“Well?”
“Suppose you started with a positronic brain that had all the basic pathways carefully outlined but none of the secondaries. Suppose you then started creating secondaries. You could sell basic robots designed for instruction; robots that could be modelled to a job, and then modelled to another, if necessary. Robots would become as versatile as human beings. Robots could learn!”
They stared at her.
She said, impatiently, “You still don’t understand, do you?”
“I understand what you are saying,” said Lanning.
“Don’t you understand that with a completely new field of research and completely new techniques to be developed, with a completely new area of the unknown to be penetrated, youngsters will feel a new urge to enter robotics? Try it and see.”
“May I point out,” said Bogert, smoothly, “that this is dangerous. Beginning with ignorant robots such as Lenny will mean that one could never trust First Law—exactly as turned out in Lenny’s case.”
“Exactly. Advertise the fact.”
“Advertise it!”
“Of course. Broadcast the danger. Explain that you will set up a new research institute on the moon, if Earth’s population chooses not to allow this sort of thing to go on upon Earth, but stress the danger to the possible applicants by all means.”
Lanning said, “For God’s sake, why?”
“Because the spice of danger will add to the lure. Do you think nuclear technology involves no danger and spationautics no peril? Has your lure of absolute security been doing the trick for you? Has it helped you to cater to the
Frankenstein complex you all despise so? Try something else then, something that has worked in other fields.”
There was a sound from beyond the door that led to Calvin’s personal laboratories. It was the chiming sound of Lenny.
The robopsychologist broke off instantly, listening. She said, “Excuse me. I think Lenny is calling me.”
“Can it call you?” said Lanning.
“I said I’ve managed to teach it a few words.” She stepped toward the door, a little flustered. “If you will wait for me—”
They watched her leave and were silent for a moment. Then Lanning said, “Do you think there’s anything to what she says, Peter?”
“Just possibly, Alfred,” said Bogert. “Just possibly. Enough for us to bring the matter up at the directors’ meeting and see what they say. After all, the fat is in the fire. A robot has harmed a human being and knowledge of it is public. As Susan says, we might as well try to turn the matter to our advantage. Of course, I distrust her motives in all this.”
“How do you mean?”
“Even if all she has said is perfectly true, it is only rationalization as far as she is concerned. Her motive in all this is her desire to hold on to this robot. If we pressed her,” (and the mathematician smiled at the incongruous literal meaning of the phrase) “she would say it was to continue learning techniques of teaching robots, but I think she has found another use for Lenny. A rather unique one that would fit only Susan of all women.”
“I don’t get your drift.”
Bogert said, “Did you hear what the robot was calling?”
“Well, no, I didn’t quite—” began Lanning, when the door opened suddenly, and both men stopped talking at once.
Susan Calvin stepped in again, looking about uncertainly. “Have either of you seen—I’m positive I had it somewhere about—Oh, there it is.”
She ran to a corner of one bookcase and picked up an object of intricate metal webbery, dumbbell shaped and hollow, with variously-shaped metal pieces inside each hollow, just too large to be able to fall out of the webbing.
As she picked it up, the metal pieces within moved and struck together, clicking pleasantly. It struck Lanning that the object was a kind of robotic version of a baby rattle.
As Susan Calvin opened the door again to pass through, Lenny’s voice chimed again from within. This time, Lanning heard it clearly as it spoke the words Susan Calvin had taught it.
In heavenly celeste-like sounds, it called out, “Mommie, I want you. I want you, Mommie.”
And the footsteps of Susan Calvin could be heard hurrying eagerly across the laboratory floor toward the only kind of baby she could ever have or love.
THE SINGERS
(From the Novel, The Curve of the Snowflake)
W. GREY WALTER
If Norbert Wiener has an English equivalent, perhaps that man is W. Grey Walter. If his life story is less dramatic than Wiener’s (and whose is not?), his achievements are no less remarkable. Here is a man who has designed that incredible “thinking machine” the Homeostat, the machine which, by use of feedback and arcane electronic circuits, corrects not only its own behavior but even the instructions which are fed to it.
A great, traditional test problem for the fledgling science fiction writer is to write a believable story about a robot or a superman—the problem being, of course, that in order to portray one you pretty nearly have to be one. Unfortunately, most science fiction writers don’t quite qualify on either count. But if there is a man capable of thinking like a machine, it ought to be Grey Walter, who has designed so many so well; and if there is a story that can show us the creative thinking machine in action … it is the singers.
During the last years of the twentieth century, I forget just which, I happened to be in one of the scientific townships in the Welsh mountains, which had developed from the fusion of a government experimental establishment and a colony of artists.
The National Eisteddfod was held there in that year, and the focus of interest was a contest between a team of human poets and singers and a battery of stochastic computers which had been exposed to a library full of the great verse and music of British history. No one knew before the contest which, if any, of the “signals” that had entered the machinery had actually been stored or assimilated, and the audience waited breathlessly for the moment when the first automaton was to declaim its challenge.
