposed to it. There is also a standard humanoid robot running for president, but that is hardly taking over the world.

The instance you think of are likely the robots in one of the later books from the space detective series, which actually links that series to Foundation. But the edge which the robots develop -- and which allows them invent the Zeroth Law -- is not superintelligence, but telepathy.

The events in the Foundation series strongly imply that the descendants of these robots are still not superintelligent. After all, they allow the Mule -- who is himself a telepath, but not superintelligent -- to escape their planet and take over the Foundation. They leave the cleanup to the Second Foundation.

R. Daneel Olivaw (Asimov's smartest robot) is superintelligent but not incomprehensibly so; imagine a synthesis of all the most intelligent humans in every field, add millennia of experience and perfect recall, and later on, telepathy. The Minds, by contrast, are basically godlike.

No spoiler tags? I know, I know, decades-old books, but you never know who's never read them but might like to.

Daneel gets his telepathy after only a few centuries of experience, but he still doesn't clearly exceed human intelligence at that point. In his initial appearance in Caves of Steel, he's occasionally outwitted by his clever-but-not-extraordinary human partner, then even hundreds of years later he's confident that he's failing to figure out certain mysteries that his now-deceased partner would have deciphered right away. He stays at a comprehensible level of intelligence throughout the books. Even many millennia later, when he's probably the smartest thing in the galaxy overall, he still ends up relying on a one-in-a-quadrillion human savant to solve specific applied math problems he can't.

I'd also say the Minds are godlike in the ancient "squabbling Greek pantheon" sense rather than the modern "omniscient + omnipotent" sense; they surely count as superintelligent, but e.g. in Excession they never manage to understand what the eponymous object is.

There were a very wide range of intelligence levels in Asimov's stories, even just restricting to his main series' "canon" stories. Many of his stories set "early" in his fictional future are basically puzzle stories where positronic robots are doing something stupid and humans are trying to understand why. Even in his "later" settings it was just the personal-servant style robots who had roughly human-level intelligence, and those were outnumbered by humanoid-but-dullard robots limited to agriculture or manufacturing uses.

More spoilery: He had a couple standalone/non-canon stories where it looked like his robots would end up later taking over the world in classical Unfriendly AI fashion, but in canon in his longest series the most intelligent of them takes over the galaxy in part to keep it mostly under human control, after he realizes how badly human culture seems to wither away in societies where humans started relying too heavily on robots.

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