Flick, flick. ‘Okay sure, you think the robot idea is powerful. Only it still might be kind of tough on us, having all these puppets around who are also our intellectual equals. We won’t be able to shut
‘But maybe an inevitable rip. Anyway, we’re the team to make the historic incision.’ Bunsky briefly saw them all gathered around an operating table,
‘Something funny?’ Ben Franklin asked.
‘Nothing really, just remembered a notion I had for a science-fiction movie — well it’s nothing.’
‘I’d like to hear it.’
‘All I really have is this opening scene. There’s a human brain floating in a tank of water and pulsating with light. These scientists in white lab coats are leaning over it, looking grave, with the pulsating light reflected in their eyes. Then the camera begins to pull back, so we see the tank is an office water cooler. One of the scientists takes down a paper cup and gets himself a drink.’
‘He’s laughing now,’ said the older of the two men in white lab coats. He pointed to a screen where a jagged line bobbed and danced. ‘There, he just told a joke.’
‘Really? A joke? How do you know?’ The younger man kept turning away from the instrument panel to look directly into the tank where Leo Bunsky’s brain floated in water.
The older man pointed to a different screen. ‘We know everything he thinks. See right now he thinks he’s in his old office, back at some jerkwater Northern university, still working on a big secret “robot” project. And he thinks he’s talking to a colleague named Franklin. Franklin must have been a pretty good friend of his, because we never have any trouble producing him. We use Franklin as an input dummy.’
‘Input dummy? Afraid I don’t understand the technical side of this. Do you mean we can talk to this — this guy?’
‘Precisely. Now I’m not entirely familiar with the technical details myself. The wiring must be unimaginable. But I gather that we somehow stimulate vision and hearing centres to produce an hallucination of this Franklin, and then we somehow manipulate the hallucination. Of course we get output from Leo’s speech centres too.’ He pointed to another screen. ‘There, his joke is just coming up now.’
The younger man kept craning around to peer at the brain itself, but now he turned back to see:
Scientists are leaning over,
looking into a grave. A watery
grave. One of them has to be
pulled back. He lowers his cup
to get a stiff drink.
‘Not much of a sense of humour,’ said the younger man.
‘Well it probably loses something in the processing,’ said the other, pushing a few buttons. ‘Now we can also monitor his general thoughts, read his mind so to speak.’
am a maam a man of parts Dr
Gulp hands of a murderer drip
drip riverrun or creektrickle
O Rijn maiden God’s immerse
anatomical babies in jars drip
drip father fathomful drip
are those pearls eyes of an
artist pools
‘Interesting,’ said the younger man. ‘But you know I keep wondering why? Why go to all this trouble to find out what one computer scientist is thinking?’
‘Oh Leo isn’t just any computer scientist, he’s very special. A first-class brain, if you’ll pardon the expression. Let’s take a pew and I’ll tell you about Leo.’
There were comfortable theatre seats banked along one side of the room. The two men took seats in the front row, a pair of critics. The older man folded and unfolded his liver-spotted hands a few times before he began.
‘You know, Otto Neurath once said science is a boat you have to rebuild even while you’re at sea in it. In Leo’s case he was launched as an electrical engineer, drifted into communications theory and finally rebuilt his boat as a linguist. And so it was that Leo turned out to be the right man at the right time for a very special project. Building a so-called robot. Or as we prefer to say, an
He paused for effect. But the younger man was watching an attendant polish the glass front of Leo’s tank, wiping away fingermarks.
‘They called it Project — Rubric was it? Roderick, I believe, though what’s in a name, they had cover names galore, a very secretive bunch. And no wonder, because it turned out they were swindling funding out of NASA, heavy funding.’
‘They were just crooks?’
‘On the contrary, they had plenty of genuine talent. The team was headed by Lee Fong—’
‘The pattern-recognition guy? I’ve heard of him.’
The liver-spotted hands were folded again. ‘You may know the others too, all first-class br— people. So they had heavy funding, heavy talent, and I guess heavy luck. Because they blitzed through some incredibly tough problems and actually got their Entity built.’
The younger man was now listening with his full attention. ‘Go on. What was it?’
‘It was a “viable” learning machine incorporating some of Leo’s best ideas. By the time they built it, Leo Bunsky himself was officially dead, but his ideas lived on. The Roderick Entity was a great success — if you can call it a success to endanger humanity — and it was Leo Bunsky who made it possible for the thing to talk.
‘Of course there were the others, Fong and Mendez and Sonnenschein, all brilliant, but Leo made it talk. I wish sometimes we could tell him about his success.’
‘He doesn’t know?’ The younger man looked to the tank.
‘All he knows is, he went into the hospital for open-heart surgery, came out wonderfully well, and went back to work. In fact he died on the table. Our people were there, and they managed to get his brain — and now Leo works for us!’
‘As a kind of devil’s advocate, I suppose.’
‘Precisely. Precisely.’ Wrinkled reptilian eyelids came down over bright reptilian eyes. ‘Leo sits in his office, “Franklin” comes in and asks him some questions about the future of artificial intelligence research. He tells “Franklin” what he thinks, and we have our answer. We know what has to be stopped.’
The younger man watched the attendant breathe on the glass to clear a fingermark. ‘Of course I’m new around here, but frankly I don’t get it. Why does the Orinoco Institute keep on spending money to sabotage robot research, Entity I mean, when every year there’s going to be more and more new research? I mean it sounds like a holding action that isn’t even holding. Aren’t Entities inevitable? Aren’t they becoming a fact of life?’
‘That’s certainly one of Leo’s arguments, inevitability. But you know, in all of our scenarios, Entities are a decidedly negative development. Ultimately they signal the collapse of our way of life, the death of our culture. I do not mean just American or Western culture, I mean human culture. And if we at the Institute have one over-riding loyalty, I believe it must be to our own species.’ His head swivelled sharply, the lizard eyes opening in a hypnotic stare. ‘Don’t you agree?’
‘Well sure, naturally. But are we really sure that humanity is threatened by, by Entities?’
‘Oh, we’ve worked it out. In all eight scenarios.’
‘In all three modes?’
