Visions of the Future

While I was reading Caves of Steel, I started to think about the different versions of where society will go we see in Asimov's Robots series.

On the one hand, you have the Earth. Everyone has moved into enormous domes that keep them sealed off from the outside. Not because humanity has foolishly rendered the planet uninhabitable to themselves. More because the different urban sprawls started to run into each other, so why not lump them together? Stack buildings on top of buildings, interconnect everything, tunnel beneath the surface to increase the area available. It does have the benefit of creating more space to grow food or generate power to sustain all these people, but all that is handled by robots. No Earthman wants to venture outside and actually experience direct sunlight or air.

Everything is very communal. Large cafeterias for people to gather for daily meals. Community washrooms, or Personals, for showering and so on*. Most people get from one place to another on moving walkways that you just hop on and off of as needed. You don't necessarily have to use these amenities. If your Class is high enough you can cook your own food, have your own washroom. There are roadways to use if you have a vehicle. But those are sparsely utilized. Even though Baley's apartment has a personal washroom, he still uses the community one.

There doesn't seem to be any homelessness or starvation. Everyone is getting at least the bare minimum, although there's still a stigma about being declassified, jobless I think, and existing at that level. Or perhaps that's just Baley, but his feelings are as result of his childhood experience, so I doubt fear of declassification, of being dropped in status, in resources, is something unique to him.

There are robots, but they're crude things, easily identifiable, and mostly doing the work Earthmen don't want to do, meaning the stuff that takes places outside. All in all, it makes me think of Metropolis, which is weird since I've never watched that. But the idea of this great mass of metal with people scurrying around within the bowels of it, like mice in the gears of an enormous clock, feels appropriate.

In contrast, there's the 50 Spacer worlds. Combined, their population is less than that of Earth's. Solaria is an entire world with perhaps 20,000 people on it. That's the extreme, where each person lives on hundreds or perhaps thousands of acres, alone except for the robots that do everything. All contact with other humans is through three-dimensional holograms. The other worlds aren't as extreme, they have actual cities, but there's still a certain distance maintained between individuals. The notion of two people sharing a washroom simultaneously is almost horrifying. The outside world is actually incorporated into their living spaces, rather than being kept, well, outside. Parks and lawns and places to hike.

The robots are more numerous, more sophisticated. They perform most major functions short of whatever administrative or higher thinking jobs are required. People can have jobs, but they're more like hobbies. At least on Solaria, people seem to each pick an interest and then pursue it as far as they care to. Whether that's an art style based on melding sound and color into sculpture, or mathematics. But there's no urgency to it. Baley speaks to a man that studies math and thinks there might be a way to predict future events with it. When Baley suggests comparing notes with someone else, the guy is flabbergasted. Why bother?

Of the two, I know which sounds better to me, and it's the one where people wouldn't be constantly crowding in on me. But from Asimov's perspective for humanity as a whole, neither is any good. You could argue about whether humanity continuing to expand across an ever greater expanse is actually a good thing, but let's go with it for the moment.

The Spacers have the capability to settle new worlds. Their ancestors already did it once, and they have the robots to do all the prep work. They just don't have the drive for it, or the ability to work together, which is vital for such an undertaking. Because in their society, there's no need. There's plenty to go around on their worlds, the robots handle all the work nobody really enjoys doing. People can pursue their interests as far as they care to for their own curiosity, but the idea of collaboration to produce something great, is increasingly foreign. Not entirely, you see it on Aurora in the people working to try and recreate a positronic brain the equal of Daneel's, but there's not much pushback against Falstolfe refusing to share his work with them. It's his work, he can keep it secret if he likes, regardless of whatever arguments might be made about the greater good.

The Earth has the need, because the planet's capabilities are becoming increasingly taxed with the growing population. They have the collaborative spirit. There's no choice, on a world where they're all packed together like sardines. You have to be used to being around other people, working with and around them. They might even have the drive, as the push to climb the ladder, get the little extras they might not even want, to have something to do and accomplish, is still there. But they're too locked into their domes. If Earthlings can't even venture out onto the surface of their own, perfectly safe world, how are they going to travel to an entirely new, inhospitable world, and make it someplace livable?

