“Well, sure. If the robot gets no satisfaction out of using up things—”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” growled the Ration Board official. “Robots aren’t human. How do you make them feel satisfaction? And adjustable satisfaction at that!”
Morey explained. It was a highly technical explanation, involving the use of great sheets of paper and elaborate diagrams. But there were trained men in the group and they became even more excited than before.
“Beautiful!” one cried in scientific rapture. “Why, it takes care of every possible moral, legal and psychological argument!”
“What does?” the Ration Board official demanded. “How?”
“You tell him, Mr. Fry.”
Morey tried and couldn’t. But he could show how his principle operated. The Ration Board lab was turned over to him, complete with more assistants than he knew how to give orders to, and they built satisfaction circuits for a squad of robots working in a hat factory.
Then Morey gave his demonstration. The robots manufactured hats of all sorts. He adjusted the circuits at the end of the day and the robots began trying on the hats, squabbling over them, each coming away triumphantly with a huge and diverse selection. Their metallic features were incapable of showing pride or pleasure, but both were evident in the way they wore their hats, their fierce possessiveness… and their faster, neater, more intensive, more dedicated work to produce a still greater quantity of hats… which they also were allowed to own.
“You see?” an engineer exclaimed delightedly. “They can be adjusted to want hats, to wear them lovingly, to wear the hats to pieces. And not just for the sake of wearing them out—the hats are an incentive for them!”
“But how can we go on producing just hats and more hats?” the Ration Board man asked puzzledly. “Civilization does not live by hats alone.”