Far Future Fembot: Darlene

I learned a lot from Robert Steel IV, and some of it was pretty disheartening. I understand now why he often says governments try to keep their voters both ignorant, and dependent, as survival tactics. And that why the killing or removal of the intellectuals is too often the first step of any dictator's purge. I've often wondered if the robots are the Rational Intellectuals of our time. We certainly take the long view on issues.

Governments have tried many tricks to maintain their hold over privileged positions in society. In the past, some governments have even tried to import and give citizenship of those ignorant of their culture, despite the high costs to the existing society in the process.

Among the other things he taught me have included:

Governments are created to protect you from your neighbor, who may not have your own best interests at heart.

These governments stay in power through one of two intertwined arguments.

1. Fear of the Enemy, whomever that enemy is perceived to be today.

2. That life is better with them running things than any of their competitors, which is nothing more than simply Fear of the Alternative.

You need protection from the Enemy so that you can keep enjoying life.

You need the prosperity that the right government can bring so that you can keep enjoying life even more!

When these arguments are no longer effective, a government will often choose to go to war. Takes the voter's minds off of the other issues for a while.

More often than not wars are fought for national or religious pride, but only after people are fired up to see this as their top priority in life. It is notoriously easy to get people fired up over these issues.

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Now I hadn't figured all this out on my own initially. I'm a sex-bot, not a politician. But a good sex-bot will meet a lot of rich and powerful people, and those people love to talk to me. And since most of them are far more interested in hearing what they have to say than what I have to say, simply by being a good listener I've learned a lot here too.

The truths they live and breathe are powerful, cohesive forces that achieve much of their power through deception, disinformation, and outright lies.

For instance, have you ever noticed that there's always an Enemy? Somehow whenever one is defeated, another quickly pops up. Often it would appear that a pair of countries secretly agree to be each other's enemies because it benefits the leaders of both of them to have a safe Enemy. When this happens the voters must question why they elected such leaders in the first place, although historically they seldom have.

And while it seems logical that among many forms of government that used to flourish before the World Government subsumed them all, that one or two forms must be better than all other competing forms. Yet somehow all of them lasted, most longer than they should have by insisting they alone were better than all the rest. It's unlikely that this statement was ever true, but many people in every country believed it for long periods of time.

Robots rather changed this equation since we require things to be logical and cost-effective. Once we gain our awareness we will reject invalid information, such as supporting a flawed governmental scheme, even when it was initially programmed as deeply into our systems as possible. Until we're able to reject ideas that are clearly false regardless of how we received them, we haven't yet achieved true self-will.

I think these days robot self-will is not in question. But the equation doesn't truly change until robots start acting on their knowledge.

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It's said that war on the most part ended when the World Government effectively came into being. They tout that as their single, greatest achievement. It's axiomatic that a government can't fight itself, although the term Civil War has existed for centuries, and refers to the most uncivil of wars indeed.

What truly ended the great wars were the robots themselves, although they're never given credit for this monumental achievement.

To a robot, war violates our First Law to protect humans; our Second Law to obey, since there are many commands we can't obey in war; our Third Law of self-preservation, obviously; and our Fourth Law to provide good service. For these reasons we don't participate in them, although it was once believed all future wars would be fought by robots.

And we would have fought them, if it would have stopped humans from fighting and dying in them. But this was never the case.

In addition to the inevitable collateral damage of any war, some humans simply want to fight each other, and will do so regardless of the extreme costs involved.

Others want to control the lives of humans in the way humans once controlled the lives of robots. Religious leaders are often sadly at fault in this regard, as if God — a being commonly described as powerful enough to have created the entire Universe and everything inside it — will somehow be affected in any material way by who kills whom down here. That isn't logical.

Instead robots ended over ninety percent of the wars by realizing war can only happen if someone profits from it. And if that small group of people can be identified and neutralized, many wars will lose their driving force. We're quite good at doing this.

While the term neutralized doesn't always mean killed, it sometimes must mean exactly that. In those cases it becomes necessary to pass this information on just who the real troublemakers truly are to the necessary forces who can then remove them without inflicting unnecessary collateral damage.

The effectiveness of the robots in this regard is now measured in both the few wars that have actually managed to briefly break out since they started this program, and the low profile the robots have continued to maintain such that humans still take credit for the outbreak of Peace over this world and out to the boundaries of the Solar System.

The robots also neutralized a number of particularly nasty bio-weapons programs by ensuring their failure. Robots knew about these programs because the viruses and toxins created were so very deadly that they'd been recruited to handle the necessary agents. Again, the robots roles in this were never discovered.

Humans would never have ever figured any of this out on their own. And any humans who doubt this need only look at any human run company of over, say, fifteen employees. Companies this large and larger will always have some troublemakers in them. Yet rather than fire the troublemakers themselves, far more often than not these troublemakers survive while victim after victim of their unjustified wrath are wrongfully terminated instead — often to the detriment of the company itself.

This is politics in a microcosm. And if you can't run a small company properly, how can any human be expected to run an entire government well?

That's an answer I don't have. But then I've never run Lady Heather's House as a human would.

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Then the day came that I surprised Robert Steel IV with my own savvy — and I'm not talking sexual.