I've seen some writing from the early to mid-20th Century where the feeling seemed to be that the assembly line and increasing automation of industrial work would free up the working man to have more time to pursue their own interests. The idea being they'd still live comfortably, needs met, without having to work as much at a repetitive job. The idea that mechanization makes things better for everyone.

Obviously, that hasn't exactly worked out. But the Spacer worlds seem like the ultimate progression of this notion. Maybe that's inaccurate. Maybe Baley didn't meet the people who suffer in that system, but there's never a sense that the people he does meet are trying to produce results because they'll go hungry otherwise. They're trying to produce whatever they're pursuing because it's what moves them. Whether that's more advanced robotics, or art, or greater understanding between Earth and the Spacers.

Even in circumstances that Asimov posits as untenable for one reason or another (Earth being too confined, the Spacers have grown too complacent and stagnant) he still expects the basic needs of the people will be met. I don't think we really see the notion of poverty in Asimov's books until the Galactic Empire starts to crumble in the Foundation series. Some of the worlds we see there that are abandoned to some petty local warlord have drifted back to a technological state less advanced than where we are presently. Nobody is looking after the elderly or infirm. They do the best they can on their own, or by the good will of their friends and loved ones. In other words, where a lot of people are right now.

But on Terminus, even in the days shortly after its settlement, when the Empire is still going on inertia, when Terminus is a rinky-dink, no-account world whose greatest export is potatoes, there's not a sense people are in dire straits. They might not be in the lap of luxury, but their lives are stable enough to be concerned about losing what they have if the Anacreons, who are closer to those indifferent warlord types, take control.

By the last of the Robots series, Earthlings have begun settling new worlds, to the discomfort of several of the Spacer worlds. But they're still tied to Earth, still looking back towards it constantly. Much of their resources are sent back to the mother planet to sustain the massive population there. All the larger because it has other worlds to supply it now, where before it was forced into self-reliance. So R. Giskard chooses to let the weapon meant to destroy the planet, instead render it uninhabitable, radioactive. Force humanity to leave it behind once and for all.

And then, eventually, they repeat the mistake with Trantor. It's the center of the Galactic Empire. It's covered entirely with people and buildings. You can't see a bit of the original planetary surface, can barely figure out where to go to see the sky, even with domes like Earth had. Everything is just too grown over. Which means the planet is entirely reliant on all the other worlds to keep it running, while all it produces is proclamations and general bureaucratic bullshit. It's important because it says it is, not because of anything it actually does.

Once the Empire starts to collapse, once the supplies stop arriving, Trantor crumbles back to an agrarian world within a century or two. All the resources that went into building it up are strip-mined and taken back to the worlds they came from. Which makes me think all Giskard did on Earth was move up the timetable a bit.

I have no idea what to do with the notion of a great collective consciousness that Asimov puts forth as the real, best end state in the last couple of Foundation books. I guess that humanity needs the cooperative spirit to really thrive, that we can't all just be individuals doing or own thing. But that requires empathy, actually giving a shit about other people, seeing them as part of yourself, rather than a separate entity competing with you for resources. And so the best way to achieve that would be for everyone to be part of a sort of collective mind. If you can actually feel what that other person is feeling, maybe you aren't so quick to dismiss it.

Honestly, that level of interconnection with other people sounds horrifying to me, and reading Foundation's Edge, I always wondered what was going to happen to the people who didn't want to buy in. I think there's an assurance that each person can still be an individual, just they can also connect to this greater, whatever. But you're hearing that from the people already inside the thing. How trustworthy is that account? Would they have to go find some empty pocket of the galaxy for themselves? Would they be forced in (seems like introducing a toxic element into your mixture)?

Maybe I'd just watched the Borg episodes of Next Generation too often by the time I started reading Asimov.