Reflections

With Folded Hands…
by Robert Silverberg

I am not a user of the various and complicated products of the ubiquitous Elon Musk. I have never tweeted, nor even X-d. I am not planning to take a ride in one of his spaceships. My cars are not Teslas but humble Hondas, powered by the archaic fossil fluids that Exxon and Chevron sell. I began my life in the third decade of the long-ago twentieth century, and although I have spent much of that life writing about the future, these days I tend to spend most of my time living in what most of you would probably regard as the musty old past.

The energetic Mr. Musk, though, is very much a man of his times, and since I write these columns close to a year prior to publication, he may well have started two or three futuristic new companies by the time this one appears. However, just a few weeks ago in the time frame I live in, he announced the latest of his projects, and it was one that sent a shiver through my aged bones. What he plans to do next, apparently, is to bring into ugly reality nothing less than Jack Williamson’s overly helpful humanoid robots.

If you don’t know Williamson’s classic story, “With Folded Hands,” you ought to make a point of finding it before you get much older. Williamson was one of the greatest of all science fiction writers, with a career that stretched from the 1920s into the present century, and “With Folded Hands” was, perhaps, his most significant story. It was first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1947, which is getting to be a long time ago, but it is reprinted again and again in science fiction anthologies, and deservedly so, because it is probably the best story ever written about robots. (I have anthologized it a couple of times myself, most recently in Robots Through The Ages, which I edited with Bryan Thomas Schmidt and which was published in 2023.) I first encountered the tale in 1948, when I was a high-school freshman just discovering science fiction, and it scared the daylights out of me and the later hours of the day also. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it since, but it has never failed to have a terrifying effect on me. Mr. Musk’s plans for building robots affect me in a very similar way.

It’s not as though the Williamson story is full of violence and gore. On the contrary: it’s quite quietly told, and that’s the scariest part about it. There is no melodrama in its opening paragraph:

*   *   *

Underhill was walking home from the office, because his wife had the car, the afternoon he first met the new mechanicals. His feet were following his usual diagonal path across a weedy vacant block—his wife usually had the car—and his preoccupied mind was rejecting various impossible ways to meet his notes at the Two Rivers bank, when a new wall stopped him.

The wall wasn’t any common brick or stone, but something sleek and bright and strange. Underhill stared up at a long new building. He felt vaguely annoyed and surprised at this glittering obstruction—it certainly hadn’t been here last week.

*   *   *

No melodrama, no, but Williamson, ever a superb craftsman, immediately has introduced a note of mystery and suspense. There is a strange new building on a familiar street. Why? Where did it come from? Then he sees a sign in a window of the building, advertising something called the Humanoid Institute, which offers “the perfect mechanicals”—whose function is “to serve and obey, and guard men from harm.”

That catches Underhill’s interest at once, because he is in the mechanicals business himself—he earns his living selling androids, one of a variety of mechanical labor-saving devices available to consumers in what appears to be the relatively near future at the time of the story’s publication (“Androids, mechanoids, electronoids, automatoids, and ordinary robots.”) The android business is currently not doing very well, which is why Underhill is having trouble paying his bills. There are too many such gadgets on the market, and few of them perform as advertised.

He looks through a window of the Humanoid Institute and sees his first humanoid: a small, shiny device with a silicone skin. “Its graceful oval face wore a fixed look of alert and slightly surprised solicitude. Altogether it was the most beautiful mechanical he had ever seen.”