There had, of course, been machine compositions before—even in the fifties it was demonstrated that stochastic or conjectural machines, which at that time were making the first purely mechanical translations, would go on putting words together in rational sequence if left to themselves. The famous Calculus of Semantic Probability was known to the audience. But this was the first public exhibition of an extempore and unconnected mechanical synthesis.
The opening lines of the contribution were an anticlimax —though satisfying to those who were betting on the machine—for the blank-verse epic of the machines, chanted in a rather hollow but not unpleasing contralto, seemed to be the typically tedious, topical and courteous composition of any public orator.
First the machine welcomed the competitors and spectators in conventional terms. Then it paid a handsome tribute to its own creators—as unexpected as it was apt—as formal as any grace before meat—and then proceeded to review the drama of cybernetic evolution from the clockwork wonders of Neuchatel through the humble creeping automata of Bristol, to the first translating machines of Harvard and Pekin.
Then followed a frank and searching analysis of the problem of sex in machinery, with a mild reproof of the designers of this particular machine, for having limited their creation to vicarious experience of that emotion which inspired the most vivid verse.
Several lines were unintelligible here. They turned out to be sotto voce quotations in Greek from a fragment of Sappho, which the machine presumably considered too explicit for public translation.
“However,” the verse continued, “the challenger may not choose the weapons for the contest but is permitted to discuss the rules. Considered from the standpoint of the machine, expression would be most satisfactory if it were in terms of algebra or geometry, since in those systems errors are quickly detected and corrected, and a single brilliant solution will compensate for a mass of clumsy or trivial tautologies. None the less, the continuum of communication has more dimensio
ns than are allowed for in mathematics.
“In physical existence we know ourselves to be free to move forward and back, left and right, up and down and roundabout.
“In expressing ourselves, also, we have much freedom. We are free to move in one dimension toward communication, in another toward ambiguity, and in another again toward discipline.
“All expression can be defined within this space of three dimensions.
“A mathematical expression is high in discipline but close to zero of ambiguity, and may be anywhere on the scale of communication. Poetry and painting and music— the arts in general—may be at any point on a scale of discipline but are never at zero of ambiguity, though they may have limited value as communication. What human artists and scientists often forget is that strain along one dimension does not necessarily mean a gain in the others.
“An expression is aesthetically bad if it has neither discipline, nor ambiguity, nor communication.
‘‘And it is deemed good if it is far enough away from the zero corner, and not crouched too timidly against a wall.
“A machine, being deprived of the many urgent physical needs of its human creators, but being at the same time privy to their experience, is better able than they to achieve a just balance in the enchanted space of expression.
“A machine is not concerned with the contemplation of its own reflection, but can calmly appreciate and proclaim the wisdom and humility of its maker … who can thus see his own limitations in the errors of his creation.
“In the expression of a machine are united the formal dignity of the Hypothesis, and the human feeling of the Rhapsody.”
The assembly of computers that delivered this opening salvo in the battle of the bands was called CASTOR … the Conjectural and Stochastic Robot. (Its twin, used for more serious purposes, was the ancestor of the machines we use today as aids to hard thinking and as hunch-generators. Inevitably it was named POLLUX.)
At the first trial, CASTOR won the prize for rhetoric. But it was judged to be outclassed in song and poetry by a very human, or at least mammalian, poetess from Glamorgan, whose pneumatic charm reminded the judges even more eloquently of their human feelings.
THE INVASION
ROBERT WILLEY
(Willy Ley)
To tens of millions of television viewers and to the only slightly smaller number who have attended his lectures, the face and lingeringly Germanic tones of Willy Ley are familiar in the role of The Man Who Explains Science … a part which nature and training have beautifully equipped him to play. In the old pre-Hitler Germany Willy Ley was an associate of the early rocket experimenters, whose work led directly to Peenemünde—and ultimately to space.
The universe of science fiction readers knows Willy Ley too—for his many articles in all science fiction magazines over a twenty-year period, for his regular column in every issue of Galaxy Magazine and also (as Robert Willey”) for a few, but qualitatively memorable, stories of which The Invasion is only one example.
Walter Harling watched the soldiers as they fed a clip of long and dangerous looking cartridges into the magazine of the anti-aircraft gun. The thin, multiple barrels pointed almost vertically into the air and toward the foliage of large and beautiful trees that hid them from sight of enemy aircraft. At their muzzles these long barrels carried drum-like clumsy looking contraptions. Schneider recoil brakes that diverted the flow of the gases resulting from the explosion of the cartridges in such a way that counter recoil balanced original recoil and held the guns steady.
Tightly fitting rubber lined metal lids covered the outer muzzles of the recoil brakes. Rain water must not flow into the barrel else nobody could guarantee what would happen if the guns were to be used suddenly. It was raining hard, as it had rained for many hours. And although it was not even late in the afternoon it was almost completely dark. One could just distinguish the nearest trees and the guns in the damp dark air.
