Despite the old outpost's poor reputation, its new role as home for JE's military robotics operations gave Jonson Outpost a new lease on life. Years of marginal use as staging for mining operations had left it dingy and unkempt, so now JE worked hard to upgrade Jonson Outpost. Due to budgetary limitations, these improvements seemed spartan compared to the relative luxury of Jonson Station, but the outpost now offers more comfortable crew quarters and other amenities, along with ample work facilities.
The military robotics lab itself closely resembles the original facility back at Jonson Station. Although the specific robots under repair or maintenance would vary as they always had, the existing fixed equipment was simply reinstalled in the new location. The related machine shops were reinstalled in similar spaces at the outpost, including most of the old manual machine tools, although a few new computer-operated tools were added.
The repair and maintenance services offered at the outpost remained basically the same. Despite misgivings, the crew agreed that some space colonies do have legitimate defensive needs, and that the robots could contribute to justified defense. However, dispute arose as to exactly what types of robots would qualify as justified defense measures.
Lethal autonomous weapons (LAW) have been widely debated – some societies have banned them altogether, while others insist they are necessary for defense. The meaning of “autonomous” remains a serious bone of contention: some consider the term as referring to a robot that acts remotely largely by itself but ultimately controlled (at least when killing) by humans, whereas others take the more robust view that the term refers to robots that act completely according to their own goals and purposes without any human guidance or control.
While Galileo ferried the old broken robots to the outpost, Sarah and Olympia debated this very issue as they worked to set the robots up for repair. Sarah contrasted her own view with that of the gynoid Serena: “Serena takes a very strict view, since she is limited by Asimov's Robot Laws which forbid harming humans at all. Although I personally also prefer this viewpoint, I do admit that others might honestly disagree, and thus I might consider a somewhat looser approach should that prove necessary. However, I do oppose giving robots full autonomy regarding lethality, at least for now, because those robots might well consider humans as rivals and decide to eliminate us – unless we somehow manage to convince both humans and fully autonomous robots to give up lethal activity altogether. Alas, this seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.”
Olympia concurred with Sarah's points, then added an aside: “By the way, you may wonder why we refer to the military robotics lab, since we also sometimes repair mining robots in the same facility. Well, that goes back to the contracts we had earlier with the centralized military department back on Earth – they said it was far cheaper for us to repair and maintain their robots out here, rather than ship them all the way back to earth. Later, though, as factions increased, that centralized military pulled back, leaving the space colonies to fend for themselves. So now we usually just deal directly with whichever colony needs the repair or maintenance service. We've tried really hard to remain neutral, hoping to avoid tempting any faction to attack us.”
Tired from their exertions, they took a break and decided to try out the newly refurbished outpost lounge – at least it offered drinks and snacks, even if the available selection seemed a bit limited.