In his 1965 novel The Tin Men, British writer Michael
Frayn describes an attempt to develop an altruistic robot.
The first prototype, Samaritan I, was programmed to
sacrifice itself in favour of others. Its designer tested it by
putting it on a one-robot raft with various companions to
see what happened when the raft started to sink. The
robot duly chucked itself overboard with alacrity.
However, it did this to save anything from a sack of lima
beans to a chunk of seaweed, and the cost of drying it out
each time proved expensive.
Samaritan II was adapted to sacrifice itself only for
things it judged to be as, or more intelligent than itself. In
trials it threw a number of insensate objects overboard,
plus one hapless sheep. Yet when it was placed on the
raft with another of its kind, both machines chucked
themselves overboard simultaneously, which proved
even more expensive.
Lastly, the designer inserted a bit of software that
stopped the robots from committing reciprocal suicide,
but this final version proved to be most expensive of all.
When placed together on the raft, the two machines
thought about it for a while, then, as the raft slowly sank,
they bashed each other to bits.
Our species’ history of warfare suggests we are
programmed like the later versions of Samaritan. Yet
every so often someone behaves like one of those
earlier versions: they do something spectacularly
altruistic. Stories abound of people diving into the
paths of cars to push stray children aside, or throwing
themselves onto live grenades to contain explosions
that would otherwise kill dozens, or plunging into icy
waters to save drowning babies.
Millions of others do quiet acts of giving that rarely
feature in newspapers. According a survey carried out by
the Charities Aid Foundation, three-quarters of people in
the UK gave money to a good cause in 2014, one-third
gave their time and two-thirds helped a stranger. The
proportion of people who reported doing altruistic acts
had increased on the previous year in nearly every
country monitored.
At first, all this niceness doesn’t make sense. Selfish
people should flourish because altruistic types areStories abound of people
diving into the paths of cars
to push stray children aside
ILLUSTRATOR: KYLE SMART68 Vol. 8 Issue 10SCIENCE
68 Vol. 8 Issue 10