Underhill goes inside and very quickly he is approached by a humanoid—no human salesmen appear to work here—who offers him a free trial demonstration at his home. “We are anxious to introduce our service on your planet, because we have been successful at eliminating human unhappiness on so many others.” You will be wise to sell your business, the humanoid tells him, because the mechanicals he deals in can’t possibly compete with them. It seems a little ominous to Underhill, because he has never known any kind of mechanical to radiate such quiet competence and confidence. He shakes off the offer of a demonstration and leaves—only to encounter another humanoid outside that greets him by name, which bewilders him. And when he gets home he finds that his wife has taken in a lodger, an old man named Sledge who says he has come from a planet called Wing IV, 109 light-years away. (Evidently the story is not taking place in the very near future after all.) Sledge reveals that he was the inventor of something called rhodomagnetic force, which Williamson describes in a few glib paragraphs as a miraculous property of atomic energy that, so it turns out, powers the remarkable humanoids. “I came here to get away from them,” says Sledge. And very soon Underhill finds out why. The humanoids, already dominant on Wing IV and other worlds, have now established themselves on Earth, offering their services on a free trial basis from which there seems to be no escape. And what services! They have taken over the local police department, as Underhill discovers when he runs through a red light and is stopped by a police car operated by a humanoid. “Driving is really much too dangerous for human beings. . . . As soon as our service is complete, every car will have a humanoid driver. As soon as every human being is completely supervised, there will be no need for any police force whatever.” I think you can see where this is going.

Enter Mr. Musk, here.

Late in 2023, he offered one of his many utopian visions: a world of super-intelligent robots that would relieve us of the annoying necessity of work. Artificial intelligence—another little Musk fascination—will step in and create a world of vast abundance, in which goods and services will essentially be free, and all you poor saps who toil many hours a day at tedious, uncomfortable, or downright dangerous jobs will be liberated to spend your time at occupations that are more personally rewarding. “It’s fun to cook food,” says Musk, “but it’s not that much fun to wash the dishes. The computer is perfectly happy to wash the dishes.”

The computer? These days computers are squat little gadgets with keyboards and screens, but it takes hands, or something hand-like, to wash dishes. So when Musk says “computer,” he’s actually talking about—deep breath here—humanoid robots, sleek graceful things straight out of the Jack Williamson story, which, he says, will do all sorts of things from washing the dishes to doing the bookkeeping to operating factory assembly lines. Thus putting everybody out of work? Well, no, because the new leisure will create all sorts of (unspecified) new jobs.

What about the danger that Musk’s humanoid robots will inexorably take over everything, police departments, driving cars, performing surgery, even writing science fiction novels? The self-driving cars are already here, courtesy of Elon Musk. And these days we hear constantly about the danger posed by artificial intelligence as it develops superhuman mental powers that will make ordinary humans like us obsolete. Is that not the very problem that Mr. Underhill and his tenant Sledge face in “With Folded Hands”?

Musk used to worry about that himself. In 2015, celebrating his forty-fourth birthday at a party in the California wine country, he fell into conversation with Larry Page, one of the creators of Google, who said, “Humans would eventually merge with artificially intelligent machines. One day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.”

If that happens, said Musk, we’re doomed. The machines would destroy humanity.

That was in 2015. Eight years later, the ever-volatile Musk had swung around 180 degrees, and had begun to see artificial intelligence not as a threat, but as a vast boon. He has founded his own AI company—of course—called xAI, with a goal of developing “digital super-intelligence combined with robotics” so that the rest of us will be spared all that dreary work, while at the same time becoming wonderfully wealthy, “We’ll have universal high income. In some sense it’ll be somewhat of a leveler or an equalizer, because, really, I think everyone will have access to this magic genie.”

Don’t you love it? Watch for the first office of the Musk Humanoid Institute sprouting overnight in your town. And rejoice that the humanoids, in keeping with the Prime Directive (“to serve and obey, and guard men from harm”) will be doing the laundry, mowing the lawn, taking away the sharp-edged tools that make home workshops such risky places, confiscating other dangerous things like knitting needles and children’s wooden blocks, preventing the playing of violent games like football, etc, etc, etc. . . . It will make for a quiet life, and a very safe one. There will be no danger, no struggle, no toil. And the coming of the humanoid robots will bring us to the situation Jack Williamson describes in the final lines of “With Folded Hands”—

“‘No, there’s nothing the matter with me,’ he gasped desperately. ‘I’ve just found out that I’m perfectly happy, under the Prime Directive. Everything is absolutely wonderful.’ His voice came dry and hoarse and wild. . . .

“The car turned off the shining avenue, taking him back to the quiet splendor of his home. His futile hands clenched and relaxed again, folded on his knees. There was nothing left to do.”

Copyright © 2024 Robert Silverberg