to pick up this robot’s trail again, every minute! And now just this week I picked it up again, you just gonna tell me to let go? You tellin’ me to just walk away?’
‘I’m sorry. Company decision, not mine. It just wasn’t cost-effective to keep on with—’
‘But goldurn it, Mr Frankelin, I made a lotta commitments on the basis of that contract, you can’t just go and fold out on me like this, I mean I got some fancy new prostheses to pay for. Dang it. I am a professional, not one a your two-bit outfits like the Honk Honk Agency, I worked hard and — Mr Frankelin?’
But the haggard face, having awakened from its stupor to deliver holy wisdom, now lost all expression once more, as Franklin contemplated a book page:
we take a pigeon, cut out his hemispheres carefully and wait till he recovers from the operation. There is not a movement natural to him which this brainless bird cannot execute; he seems, too, after some days to execute movements from some inner irritation, for he moves spontaneously. But his emotions and instincts exist no longer. In Schrader’s striking words: ‘The hemisphereless animal moves in a world of bodies which… are all of equal value for him… Every object is for him only a space-occupying mass…’
When he next looked up, the visitor was gone.
O’Smith grinned and winked at the receptionist on his way out, but inside he was feeling real mean. Okay, goldurn it, if they wanted to play rough, they had the right
Okay, then, everybody plays rough. Only one way to make sure KUR never cleans up on this deal: destroy the durned robot. Shoot it up until it was worth maybe ten cents at some junkyard, that would show ’em.
As soon as he started thinking about destruction, Mister O’Smith felt good again.
In the common room of the Newman Club, Father Warren looked up from the checkerboard where he had just been willing his hand to pick up a checker — and then, before it moved, cancelling the order. Who was that coming in? Yes, that smirking young man who’d tried to wreck the panel discussion, calling himself a robot and then streaking, damned grinning — but no, Father Warren willed forgiveness. Fraternity boys would be fraternity boys, and the one with him was wearing a Mickey Mouse mask. They sat down at the other end of the room. The ‘robot’ smiled at Father Warren, and that priest, willing forgiveness, smiled back. The insolence! Smile and smile and yet be a robot… the
Father Warren now willed himself to return to his task, verification of the fact of free will, as he prepared his article, ‘Machine Function and Human Will: a Final Analysis.’
His starting point was the classic debate between Arthur Samuel (inventor of the checker-playing program that could beat its inventor) and Norbert Wiener. Wiener contended that machines ‘can and do transcend some of the limitations of their designers, to which Samuel replied:
A machine is not a genie, it does not work by magic, it does not possess a will, and, Wiener to the contrary, nothing comes out which has not been put in, barring, of course, an infrequent case of malfunctioning… The ‘intentions’ which the machine seems to manifest are the intentions of the human programmer, as specified in advance, or they are subsidiary intentions derived from these, following rules specified by the programmer. We can even anticipate the higher levels of abstraction, just as Wiener does, in which the program will not only modify the subsidiary intentions but will also modify the rules which are used in their derivation, or in which it will modify the way in which it modifies the rules, and so on, or even in which one machine will design and construct a second machine with enhanced capabilities. However, and this is important, the machine
But what followed from this? Mentally he essayed a few trials, attempting to make some effort at tackling the undertaking:
Yet why is it so many human lives seem unwilled, pathetic examples of garbage in, garbage out?
Then is man a genie? Does man work by magic? The answer must be an unqualified and resounding…
If the intentions of the machine come necessarily from the programmer, human intentions might be seen similarly to come from God. The Ten Commandments, for example, engraved in every human heart. Yet human volition can and does subvert Divine Law, just as machine volition…
Not what he wanted. Not at all what he intended.
Roderick noticed Father Warren, looking bluer around the gills than usual, sitting contemplating a checker game as though there were a figure nailed to the board. The Luddite priest was today wearing a plain cassock, as were now seldom seen outside Bing Crosby movies. But he did smile and nod at Roderick, in a kind of automatic way.
‘Okay, Dan, you just sit right down here, maybe I can get you a coffee from the machine or — you want a peanut butter sandwich? Here, I brought a stack of them, help yourself.
‘Probably you’re wondering what kind of place this is, well it’s the Newman Club, named after this English Cardinal who was I guess in favour of “cumulative probabilities”, whatever that means, sounds like he was adding them, but you can only do that if they’re independent and you want the probability of at least one of them happening, look you want a coffee or I could get you a Coke? Oh, don’t worry about that; that’s just the air conditioning, it always makes a funny noise starting up.
‘You know I really looked forward to this. I always saw us like this, just sitting down and having a long talk, I mean without all the doctors and nurses hanging around. Because there’s a whole lot of questions I have to ask you, I mean you’re almost like the nearest thing to a father — you sure you don’t want a Coke? Eating all that peanut butter must be dry, and hot inside that mask, look I don’t think they’d mind if you took it off here, you’re not in the ward where I know they want you to wear it, but here — no okay, okay, take it easy, no one wants to take your mask. You know it’s funny but I feel like I saw a Mickey Mouse mask like that before, long ago or in a dream or, I don’t know but it wasn’t just any old mask, it was important, very important. I don’t know why, I thought maybe you knew the answer. I just remember seeing those empty eye-holes, nobody inside, nobody inside looking out…
‘You, uh, want a game of ping-pong? There’s a table next door no? Heck, I guess they probably have it over at the hospital too, I forgot. I forgot, what was I going to say? I guess maybe I should go over and say hello to Father Warren there, the way he keeps nodding and grinning at me. You be okay? Sure you will, just for a sec.’
To the priest, he introduced himself as Roderick Wood. ‘I guess you remember me, huh Father?’
‘Of course I do. You and your gang tried hard enough to break up our panel discussion, how could I forget?’ Father Warren’s long hands began gathering up checkers.
‘No I thought you remembered me from before, from Holy Trin, Father. Roderick Wood?’
‘Wood? No, I don’t think I—’
‘You loaned me all these neat science-fiction books like this
‘The Wood boy! The little crip — handicap — disadvantaged boy, of course, of course! Well well, how are you, er, Roderick.?’
‘I’m still a robot, Father. Remember how you tried to prove I wasn’t, how you had me stick this pin in your hand, that was supposed to prove—’
‘Hold on now, hold on.’ Father Warren’s laugh was uneasy. ‘The way you say it makes me sound like some kind of nut or something, heh heh. No, as I recall it what I was trying to do was to show you how illogical it was to pretend to be a science-fiction entity and then try to get out of science-fiction laws, like Asimov’s Three Laws of
