Victor Onrust schreef een Engelstalig blog over de lockdown, en hoe de SF-schrijver Asimov daar ooit al een vooruitziende beschrijving van gaf.

Probably, Isaac Asimov is still the top Science Fiction writer of all times. What he wrote about the ethics of robotics — in fact about Artificial Intelligence, but that expression didn’t exist when he wrote about it — is still very much to the point. Perhaps even more important are his sociological and psychological observations leading to his famed psychohistory in the Foundation series. His writing is permeated with the insight that personality is shaped by society, not the other way around. In these times of lockdown because of the COVID “pandemic” The Naked Sun (1957) is very instructive for where we are heading. The Naked Sun is the second detective in the “Eliah Baley” series that started with The Caves of Steel.

In an unspecified future, mankind has developed intelligent robots and star-travel. The Earth is overpopulated. Everyone lives in caves of steel: a gigantic closed structure covering most of the Earth with virtually no privacy. Even lavatories are shared by multiple families. The surface of the structure and the unbuilt parts that are left are used for food production. In the caves robots are scarce and loathed. They work the fields or foodplants on the surface autonomously. No one goes outside any more, in fact one is even afraid of looking outside.

Some hundred planets have been colonized. They are sparsely populated. There are enormous amounts of robots, all owned by individual persons that do most of the work. There is one spaceport on earth for trade but personal contact between earthlings and spacers are only functional. Earthlings are not allowed off the earth. The spacers have eradicated all disease and seemingly all crime too.

In The Caves of Steel a spacer has been murdered at the spaceport. As spacers have no crime they don’t have detectives. Also it’s quite possible that the murderer was an earthling. For this reason detective Eliah Baley is asked to solve the murder. For this task he is partnered with Daneel, the first — experimental — humaniform robot that can pass for a human and is specially sent to Earth for this task.

In The Naked Sun the almost impossible has occurred on the planet Solaria: a human has been murdered. Bailey is asked to come to Solaria escorted by robot Daneel to solve the murder. There he is confronted with a society where every individual lives on a large estate with many robots. People abhor visiting each other — called seeing — but only “view” each other by artificial means. They like to go outside and this poses a great challenge for Bailey. Hence the title. Two fragments.

Viewing a Woman

A second viewing the following day

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Dit blog is oorspronkelijk gepubliceerd op Wat te Doen 01-11-2020 door @VictorOnrust

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