I recently re-read Cal, one of Isaac Asimov’s final short stories. It was published in the 1995 collection Gold, which is a hit-or-miss collection of unpublished Asimov stories sitting around near the end of his life, paired with essays on sci-fi as a genre and writing as a practice.
That’s enough by way of an intro. Here’s the point: In the story, Asimov lays out a scenario involving a robot that learns how to write. As the robot becomes more complex, its writing becomes better than the writing of its master. The master worries that the robot will come to overshadow him. In response, he calls a technician to dumb down the robot’s programming.
This produces a crisis in the first law of robotics.
Sound familiar?
