However, I have recently finished The Naked Sun which I did quite enjoy. Published in 1956, it is a space murder mystery, but really it is a device for Asimov to explore likely sociological implications of technology. Solaria is a planet with 20,000 people supported 200 million robots. It is a Spartan society of the upper caste supported by the helots.
Baley is the Earthman officer, summoned to Solaria. Earth still has crime and policemen to investigate crimes. Solaria does not. Baley discovers that while Solarians and Earthmen are biolocially the same, their different development paths have led to disconcerting cultural differences.
Some passages with emphasis added:
Page 55The Solarians have a device which is effectively a holographic communication. Their images are projected between one another and this is their primary, and often sole form of communication. They no longer need to be in each other's presence to communicate. Indeed, they have grown to find personal presence repulsive and alarming.
“All right,” said Baley, “we learn something every minute. Now see here, boy, you tell me how to work whatever it is I am supposed to work; give me the connection pattern, or whatever you call it, and then step out.”
There was a perceptible pause before the robot answered. It said, “Do you wish to make contact yourself, sir?”
“That’s right.”
Daneel touched Baley’s sleeve gently. “One moment, Partner Elijah.”
“Now what is it?”
“It is my belief that the robot could make the necessary contact with greater ease. It is his specialization.”
Baley said grimly, “I’m sure he can do it better than I can. Doing it myself, I may make a mess of it.” He stared levelly at the impassive Daneel. “Just the same, I prefer to make contact myself. Do I give the orders or don’t I?”
Daneel said, “You give the orders, Partner Elijah, and your orders, where First Law permits, will be obeyed. However, with your permission, I would like to give you what pertinent information I have concerning the Solarian robots. Far more than on any other world, the robots on Solaria are specialized. Although Solarian robots are physically capable of many things, they are heavily equipped mentally for one particular type of job. To perform functions outside their specialty requires the high potentials produced by direct application of one of the Three Laws. Again, for them not to perform the duty for which they are equipped also requires the direct application of the Three Laws.”
“Well, then, a direct order from me brings the Second Law into play, doesn’t it?”
“True. Yet the potential set up by it is ‘unpleasant’ to the robot. Ordinarily, the matter would not come up, since almost never does a Solarian interfere with the day-to-day workings of a robot. For one thing, he would not care to do a robot’s work; for another, he would feel no need to.”
“Are you trying to tell me, Daneel, that it hurts the robot to have me do its work?”
“As you know, Partner Elijah, pain in the human sense is not applicable to robotic reactions.”
Baley shrugged. “Then?”
“Nevertheless,” went on Daneel, “the experience which the robot undergoes is as upsetting to it as pain is to a human, as nearly as I can judge.”
“And yet,” said Baley, “I’m not a Solarian. I’m an Earthman. I don’t like robots doing what I want to do.”
“Consider, too,” said Daneel, “that to cause distress to a robot might be considered on the part of our hosts to be an act of impoliteness since in a society such as this there must be a number of more or less rigid beliefs concerning how it is proper to treat a robot and how it is not. To offend our hosts would scarcely make our task easier.”
“All right,” said Baley. “Let the robot do its job.”
He settled back. The incident had not been without its uses. It was an educational example of how remorseless a robotic society could be. Once brought into existence, robots were not so easily removed, and a human who wished to dispense with them even temporarily found he could not.
This passage and the distinction between seeing and viewing echoed to me the emerging tendency we have now, still primarily an intergenerational thing, of distinguishing between communicating and speaking. Often, when talking with someone much younger, they will refer to having spoken with someone about such-and-such and they decided X. When I query, it emerges that they have not in fact spoken face-to-face or even voice-to-voice. They have exchanged emails or even just texts.
Which is fine as far as it goes. But it doesn't go very far. Face-to-face and voice-to-voice is orders of magnitude more effective at communicating nuance which is lost in emails and texts.
Asimov is exploring the likely consequences when a people become accustomed to remote and deracinated communication. Just prior to this passage the protagonist Baley has been disconcerted when a young woman Solarian with whom he has been "viewing" unconcernedly exposes herself to him.
Page 62Later.
“It was only viewing, you see,” said Gladia contritely. She was wrapped in something that left her arms and shoulders free. One leg showed to mid-thigh, but Baley, entirely recovered and feeling an utter fool, ignored it stoically.
He said, “It was the surprise, Mrs. Delmarre-“
“Oh, please. You can call me Gladia, unless-unless that’s against your customs.”
“Gladia, then. It’s all right. I just want to assure you there was nothing repulsive about it, you understand. Just the surprise.” Bad enough for him to have acted the fool, he thought, without having the poor girl think he found her unpleasant. As a matter of fact, it had been rather-rather.
Well, he didn’t have the phrase, but he knew quite certainly that there was no way he would ever be able to talk of this to Jessie.
“I know I offended you,” Gladia said, “but I didn’t mean to. I just wasn’t thinking. Of course I realize one must be careful about the customs of other planets, but the customs are so queer sometimes; at least, not queer,” she hastened to add, “I don’t mean queer. I mean strange, you know, and it’s so easy to forget. As I forgot about keeping the windows darkened.”
“Quite all right,” muttered Baley. She was in another room now with all the windows draped and the light had the subtly different and more comfortable texture of artificiality.
“But about the other thing,” she went on earnestly, “it’s just viewing, you see. After all, you didn’t mind talking to me when I was in the drier and I wasn’t wearing anything then, either.”
“Well,” said Baley, wishing she would run down as far as that subject was concerned, “hearing you is one thing, and seeing you is another.”
“But that’s exactly it. Seeing isn’t involved.” She reddened a trifle and looked down. “I hope you don’t think I’d ever do anything like that, I mean, just step out of the drier, if anyone were seeing me. It was just viewing.”
