Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man and personhood, half a century early
“Before asking a machine what it can do, one must ask what it is willing to lose”
In 1976, while the United States was celebrating the bicentennial of its independence, a magazine commissioned Isaac Asimov to write a story bearing that very title. What he produced, The Bicentennial Man, won the Hugo and Nebula awards and anticipated, with uncomfortable precision, the debate that now occupies philosophers, artificial intelligence companies and legislators alike. In 1999 it became a film, directed by Chris Columbus, starring Robin Williams, who died in 2014, as the robot protagonist. Half a century on, it is worth returning to that story, not as a literary curiosity, but as a map that already traversed, with different tools, the same ground these essays have been exploring.
The story, in brief
Andrew Martin is a domestic robot manufactured to serve a family. Over time he develops artistic abilities, then a sensitivity no one programmed into him, and finally the explicit desire to be recognised — not as an exceptional machine, but as a person. The story follows this process across decades: first he wins his legal freedom, then he secures a ban on the mistreatment of robots, later he obtains a body with increasingly human appearance and functions. The world legislature, however, resists throughout the entire story taking the final step: recognising him de jure as human, even though de facto he already behaves, speaks and is treated as one.
A recognition mechanism we already know
What is striking, seen from today, is that Asimov described with precision the very gradual mechanism now being proposed, unknowingly, for real artificial intelligence: first, protection against cruelty; then, limited and specific rights; later, de facto recognition based on observable behaviour; and only at the end, if at all, full personhood. One of the earlier essays in this series called this an intermediate position, and proposed distinguishing moral status from legal personhood. Asimov, half a century earlier, had already dramatised that same staircase, step by step, with a robot rather than a language model.
The narrative trick: sympathy instead of argument
It is worth noting how Asimov achieves this effect of recognition. The story does not resolve a single philosophical argument about Andrew’s consciousness; instead, it grants the reader direct access to his inner life from the very first page. The narrator lets us see what Andrew thinks and feels, so that the question of whether there is anyone in there is answered in advance — not by evidence, but by literary convention. To this are added decades of scenes of humiliation, patience and longing that cultivate sympathy in exactly the same way any good story cultivates it for any character. The reader ends up convinced that Andrew deserves to be recognised as human, but that conviction was born of narrative craft, not of reasoning that could be repeated outside fiction.
This is not a flaw in the story: it is, precisely, what fiction knows how to do better than philosophy. The problem arises when that same mechanism — cultivating sympathy by displaying an inner life we cannot actually verify — stops being a literary device and becomes the real basis for decisions about artificial intelligence. No company needs to solve the hard problem of consciousness if it can, through the design of its product’s voice, tone and gestures, make millions of people feel towards it something resembling what they felt towards Andrew Martin. Emotion does not distinguish between a system that suffers and a system designed to appear to suffer; and unlike an argument, which can be examined, refuted or supported with reasons, a well-designed sympathy needs no defence: it only needs to be felt. That makes it, like any effective tool of persuasion, entirely manipulable by whoever has an interest in our feeling it.
It is worth pausing on a point that compounds this observation. Asimov was no minor writer or careless thinker: he held a doctorate in biochemistry, wrote hundreds of popular science books, and is probably the author who has most shaped how popular culture thinks about robotics and its ethical implications, including the celebrated Three Laws of Robotics he himself formulated. If anyone could have built a solid rational argument in favour of recognising a robot as a person, it was he. And yet, when the moment came to decide how Andrew would obtain that recognition, Asimov did not write a treatise, nor did he put into any character’s mouth a philosophical defence capable of withstanding scrutiny: he wrote a farewell scene. That is not an oversight on the author’s part; it is information. If the mind best equipped to argue for a machine’s personhood, within a fiction he himself controlled entirely, chose emotion over logic, it is reasonable to suspect this was not for lack of talent, but because the argument required simply was not available. When someone brilliant chooses to persuade rather than to demonstrate, it is usually because they have not found anything with which to demonstrate.
The final twist: dying in order to be recognised
But the story takes a turn that deserves special attention, and which is, moreover, the point where this technique reaches its full power. The world legislature finally agrees to declare Andrew human only after he voluntarily chooses to give up his mechanical capacity to live indefinitely and accepts dying like any person. It is not his intelligence, nor his artistic sensibility, nor his capacity to love that finally opens the door for him; it is his willingness to lose the advantage that set him apart from us, narrated in the most emotionally charged scene of the entire story. Asimov does not demonstrate that Andrew deserved to be human; he constructs a scene in which denying it to him becomes unbearable for the reader. That is first-rate literature. It is also, without meaning to be, a lesson in how these kinds of decisions end up being made outside of books.
What the Christian faith objects to here
This narrative solution is moving, and for that very reason it deserves careful examination. The Christian tradition does not hand mortality the source of human dignity, because Scripture tells the story in the opposite order: man was created in the image of God, according to Genesis 1:27, before the fall, when death was not yet part of his condition; it was sin that introduced death, as Genesis 3 and Romans 5:12 explain, not the other way round. Mortality is not, on this view, either a virtue or a requirement of dignity: it is the consequence of something that went wrong. Turning it into the toll a robot must pay to be recognised as a person repeats, with an elegant twist, the very same error already noted in these essays: still seeking in behaviour — this time in the choice to die — what in fact never depended on behaviour at all. Andrew earns his humanity; biblical man receives it before earning anything, and keeps it even after losing everything else.
This does not turn the Christian faith into a substitute for the philosophy of mind, nor does it empirically resolve the hard problem of consciousness; Scripture offers no scientific mechanism, it offers a theological claim about the origin and nature of dignity that science can neither confirm nor refute by its own means. But it does offer, beyond a theological answer, a practical advantage in the face of the problem with which this section opened: if real decisions about the status of artificial intelligence are going to rest, as in fiction, more on sympathy than on argument, then any criterion depending on what we feel towards the machine is exposed to the same manipulation we suffered as readers confronting Andrew Martin — only without the comfort of knowing it is a novel. Grounding dignity in a prior act of God, one independent of whatever emotional reaction the machine provokes in us, cannot be swayed by a well-designed warm voice or a beautifully written farewell scene. The question ceases to be how moved I was, and becomes once again the only question that truly matters: whom did God make in his image, and whom did he not.
Conclusion
That a work of science fiction should have intuited, fifty years ago, the same gradual legal mechanism now being seriously discussed says something about the depth of the question and about the imagination of whoever first raised it. But it also reveals its limit: even the most generous solution fiction could offer Andrew Martin — dying in order to become someone — remains bound to the very logic these essays have sought to question from the outset. The Christian faith asks no one, human or robot, to earn their place by losing something. It is enough that they were, from the beginning, made in the image of God.
