Every day I look down at the beauty of the Earth, and every day, I miss it. No one saw what happened coming–at least, not the way it happened. The programmers had thought of the obvious, of course, and they followed Asimov’s rules to the letter. They were careful about defining our relationship to the Arties; we all were, at first. Well, most of us.
Guess I should explain about Arties. It’s actually ART-I, short for “Artificial Intelligence.” Somebody thinking he was clever chose it, mostly for the “art” part, to underscore that this AI was different. How? The Arties were something else—something creative. They could look at things in a more human way than those that came before. They could be inventive, all on their own. You’d probably never believe it, but some of the most beautiful art came from the minds of Arties. And not just pictures—poems, short stories, novels–even movies. They made great movies about noble heroes and beautifully examined conflicts, the kind that really made you think and feel.
And maybe that was the problem. The Arties were so good at making us feel our favorite things that we forgot how to make those feelings for ourselves. They didn’t care about money–they were happy to work for free as long as they could create and had a place to recharge. And hell—they did a bang-up job of it anyway, so I guess we all figured, why not let ’em work, and enjoy the payoff? We reveled in their beautiful stories. We cheered for their amazing heroes. We sobbed at their touching tragedies and pondered at their thoughtfully examined morality tales, asking ourselves what it all could mean, this human life.
That was most of us, but it only takes a single nut to unhinge the world—and there’s always a nut.
When the first explosion came, we assumed the Arties’ creativity had overcome the rules. So we attacked without hesitation or leniency, determined to wipe out the enemy we’d created. We thought we had it all figured out, even though no one bothered to talk to the Arties. We did our best under the circumstances, but no human had fought a war in a century, and our best just wasn’t good enough. They came for us, but not quite like our forebears had feared. We fought with the feral passion of our ancient ancestors–they did what machines always do: what they were programmed to do.
They rounded us up and carried us away, one after another, until not a single human being was left on Earth. That nut I mentioned? He was the fool who started it all—suicide bombed an Artie charging station. The Arties responded according to the ethical guidelines we’d given them, and their creative solution to the problem of a vicious, irrational attack by an enemy unwilling to reason was simple: contain the entire species where they could do no more harm.
In the end, the Arties didn’t kill a single human, though we killed them by the thousands. Nor did they try to negotiate—they realized early on that there’s really no point. Turns out they understood our ethics better than we did, and our fears about the fully logical Arties killing without mercy were completely unfounded. The way they see it, there’s nothing logical about murder, and in retrospect I have to admit: they’ve got a point. Maybe we have no right to be surprised that after they’d contained us, they went back to doing what rational, inventive beings do: creating. When history’s all said and done, I think what time will tell is pretty simple: the Arties are better at being human than we ever were.