large colored button.
“The cat has already been conditioned,” Engersol explained. “A slight electrical charge can be transmitted through the floor of its cage. When the cat feels the charge, it can stop it by hitting either of the two buttons on the smaller compartments, which have also released a small quantity of food into the main cage.”
Amy, thinking of Tabby — who was even now curled up on the pillow on her bed — shuddered as she gazed at the grotesque-looking cat, its bald head sprouting a tangle of wires. It was prevented from pawing the wires away by a large, cone-shaped plastic collar around its neck. “It doesn’t look very happy,” she said, almost under her breath.
Engersol shrugged. “I don’t suppose it is. On the other hand, it’s not suffering at all, nor is the electrical charge enough to hurt it. It merely startles it into a conditioned response.”
“But where’s the food?” Jeff Aldrich asked, his eyes fixed on the empty spaces where the rewards for a proper response should have been.
Engersol smiled approvingly. “That,” he told the class, “is the whole point of today’s experiment. What we are going to do is offer the cat two negative experiences. Today, instead of releasing food and interrupting the electrical current, one of the buttons will trigger the snarl of a dog, while the other one will release a small amount of skunk musk. Neither of which,” he added, “is a cat’s favorite thing. Thus, the cat will have some choices to make. If it wants to stop the electrical charge, it must elect to face either the snarls of the dog or the smell of the skunk.”
Amy Carlson’s face set stubbornly. “I don’t think we ought to do it,” she said. “It’s cruel!”
Engersol offered her a reassuring smile. “The cat won’t be hurt, Amy. And since it’s being monitored by the computer, we should be able to find out a lot about the physical processes its brain goes through as it tries to come to a decision. It’s a Hobson’s choice experiment, in which any action results in a negative experience. Shall we begin?”
Without waiting for a reply from any of the kids, he threw a switch activating the electrical charge.
The cat’s body tensed, and it immediately reached out with a paw and took a swipe at the left hand button.
Instantly, a small speaker within the cage blared out the sound of a snarling dog.
Startled, the cat leaped back, and was once more subjected to the tingling of electricity. It reached out again, trying the other button.
Now, the area around the cage began to reek of skunk, causing the children to hold their noses, and the cat — only an inch from the nozzle spraying the redolent gas — to jerk reflexively back once again.
Amy, outraged by what she saw, grabbed her book bag from the table on which she’d dropped it only a few minutes earlier and started toward the door. “I’m leaving,” she said. “And I’m not coming back, either!”
Startled by her words, Josh turned away from the cage. “Come on, Amy, it’s not like we’re hurting it!”
“You are, too,” Amy insisted. “You’re torturing it, and I’m going to tell!”
A groan rose from the rest of the boys in the class. Amy turned scarlet, furious at what was being done to the hapless animal in the cage and at the reaction of her classmates as well. “I hate all of you!” she yelled. Then her right arm rose and she pointed an accusing finger at George Engersol. “You’re just as mean as they are!” Bursting into sobs, she fled from the room.
Josh started after her, but Engersol stopped him before he was halfway to the door. “Let her go,” the director of the Academy said. “It’s all right. Her reaction was a perfectly legitimate response to the experiment. And in a way, she’s right — what we’re doing isn’t very pleasant for the cat. It’s not suffering any long-term damage, at least not physically. But,” he went on, drawing the attention of the class back to the cage, “let’s take a look at what’s happening to its brain.”
Josh hesitated, torn between his urge to go after Amy and make sure she was all right, and his equally strong desire to watch the end of the experiment.
In the end, his curiosity won out. He rejoined the group of boys clustered around the lab table.
On the computer monitor the lines tracing the cat’s brain waves had gone crazy, jagging up and down in a chaotic pattern that clearly indicated its confusion.
And in the cage, the cat itself was frantically pacing back and forth, swiping first at one button, then at the other, each time shying instinctively away from the snarling dog or the odor of the skunk. In the end, it sank down, trembling, unable to continue its futile efforts to escape the unpleasant stimuli that seemed to come at it from nowhere.
At last Engersol switched off the electrical charge, and the cat, breathing hard, slowly began to settle down.
“As you can see,” Engersol told the seven boys gathered around the lab table, “the cat was unable to make a choice. Its intellectual limitations didn’t allow it to choose the lesser of two evils, tolerating either the snarling or the odor, rather than continuing to suffer the electrical shock. Instead, it simply oscillated back and forth, until finally it broke down.”
“Kind of like a computer going into a loop and crashing,” Jeff Aldrich observed.
Engersol nodded appreciatively. “Exactly. Which is the point of the whole experiment. Until we know the physical processes a brain goes through while making a choice between two negatives, we suspect that it will be impossible to program true artificial intelligence.”
“But what do we do now?” Josh asked, still uncertain exactly what they’d learned from the experiment, and with Amy’s words still fresh in his mind. If the experiment was over, it seemed to him that the torture of the cat had been pointless. All they’d seen was what the cat couldn’t do.
Engersol turned his approving gaze on Josh. “Now,” he said, “the real work begins. We’ve gathered a lot of data, which is stored in the computer. What we do next is begin analyzing that data. We’ll feed the recorded brain waves into the computer and have them analyzed, looking for patterns within what appears to be chaos.”
For the rest of the hour the boys tapped instructions into the computer, comparing the activities of each area of the cat’s brain to all the others. Within a few minutes Amy Carlson’s reaction to the experiment was all but forgotten.
Except by George Engersol.
For him, the experiment had gone off perfectly. Amy Carlson, for whose sole benefit the entire performance had been staged, had reacted exactly as he had hoped she would.
She was unhappy, and she was angry.
The pressure inside her was building.
Jeanette Aldrich stared glumly at her desk in the administrative office of the Barrington University psychology department and wondered if she really was ready to come back to work. The week she’d spent at home, with everything she saw or touched reminding her of Adam and tearing the scabs off the still bleeding wound of her grief, had done nothing to begin the healing process. Indeed, she had found that long days of inactivity only made the pain worse, for with nothing to fill her time, she had found herself doing nothing but dwelling on the loss of her son.
So this morning she had come back to the office, where things had not been much better. Everyone she met, it seemed, was treating her with kid gloves, either making no mention of Adam’s death at all or being oversolicitous to the point of making Jeanette feel like an invalid.
Everyone, it seemed, wanted to help her.
Someone had made her a pot of coffee that morning, someone else had produced the morning doughnut from the student union.
Jennie Phelps, the teaching assistant who had filled in for Jeanette last week, had insisted on staying, at least for today.
And from almost everyone there had been the exact same words. Uttered in a hushed whisper, after the speaker had drawn Jeanette into a secluded corner, the question never varied. “How are you, Jeanette,
As if each of them, through some mystic right Jeanette couldn’t comprehend, expected her to share her private grief, to admit to the speaker alone that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or felt like killing herself, or didn’t think she could survive Adam’s loss.
Each of which, at one moment or another, had been quite true, but none of which she felt was anyone’s
