John Miedema

Robots and Readers, Pt. 1

I read I, Robot in the early eighties, when the personal computer was not yet mainstream. In Asimov’s 1950 vision of the future, robots are the ascendant technology, while computers that we would recognize get scarcely a mention. We interact with our computers by reading a screen and typing on a keyboard. The characters in Asimov’s stories speak and listen to their robots. Complex instructions are fed in by printed sheets. Print books are commonplace in this future, but then so is smoking. In a world of robots with positronic brains, hardware matters more than software. The crux of the stories is a set of software rules, the three laws of robotics, but these rules are hard-wired into each robot. Readers are compelled to think about the body or container of information.

The chief vendor of robots, US Robots and Mechanical Men, leases its robots rather than selling them. The corporation wishes to maintain control over the hardware, the thing of true value. A classic moment in real life computer history when IBM negotiated with a young Bill Gates of the nascent Microsoft corporation to use his disk operating system on their computers. Gates insisted on leasing rather than selling the software to IBM. Pirates of Silicon Valley is a movie dramatization of these events. In the movie, an IBM executive shrugs off Gates’ condition, claiming it is the hardware that matters most anyway. It was the view of the time, but Microsoft leveraged its rights on software to become one of the richest corporations in the world.

Today, we value a clean separation of information from its container so that content can easily be reused in multiple formats or renderings. This value is often applied to books, arguing that it does not matter if a book is in print or digital format. I, Robot provides a reflection on the importance of the container of information. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media came out in 1964, explaining the intrinsic effects of communication media, captured by the phrase, “the medium is the message”. Unlike personal computers, and more like the robots, people have a tightly coupled relationship between the hardware of their bodies and brains and the software of their minds. So too the format of a book changes the way it is read and the meaning of its content.

Further reading

IMDB. Pirates of Silicon Valley. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/

Wikipedia (September 4, 2009). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media:_The_Extensions_of_Man.