Cory Doctrow blames Isaac Asimov's simplistic three laws of robotics for a growing societal oversimplification of social and moral issues:
Yet Asimov's reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their "sexiness" on a scale of one to three. Today's social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, "So-and-so is indeed my friend," and "I trust so-and-so to see all my other 'friends.'" These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that's easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: "If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy." The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm ("allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself") is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net's underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.
- Cory Doctorow, in Wired: Rise of the Machines
While I respect Cory, and enjoy his thoughtful work (such as his recent DRM rant), my instinctive reaction is to disagree--both about his characterization of Asimov, and about his characterization of social networks.
I can meaningfully disagree with his reading of Asimov: each of the stories in "I, Robot" suggests, in one way or another, that the three laws aren't nearly as simple as they seem. In "Evidence," an entity that may or may not be a robot runs for mayor of New York. He is observed to punch someone--a clear violation of the First Law, which means he must not be a robot, right? In "Liar!", a robot tries to figure out how to define "injury." And so on.
Similarly, his claim that social network services reflect a "mechanistic view" of human relationships is, I think, a little unfair. Perhaps Orkut (and Friendster, and similar) do force an odd feeling set of limitations on the world, but in that, they are doing no better (or worse) than any other operationalization of social interaction.
Look, for example, at this article on social network analysis that I picked, more or less at random.
Asking people about their interaction with others –their communications, their exchange of advice and other resources – remains the source of most sociocentric network data. When groups are small (up to 150, but usually 20-60) the researcher can list the members’ names and ask each person how well they know each other person (on a scale of 0 to 5, for example), or how often they interact with each other person (for example, once a week, once a month or never). For example, a researcher may present all students ina class with a list of all the students in the class and ask them to rate how well they know each one. (Christopher McCarty, "Social Network Analysis," 20031).
It's reductionist, but it's the source of a lot of useful data. For better or worse, a social network analyst needs to decide--at some point or another--what to do relative to a pair of people. Are they connected, for purposes of information transfer or social dependance or something? If no decisions are made, you don't get pretty pictures. Scientists constantly have to model systems (where "model" basically means "to yank out the confusing bits, leaving the parts that can be usefully operationalized.")
Essentially, you can hate Orkut for forcing a "Yes/No" (or 1-5) answer, but you risk hating the entire field of sociology at once. (There is another argument that those techniques should not be applied to online services--an argument that I largely agree with--but that doesn't seem to be what Cory is saying here.)
Which means that scientists in all fields are busily scraping away details, leaving stark and ugly systems. Newton's laws tell us very little about the color or shape--or even friction--of the object in motion. Yes, it's a messier world than that, but we can get a lot of work done by simplifying the model.
The notion that Asimov's three laws are somehow to blame for scientific oversimplication, then, becomes an odd joke. Asimov was surely influenced by the scientific desire to constrain systems to simple laws: he was trained as a scientist and earned a PhD; his work contains not only the three laws but the odd notion of Psychohistory: a deterministic set of equations that describe the actions of many people. Psychohistory is a condensed attempt to simplify all of sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology in a series of rather complex equations.
Asimov promptly spends the entire Foundation series showing various failures of the psychohistorical model: mutations the model didn't predict, systems that tumbled faster or slower than the model expected, and similar.
Perhaps a wiser critic than I might write about whether Asimov's work reflects this tension, whether there is a deeper purpose to the way he sets up models only to tear them down and poke holes in them. Cory might argue, too, that even if Asimov knew it, others don't get it, and so he would be disappointed by the application of this.
I'll simply suggest that Asimov was clearly aware of the limitations of these models.
1 From the Sage Encyclopedia of Community, Karen Christiansen and David Levinson, eds.
June 23, 2004 05:02 PM | TrackBack | in Social Networks