“Same thing, isn’t it?” said Baley.
“Not at all the same thing. You’re viewing me right now. You can’t touch me, can you, or smell me, or anything like that. You could if you were seeing me. Right now, I’m two hundred miles away from you at least. So how can it be the same thing?”
Baley grew interested. “But I see you with my eyes.”
“No, you don’t see me. You see my image. You’re viewing me.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“All the difference there is.”
“I see.” In a way he did. The distinction was not one he could make easily, but it had a kind of logic to it.
She said, bending her head a little to one side, “Do you really see?” “Yes.”
Page 76This latter point of the relative dispossessed brings to mind one of the more startling international comparisons in terms of income. The bottom 20% of Americans have greater material well-being as measured by consumption and goods than the top 20% of Indians, yet the former feel dispossessed in their context while the latter feel blessed in theirs.
Logical processes! Unbidden, there leaped into Baley’s mind the fragment of a conversation he had once had with a roboticist. A robot, the man had said, is logical but not reasonable.
Page 140
Quemot said querulously, “I don’t know what you’re driving at. Besides I’m trying to tell you something else, my own theory, in fact, something I have viewed in no books, something I am quite proud of -
Baley said, “Exactly what is that, sir?”
“Why, the manner in which Solaria’s culture is based on one existing in Earth’s past.”
Baley sighed. If he didn’t allow the other to get it off his chest, there might be very little cooperation thereafter. He said, “And that is?”
“Sparta!” said Quemot, lifting his head so that for a moment his white hair glistened in the light and seemed almost a halo. “I’m sure you’ve heard of Sparta!”
Baley felt relieved. He had been mightily interested in Earth’s ancient past in his younger days (it was an attractive study to many Earthmen; Earth supreme because it was an Earth alone; Earthmen the masters because there were no Spacers), but Earth’s past was a large one. Quemot might well have referred to some phase with which Baley was unacquainted and that would have been embarrassing.
As it was, he could say cautiously, “Yes. I’ve viewed films on the subject.”
“Good. Good. Now Sparta in its hey dey consisted of a relatively small number of Spartiates, the only full citizens, plus a somewhat larger number of second class individuals, the Perioeci, and a really large number of outright slaves, the Helots. The Helots outnumbered the Spartiates a matter of twenty to one, and the Helots were men with human feelings and human failings.
“In order to make certain that a Helot rebellion could never be successful despite their overwhelming numbers, the Spartans became military specialists. Each lived the life of a military machine, and the society achieved its purpose. There was never a successful Helot revolt.
“Now we human beings on Solaria are equivalent, in a way, to the Spartiates. We have our Helots, but our Helots aren’t men but machines. They cannot revolt and need not be feared even though they outnumber us a thousand times as badly as the Spartans’ human Helots outnumbered them. So we have the advantage of Spartiate exclusiveness without any need to sacrifice ourselves to rigid mastery. We can, instead, model ourselves on the artistic and cultural way of life of the Athenians, who were contemporaries of the Spartans and who–“
Baley said, “I’ve viewed films on the Athenians, too.”
Quemot grew warmer as he spoke.
“Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue happiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex. For instance, even the most poorly off humans on Aurora are better off than Earth’s aristocrats, but they are dispossessed with respect to Aurora’s aristocrats, and it is with the masters of their own world that they compare themselves.
“So there is always social friction in ordinary human societies. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.
“Now here on Solaria, for the first time, the apex of the pyramid stands alone. In the place of the dispossessed are the robots. We have the first new society, the first really new one, the first great social invention since the farmers of Sumeria and Egypt invented cities.”
He sat back now, smiling.
Page 259
“If you put it that way, sir. . . When you ordered me to Solaria, you asked a question; you asked what the weaknesses of the Outer Worlds were. Their strengths were their robots, their low population, their long lives, but what were their weaknesses?”
“Well?”
“I believe I know the weaknesses of the Solarians, sir.”
“You can answer my question? Good. Go ahead.”
“Their weaknesses, sir, are their robots, their low population, their long lives.”
“Minnim stared at Baley without any change of expression. His hands worked in jerky finger-drawn designs along the papers on his desk.
He said, “Why do you say that?”
Baley had spent hours organizing his thoughts on the way back from Solaria; had confronted officialdom, in imagination, with balanced, well-reasoned arguments. Now he felt at a loss.
He said, “I’m not sure I can put them clearly.”
“No matter. Let me hear. This is first approximation only.”
Baley said, “The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it’s something that made everything else possible.”
“I don’t want to guess, Baley. What is it?”
“The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals. Solaria has given it up entirely. It is a world of isolated individuals and “the planet’s only sociologist is delighted that this is so. That sociologist, by the way, never heard of sociomathematics, because he is inventing his own science. There is no one to teach him, no one to help him, no one to think of something he himself might miss. The only science that really flourishes on Solaria is robotics and there are only a handful of men involved in that, and when it came to an analysis of the interaction of robots and men, they had to call in an Earthman to help.
“Solarian art, sir, is abstract. We have abstract art on Earth as one form of art; but on Solaria it is the only form. The human touch is gone. The looked-for future is one of ectogenesis and complete isolation from birth.”
Minnim said, “It all sounds horrible. But is it harmful?”
“I think so. Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone. Viewing is no substitute for seeing. The Solarians, themselves, are conscious that viewing is a long-distance sense.
“And if isolation isn’t enough to induce stagnation, there is the matter of their long lives. On Earth, we have a continuous influx of young people who are willing to change because they haven’t had time to grow hard-set in their ways. I suppose there’s some optimum. A life long enough for real accomplishment and short enough to make way for youth at a rate that’s not too slow. On Solaria, the rate is too slow.”
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