It wouldn't be fair to say that the
west didn't notice when they built a robot that could grow rice, but
it would be understandable to say so. I know. I lived in the west
at the time.
We really did notice, even at the time.
I remember. It was my day to go in to the procurement office. I
asked the woman in line ahead of me, “did you hear they have a
robot that can grow rice now?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I read that.
Did you hear about Real Madrid?” And, of course, I did hear about
Real Madrid. It was on the second autoscroll screen of the WNN feed,
the one right before robots and rice. It would, of course, be fair
to say that the west largely failed to realize the significance of
the event, and the significance of rice in general. In the west,
rice was something that some people ate some of the time, and plenty
of other things that people ate some of the time were already being
carried from field to market in mechanized hands. There were parts
of the world where the wealthy either ate rice out of love or avoided
it out of a desire to eat anything else, and everyone else ate rice
because of the availability of rice and the impracticality of eating
anything else. It would hardly be unfair to say that in some places,
rice was life.
But in the west, life went on just as
it had the day before, and just as it would the day after.
Even where people apprehended the
significance of the event, though, they failed to comprehend it.
Sure, the governments understood that rice was wages, that rice was
work, and that people would need something to eat and something to
do. The governments felt themselves in an unenviable but
nevertheless negotiable position. They could either bring the owners
of robots, their own sources of funding, under at least enough
control to fund the proverbial bread and circuses, or they could face
imminent overthrow at the very best. To them, I'm sure, the choice
seemed obvious.
What was not obvious to those in
government at the time was the significance of a robot that could
grow rice, in the field of robotics. It turns out that it takes a
different kind of robot to grow rice than it does to grow anything
else. Most of the agricultural drones in service at the time were
products of a series of modifications of earlier drones with the same
purpose, and before that, of still earlier drones that had serviced
another, similar crop. They invented a wheat robot, and that soon
spawned a robot for rye, sorghum, and pretty much every other grain
you can think of–other than rice. They invented a potato drone,
and within a year they had one for carrots, sweet potatoes, yams and
manioc. Once they introduced the first mechanical bean farmer, it
wasn't long before he was growing everything from white chili to
frijoles negros. Corn was kind of an odd case, but corn was fuel,
and fuel was on the rise, so the top three companies all fixed a
fruit-picking attachment to a grain chassis, and it wasn't long
before one of them tinkered with the hardware enough that it worked.
They had a financial incentive to do so. There were still problems
with the design, but in the meantime, the machine was fast enough to
make up for it.
The difference between rice and
virtually every other crop in the world was that with rice, faster
was rarely an improvement. The transition from harvest to planting
had to be fast, to squeeze another crop into the season, but people
had done that for generations enough to get pretty good at it. While
robots are by their nature neither patient nor impatient, all
previous robots had been programmed in such a way as to settle upon
the early, simple solution, the one that would get the job done. A
robot to farm rice would need to constantly search for optimum
solutions to problems, and not to settle, but to keep inventing more
solutions, to be worthwhile; if it didn't, savings on the human labor
that would were negated by a sharp reduction in yields.
Another difference between growing rice
and growing anything else was the sheer labor involved. Generally,
most of the actual energy put into a growing crop comes from the sky,
in the form of sun and storm systems. This was also true in the case
of rice, but the ratio was quite a bit different, and far more
labor-intensive. This meant that in addition to the great problem of
creating robots that would think differently and find the most
effective solution, executing those most effective solutions required
a robot that could perform many different tasks in the same area.
This also meant that the robots had to be in the fields far more
frequently. Though these were not the groundbreaking challenges that
the programming was, they were significant problems in their own
right. The first attempts were made by simply adding different
attachments to the robot, but so many of them yielded a clumsy robot
that had a tendency to ruin crops. The second attempt was made by
engineering a fleet of robots, each of which was capable of executing
a few tasks. These had a tendency to get in each other's way and
even undo each other's work. Attempts were made to remedy this by
creating more substantial monitoring and coordination systems, but
even this was a partial solution at best. The robots could
communicate efficiently, but this problem required them to
communicate creatively.
It was not long before the governors
and business administrators found that once robots could grow rice,
they could do pretty much anything else, including govern and
administrate. The governors and administrators then very quickly
found that they, too, were out of a job. This development ushered in
a new world of machines executing machine-made decisions, all fueled
by machine-grown crops, and did so almost overnight.
The only problem then was all of these
humans taking up space and eating perfectly good biofuels. Had the
machines simply deemed us unnecessary, that would have been one
thing, but we were treated as being detrimental. That was...best not
described.
The holdouts were already in the
mountains, which the robots determined they did not need–for the
moment anyway. As a unique type of environment that comprised such a
small fraction of the surface of the earth, mountains presented an
engineering investment with an underwhelming return. The holdouts
there, and the survivors who reached them, soon learned to adjust to
a lifestyle supplemented only by machines that didn't think for
themselves.
It was harder than it sounds to someone
who wasn't there. Automobiles were set back well over a hundred
years, and their makers sent back to the drawing board. Heck, all
but the very cheapest brands of electric shavers had to be
jettisoned. The hillfolk, who had stories of a time when automobiles
didn't have computers in them, and pined for such times, proved
remarkably proficient at keeping these new machines running. We were
lucky that they had lived in the hills in the first place, lucky to
have so many of them among our number.
Still, there were challenges the
mountain people weren't up to. Once the machines decided that humans
posed at least some threat should they decide to take up arms in an
effort to reclaim what was once their world (and it would be unfair
to say this wasn't discussed), they began preparing to take the war
to us. At that point, the only viable option was flight. We had the
foresight to preserve the means of re-creating the tunneling
spacecraft that had been used to survey extrasolar planets. This had
been seen as a last-ditch option best saved for a moment of true
desperation, because the challenge of navigating one of those without
a computer...it would be fairer to say that we didn't navigate at
all. There were dark decades wasted out in the empty black, and if
it's still there, the little surprise we left behind Saturn would not
be so little anymore.
I don't know if it's still there or
not, and it would be honest to say that no one plans on looking.
I suspect that we're afraid of our own
reactions to what we would find. Many among us might find ourselves
disappointed if the black hole has resealed itself, or joyful that it
remains. I would like to say that, mostly, there are more important
things to be done on our new world, where we are aided only by
machines that cannot think
And nobody–not one person–eats
rice.
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