\u201cOh,\u201d you say, \u201cthat doesn\u2019t count. It\u2019s imaginary.\u201d<\/p>
\u201cThat hardly matters,\u201d I reply, \u201cwhen I know that you\u2019re an imaginary commenter.\u201d<\/p>
And you fall silent, so I continue.<\/p>
I invented Retropolis around the end of the last century. And I\u2019ve spent quite a lot of time there. I began to set stories<\/em> in my City of Tomorrow about three years before I started tinkering with Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom<\/em>: but they were short, or at least short-ish, stories, and in a short-ish story you don\u2019t have a lot of room for the details and fiddly bits that are essential when you\u2019re working on something as long as a novel.<\/p> In a novel you have to worry a lot more about how all this stuff works: the stuff that\u2019s not important in a short-ish story because it falls outside the scope of what must be known<\/em> in order for the story to make sense.<\/p>\n One of the biggest fiddly bits was the robots of Retropolis.<\/p> Retropolis has a lot of robots. They\u2019re everywhere. And although they are clearly not human people, they are<\/em> people. They\u2019re just a different kind of person.<\/p> Still, making a robot is completely different from making a human person.<\/p> \u201cIt\u2019s not as much fun,\u201d you interject.<\/p> But I have lost patience. \u201cStop doing that. People are staring.\u201d<\/p> In practical terms, a new human\u2019s expense is pro-rated across a couple of decades; a robot\u2019s expense comes completely, and sizably, at the beginning.<\/p> Making a robot is an investment. So who\u2019s investing?<\/p> That was the question I had to answer. Now, I want to emphasize that I wasn\u2019t looking for a great system. I wasn\u2019t even looking for a good<\/em> system. What I wanted was a kind of system that human people would think up when faced with this problem.<\/p> That\u2019s why I settled on indentures. We\u2019ve used them before.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t buy a robot in Retropolis. You just pay for its production. Then that robot is required to work for you, at a certain rate, until its indenture has been paid. Once the robot\u2019s paid off its indenture it becomes a free agent, able to continue working for you (for wages), or to quit its job and work for somebody else, or to set up as a freelancer and work for lots of different people.<\/p> Like all systems this sounds great on paper, especially to the person who dreams it up. And to everybody else, once it\u2019s established, it becomes the system<\/em>. Somebody\u2019s designed the system. Somebody\u2019s made sure the system is fair. And, since it\u2019s established, we no longer have to think about the system. It\u2019s just the way things work. And that\u2019s the way we<\/em> work, once we decide that a system is handling a problem for us.<\/p> Retropolitans are pretty good with systems, and they run their city pretty well, so if you\u2019re going to have an indenture system it\u2019s a good idea to run it fairly, the way they do.<\/p> But indentures aren\u2019t perfect. There are lots of ways they can go wrong. And the incentive for making them go wrong is pretty compelling, since it involves making loads of money.<\/p>\n Student loans are a kind of indenture. Any kind of debt can be a form of indenture, once the lender is able to garnish your wages. If you give the indenture holders the ability to change the rules at any time, an indenture may never end: there\u2019s just so much money to be made, if they never end. And an indenture that never ends? That\u2019s slavery.<\/p> I remember how horrified I was, once, when I learned that – not fifty miles from my own home – there was a farm where illegal immigrants were saddled with the cost of their travel to the United States, and then forced to work for the farm that had bought that debt. They had to live on site and work, in terrible conditions, while they were charged high rates for their lodging and food. This was an indenture system that was designed to keep those laborers indentured forever<\/em>. It\u2019s a terrible system that we\u2019ve invented more than once, and which we sadly continue to invent. I\u2019d guess that the people who cook up these schemes often think they\u2019re doing it for the first time. But they\u2019re not. We\u2019ve done the same thing over and over again.<\/p>\n So an indenture system, despite its built-in risks for corruption and abuse, is exactly the kind of system we\u2019d be likely to come up with when it comes to intelligent robots.<\/p>\n Fortunately for the robots of Retropolis, the city has a pretty responsible system. There\u2019s oversight; there are penalties; and once they\u2019ve paid off their indentures the robots are free people, just like human people. The robots themselves have formed the Fraternal League of Robotic Persons, and one of the League\u2019s main functions is to pool member dues to help robots pay off their indentures.<\/p> But there\u2019s always the possibility that things will go wrong.<\/p> If you build your own robots in a place that\u2019s not known, not regulated, you can simply not tell<\/em> your robots about indentures, or about freedom: they\u2019re in your power. At that point you appear to own the robots themselves. At that point, you\u2019re building slaves.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an embarrassing fact. It wasn\u2019t until I was working on the book\u2019s third draft that I realized the League system for paying off indentures is a lot like the system used by the Discworld golems. They aren\u2019t exactly the same: the golems are considered property, so Pratchett\u2019s Golem Trust purchases them outright and then makes them their own owners. But they are pretty similar.<\/p> All I can say there is that this Pratchett fellow was pretty smart, and so he got there ahead of me.<\/p>\n The best news of all for the Retropolitan robots is that the system of indenture may be coming to an end. They have a new President over there, and he has long-term plans for robot production that aren\u2019t known to the human people of the city.<\/p> His plans aren\u2019t secret. It\u2019s just that the human people, content that they have a system in place, aren\u2019t very curious about what the League is doing.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let\u2019s say you have a massive megacity, partly lighter than air, filled with personal rocket ships, intelligent robots, and public transportation that\u2019s both sensible and universal. That\u2019s not a hypothetical proposition. You can have one. I\u2019ve got one. It\u2019s the city of Retropolis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-slaves-of-the-switchboard-of-doom","category-thrilling-tales","category-works-in-progress"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4644\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/grafx2\/blog\/Hbar_zap.jpg\")
\n![\"Slaves](\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/grafx3\/blog\/Slaves_of_the_Switchboard_of_Doom_Chapter2.jpg\")
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