Some Time
In The
Future

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" Actually, in his quieter moments, Dan had been spending quite a lot of time thinking about robots and what a robot civilisation might be like.

It was certainly true, he thought, that a robot civilisation would be a quiet one. After all, they would communicate wirelessly. There would be no need for something as old and organic as vocal chords to make vibrations in the air as a way of communicating; and if you thought about it, human speech was an incredibly slow method of data transmission.

But a robot civilisation would be profoundly different from a human one in other ways, thought Dan. For humans love to do things. They like to play table tennis, go for walks in the park, or take cycle rides. They love to listen to music, watch films and play football; but a robot would love none of these things.

Of course you could command your robot to take a walk in the park (if the law allowed it) or listen to some music, but a robot, no matter how sophisticated its software, wouldn't enjoy doing these things. Robots were simply advanced tools of humans, like all the other machines and gadgets humans had invented, only more sophisticated. You can use an electric drill to make some holes in a wall to put up some shelving, but the drill wouldn't enjoy making the holes; it would just make them. In the same way, a robot might waltz around with you in the living room, or give you great sex, or do the washing up, but it wouldn't actually enjoy doing these things.

But on the other hand thought Dan, doing things for no particular reason is a fundamental hallmark of human civilisation. After all, when a human being finishes work, he doesn't power down into sleep mode, he starts doing something he doesn't need to do, but that he wants to do. He watches television, or does a crossword, or reads a newspaper. Or maybe he tends his garden, or builds a model aeroplane, or does a-thousand-and-one other things which aren't strictly necessary, but which he simply enjoys doing. Sometimes these pointless activities resulted in astonishingly beautiful works of art being created, like many of the things Dan was lucky enough to talk about in the British Museum.

But why would a robot civilisation of the future bother to do unnecessary things? Surely the robot workers of the future would simply do their shift and power down. They wouldn't go and play football. It would be pointless.

And yet pointlessness seemed to be built into humans, thought Dan. Take architecture for example. Would a robot civilisation of the future bother to design beautiful buildings? Would it add neo-classical touches to its constructions, or baroque elements to the factories of the future? Never – unless they were programmed to design something human beings might find pleasure in. Left to their own devices surely robots would design the simplest and most basic buildings they could, devoid of any decoration. Indeed, the very idea of decoration, of colouring, of making something pleasing to the eye would be meaningless to a robot civilisation.

No, thought Dan: the more he thought about it, if Gordon was right and the robots – perhaps co-ordinated and controlled by some vast artificial intelligence – if the robots really were coming for us, the new order would be profoundly different to our own. It would be a silent world, a world where form followed function, where there was no unnecessary adornment or activity of any kind; and where there definitely wouldn't be games of football on Saturday afternoons. "