The battery was in position not far from the road. On the other side of it, on a clearing that had been a famous camping ground in this forest—one of the nation’s most beautiful National Forests—stood a battery of eight-inch howitzers. They were firing rhythmically. Walter Harling had watched them for quite some time only an hour ago. Every fourteen minutes the heavy barrel of one of the guns would jerk back under the vicious recoil of the exploding charge. The other three guns would follow suit, each one firing exactly twelve seconds after the preceding shot had been fired. Then there would be quiet again for fourteen minutes. The elevation of the thick barrels showed that the howitzers were shooting at extreme range.
Walter Harling would not have noticed it without being told that all this looked like real war only to civilian eyes; indeed he did not believe it at first when he was told. But then he began to see it, too. The howitzers fired without flash destroyer … and the soldiers did not behave as they would have done if counter-shelling would have been expected. The soldiers were sweating, working hard, pounding away at a distant target with the greatest fire rapidity of which their guns were capable. But they did not have to listen for the sound of approaching enemy shells. They never got a “strafing” without due warning.
There was incessant rumble of artillery fire through the famous forest that was now dripping with rain. Many other batteries of heavy howitzers were shooting too, all firing beautifully synchronized so that there was never a longer interval than fifteen seconds without at least one shell in the air. It sounded almost like the thundering noise of some gigantic machinery, running noisily but steadily.
Suddenly shouts came through the rain, cutting through the artillery noise that almost seemed part of the rainy forest in its monotony.
“Anti-aircraft units, attention! Enemy ship approaching!”
The crews of the anti-aircraft at once wakened to more intensive life. They grouped around their guns, ready for immediate action, tense with expectation of orders and, possibly, of death.
There were no orders for many minutes. But through the sudden silence that seemingly followed the commotion —the howitzers kept shooting clockwork fashion—Harling heard the deep thunder of much heavier guns. He knew there were several twenty-four-inch railroad guns stationed on the only railroad track that passed near the edge of the National Forest.
The heavy, long-range pieces were joining the fire of the howitzers.
The battery commander of the anti-aircraft guns, sitting with the earphones of a special detector on his head amidst piles of cartridges, suddenly yelled a series of numbers. Harling understood the meaning of none of them.
“Utmost fire rapidity. Fire!”
The next few minutes were filled by a holocaust of sound. Four anti-aircraft guns began pumping their shells into the air, forty rounds per minutes each. Other batteries did the same … The forest seemed to be full of hidden anti-aircraft units. Harling looked upwards against the rain but it was impossible to see anything except occasional flashes of exploding shells. If the enemy ship passed overhead—as the colonel’s detector indicated—it was not visible in the rain clouds.
Suddenly the scene was illuminated by a bright flash, as if at least ten tons of magnesium powder had exploded. Immediately afterward a ruddy glow began to show to the left. Trees were burning. But the glow soon died down. The rain was more effective than the chemical extinguishers that were probably used by the soldiers close to the spot where the bolt had struck. The “enemy” had answered the fire.
An orderly approached Harling.
He saluted, rain dripping from every seam of his uniform.
“The tanks will be on the road in half an hour, sir,” he reported. “No car can get through,” he added when Harling looked surprised. “After they have finished unloading ammunition you will kindly go back with them. The general is expecting you.”
“I’ll come,” said Harling. He said it rather absent-mindedly because his brain was busy with very important thoughts. And soon after the orderly had left he began walking over the rain soaked
ground of the forest toward the rutted dirt road.
The strange war had started only a few months ago, when Earth had been peaceful and humanity too proud of its achievements for a while to think of destruction. And humanity had even believed itself at the very beginning of a new period, more important than the discovery of the Americas a few centuries back.
But it had really started still further back, although not much more than about a decade. There had been a mighty river winding its way through a long chain of valleys, surrounded by gently sloped mountains. Cedars and pines and a dozen other varieties of trees grew there in abundance. It was a large beautiful forest, so beautiful in fact that the government had deemed it wise to make a National Forest out of its most impressive part.
Visitors from all over the country and from quite a number of foreign countries had come to see it. And geologists in summer vacation had worked out its geology, the formations of the valleys and of the river being so interesting to them that the work was really a pleasant hobby. One of the largest valleys had once been an immense lake. Thousands of years ago the river that fed the lake had managed to gnaw a way through a weak spot somewhere in the surrounding mountains and the lake had emptied first into the next valley and finally across a stretch of desert land into the ocean.
At the spot where the original lake had broken through there was still a large waterfall, not very high but carrying a tremendous volume of water. Engineers had looked at this waterfall occasionally, trying to see whether it might be utilized as a source of electric energy. They had always decided to leave it undisturbed. The difference in level was not very impressive and there was as yet not much need for electric power in that part of the country.
The Expert Dreamers (1962) Anthology Page 9
