still split you into different histories-but on a coarse-grained level, you don’t contribute to the process yourself?”
“That’s right.”
Robert was speechless. Even after a year, she could still toss him a hand grenade like this.
Helen said, “I can’t help living in many worlds; that’s beyond my control. But I do know that I’m one person. Faced with a choice that puts me on a knife-edge, I know I won’t split and take every path.”
Robert hugged himself, suddenly cold. “Like I do. Like I have. Like all of us poor creatures of flesh.”
Helen came and sat beside him. “Even that’s not irrevocable. Once you’ve taken this form-if that’s what you choose-you can meet your other selves, reverse some of the scatter. Give some a chance to undo what they’ve done.”
This time, Robert grasped her meaning at once. “Gather myself together? Make myself whole?”
Helen shrugged. “If it’s what you want. If you see it that way.”
He stared back at her, disoriented. Touching the bedrock of physics was one thing, but this possibility was too much to take in.
Someone knocked on the study door. The two of them exchanged wary glances, but it wasn’t Quint, back for more punishment. It was a porter bearing a telegram.
When the man had left, Robert opened the envelope.
“Bad news?” Helen asked.
He shook his head. “Not a death in the family, if that’s what you meant. It’s from John Hamilton. He’s challenging me to a debate. On the topic ‘Can a Machine Think?’”
“What, at some university function?”
“No. On the BBC: Four weeks from tomorrow.” He looked up. “Do you think I should do it?”
“Radio or television?”
Robert reread the message. “Television.”
Helen smiled. “Definitely. I’ll give you some tips.”
“On the subject?”
“No! That would be cheating.” She eyed him appraisingly. “You can start by throwing out your electric razor. Get rid of the permanent five o’clock shadow.”
Robert was hurt. “Some people find that quite attractive.”
Helen replied firmly, “Trust me on this.”
The BBC sent a car to take Robert down to London. Helen sat beside him in the back seat.
“Are you nervous?” she asked.
“Nothing that an hour of throwing up won’t cure.”
Hamilton had suggested a live broadcast, “to keep things interesting,” and the producer had agreed.
Robert had never been on television; he’d taken part in a couple of radio discussions on the future of computing, back when the Mark I had first come into use, but even those had been taped.
Hamilton’s choice of topic had surprised him at first, but in retrospect it seemed quite shrewd. A debate on the proposition that “Modern Science is the Devil’s Work” would have brought howls of laughter from all but the most pious viewers, whereas the purely metaphorical claim that “Modern Science is a Faustian Pact” would have had the entire audience nodding sagely in agreement, while carrying no implications whatsoever. If you weren’t going to take the whole dire fairy tale literally, everything was “a Faustian Pact” in some sufficiently watered-down sense: everything had a potential downside, and this was as pointless to assert as it was easy to demonstrate.
Robert had met considerable incredulity, though, when he’d explained to journalists where his own research was leading. To date, the press had treated him as a kind of eccentric British Edison, churning out inventions of indisputable utility, and no one seemed to find it at all surprising or alarming that he was also, frankly, a bit of a loon. But Hamilton would have a chance to exploit, and reshape, that perception.
If Robert insisted on defending his goal of creating machine intelligence, not as an amusing hobby that might have been chosen by a public relations firm to make him appear endearingly daft, but as both the ultimate vindication of materialist science and the logical endpoint of most of his life’s work, Hamilton could use a victory tonight to cast doubt on everything Robert had done, and everything he symbolized.
By asking, not at all rhetorically, “Where will this all end?,” he was inviting Robert to step forward and hang himself with the answer.
The traffic was heavy for a Sunday evening, and they arrived at the Shepherd’s Bush studios with only fifteen minutes until the broadcast. Hamilton had been collected by a separate car, from his family home near Oxford. As they crossed the studio, Robert spotted him, conversing intensely with a dark-haired young man.
He whispered to Helen, “Do you know who that is, with Hamilton?”
She followed his gaze, then smiled cryptically. Robert said, “What? Do you recognize him from somewhere?”
“Yes, but I’ll tell you later.”
As the makeup woman applied powder, Helen ran through her long list of rules again. “Don’t stare into the camera, or you’ll look like you’re peddling soap powder. But don’t avert your eyes. You don’t want to look shifty.”
The makeup woman whispered to Robert, “Everyone’s an expert.”
“Annoying, isn’t it?” he confided.
Michael Polanyi, an academic philosopher who was well-known to the public after presenting a series of radio talks, had agreed to moderate the debate. Polanyi popped into the makeup room, accompanied by the producer; they chatted with Robert for a couple of minutes, setting him at ease and reminding him of the procedure they’d be following.
They’d only just left him when the floor manager appeared. “We need you in the studio now, please, Professor.” Robert followed her, and Helen pursued him part of the way. “Breathe slowly and deeply,” she urged him.
“As ifyou’d know!” he snapped.
Robert shook hands with Hamilton, then took his seat on one side of the podium. Hamilton’s young adviser had retreated into the shadows; Robert glanced back to see Helen watching from a similar position. It was like a duel: they both had seconds. The floor manager pointed out the studio monitor, and, as Robert watched, it was switched between the feeds from two cameras: a wide shot of the whole set, and a closer view of the podium, including the small blackboard on a stand beside it. He’d once asked Helen whether television had progressed to far greater levels of sophistication in her branch of the future, once the pioneering days were left behind, but the question had left her uncharacteristically tongue-tied.
The floor manager retreated behind the cameras, called for silence, then counted down from ten, mouthing the final numbers.
The broadcast began with an introduction from Polanyi: concise, witty, and nonpartisan. Then Hamilton stepped up to the podium. Robert watched him directly while the wide-angle view was being transmitted, so as not to appear rude or distracted. He only turned to the monitor when he was no longer visible himself.
“Can a machine think?” Hamilton began. “My intuition tells me:no. My heart tells me:no. I’m sure that most of you feel the same way. But that’s not enough, is it? In this day and age, we aren’t allowed to rely on our hearts for anything. We need something scientific. We need some kind ofproof.
“Some years ago, I took part in a debate at Oxford University. The issue then was not whether machines might behave like people, but whether people themselves mightbe mere machines. Materialists, you see, claim that we are all just a collection of purposeless atoms, colliding at random. Everything we do, everything we feel, everything we say, comes down to some sequence of events that might as well be the spinning of cogs, or the opening and closing of electrical relays.
“To me, this was self-evidently false. What point could there be, I argued, in even conversing with a materialist? By his own admission, the words that came out of his mouth would be the result of nothing but a mindless, mechanical process! By his own theory, he could have no reason to think that those words would be the truth! Only believers in a transcendent human soul could claim any interest in the truth.”
Hamilton nodded slowly, a penitent’s gesture. “I was wrong, and I was put in my place. This might be self- evident tome, and it might be self-evident toyou, but it’s certainly not what philosophers call an ‘analytical truth’: it’s not actually a nonsense, a contradiction in terms, to believe that we are mere machines. There might, there justmight, be some reason why the words that emerge from a materialist’s mouth are truthful, despite their origins
