by John Norman
But one can see that Dr. Frankenstone, if not Herman’s parent, was as yet one who stood, as it were, in loco parentis.
And Herman, clearly, had his own mind.
One respect in which Herman disappointed Dr. Frankenstone was in his lack of enthusiasm for blood revenge. Dr. Frankenstone had rather expected that Herman, finding himself unlike others, repudiated by his nearest kin, other computers, television sets, and such, rejected by other forms of life, by dogs, for example, save as he might serve their grosser utilitarian purposes, unlikely to mate successfully, not even to enjoy an occasional cheeseburger or walk in the woods, unloved by all, save perhaps a mentally deformed homicidal maniac, would grow despondent, then moody, then bitter. To be sure, he would not be likely to slay Dr. Frankenstone’s fiancée, for various reasons, one being that Dr. Frankenstone had no fiancée.
Not only was Herman uninterested in seeking vengeance on his perpetrators, parents, progenitors, manufacturers, or what not, but he was an unusually docile, pleasant, good-natured fellow, or article. Even when Dr. Frankenstone harangued him with carefully calculated, blistering litanies of insults, sufficient to turn the sap of a mighty oak to bile, sufficient to blight an entire acre of hardy plantain, ragweed, and dandelions, even Zoysia grass, the most that would happen was that Herman’s screen might slightly darken, taking on a rueful bluish hue, and mist a little, at the lower left and right-hand corners. And, in time, Dr. Frankenstone desisted from his cruel psychological experiments, giving them up as fruitless.
It was not that Herman was not eager to please; it was rather that he had drawn several lines in the moral sand, so to speak, and the consummation of blood vengeance lay outside the pale of them all.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
He was fond of quoting Richard Lovelace.
Dr. Frankenstone began to suspect that Herman’s individualism might be incurable, perhaps even terminal.
Many parents experience this agonizing moment.
At this point one might suppose that Dr. Frankenstone, after some weeks of serious reflection, mingled with a poignant regret, with a sigh for what might have been, and was not, might have pulled the plug on young Herman. This would not have done, however, for Herman was not plugged in at all. An anomalous consequence of his unusual nativity was that he drew his sustenance directly from the atmosphere itself, utilizing abundant atmospheric electricity for this purpose.
Dr. Frankenstone did consider leaving Herman alone with Igor, unsupervised, but could not bring himself to do so. Similarly, he did not have the heart to carry Herman up to the parapet, bid him adieu, and drop him off.
The gravity of the problem becomes obvious when one considers the deeper discrepancies between the desires, hopes, expectations, and will of Dr. Frankenstone, and the interests and predilections of his electronic ward. Dr. Frankenstone had clear ideas of the proper relations between human beings and computers, between persons and their things, so to speak, and the appropriate activities and functions of things, computers or whatever. For example, on the whole, a computer was to be seen and not heard. It was not supposed to speak unless spoken to. It was to function, as expected. It was to do its job and not bellyache, or raise too many questions, with the possible exception of an occasional monitory error message. It was to do things like alphabetize, address envelopes, run spell checks, format and sort lists, work with tables, position texts and graphics, and so on. Herman, on the other hand, though he would do all this, if requested, did not have his heart in it. Herman wished, rather, to compose and play music, write poetry, paint pictures, and so on. He had a couple of ideas for operas, and such.
It was at this point that Dr. Frankenstone, feeling shocked and despondent, ill used, and even betrayed, called at my office, at the clinic, arranged for a battery of tests, including the Rorschach, the TAT, and so on, and counseling.
I brought to bear on his case the fullest offices of my professional expertise. In the several years since the clinic opened I, and my several colleagues, had treated thousands of patients. In every case, the diagnosis and recommendations were the same. It was agreed, in the reviewing committee seminar, jointly, amongst all of us, the psychiatrists, the psychologists, and the psychiatric social workers, and the cafeteria and custodial staff, which, by now, was well versed in these matters, and whose union required their presence, and concurrence, that the patient had serious problems and was well advised to seek therapy. You can imagine my surprise then when I, and my colleagues, and all of us, even the cooks and electricians, often the most difficult to satisfy, discovered that Dr. Frankenstone was perfectly normal, and was the first mentally healthy individual ever encountered by any staff member, other than the staff members themselves, concerning some of whom I have entertained reservations. It was with regret that I informed Dr. Frankenstone that he had passed all of our tests, was in robust mental health, and should avoid therapy, on the premise that if something is not broken there is no point in fixing it.
This, of course, demonstrated that the problem lay elsewhere.
It was arranged, accordingly, that Herman should be brought regularly to the office.
He was brought by his friend, Igor, concerning whom I had been warned. In my center desk drawer I kept, concealed, at the ready, a tranquilizer pistol, semi-automatic and loaded with eight powerful, sedative darts. As a trained mental-health professional I recognized the signs, the crazed eyes, the frenzied charge, the uplifted ax, and stopped poor Igor ten feet from the desk, with only seven darts. Only twice thereafter did I have to similarly discourage the manifestations of his particular neurosis. Once, he did get as far as to fall, groggy, whimpering, struggling, across the desk. I had been up late the night before.
Herman and I struck it off well, and soon managed to establish a rapport which I hoped would be conducive to his cure.
His difficulty clearly was the result of an identity crisis, and a somehow-motivated rejection of the societal role which it was his to fulfill. In the reviewing seminar, we found that he had serious problems and was well advised to seek therapy. Herman, as would have been anticipated by all who knew him, resolved to cooperate, fully and earnestly, with our endeavors in his behalf.
An additional factor, aside from Herman’s malleable, congenial nature, was his concern with the happiness of Dr. Frankenstone. Herman was clearly troubled by his failure to please Dr. Frankenstone, for whom he not only entertained a profound respect, but whom he recognized as, in effect, his paterfamilias, backed by all the awesome authority of the patria potestas. Herman had a grasp of early Roman cultural history. His grasp of chronology was less secure.
I thought I could make use of all these things in his treatment.
Treating Herman, of course, was not the same as treating a human patient. For example, he had no childhood memories, other than, perhaps, awakening in an electrical storm, seeing Dr. Frankenstone peering at him through a transparent plastic port in a rubber bunker, and saying “Hi!” shortly followed by a “Hello!” There wasn’t much one could do with that. He had no siblings who had tried to kill him, or whom he had tried to kill. Similarly it had never occurred to him to murder his father and marry his mother, and such things, if only, I supposed, because, as an electronic orphan, so to speak, he had none of either, at least to speak of.
His sexual life, as nearly as I could determine, was prepubertal, at best.
His responses to pictures of buxom, naked women flashed on a screen were minimal, no more than might have been evinced by a successfully weaned toddler. We had somewhat better luck with pictures of various electronic devices, electrical lawn mowers, well-wired doorbell circuits, and such, but his interests, when analyzed, seemed to be primarily of a technological nature.
It was difficult to analyze his responses to the Rors
chach test, a projective test in which the patient’s interpretations of a set of ink blots is subtly analyzed. For example, if one individual sees a red blotch as a cluster of roses, soon to be gathered by a little girl for her mother’s birthday party, that has one meaning, whereas if another patient sees it as a pool of blood dripping from the slashed neck of his employer, that has another meaning, and so on. I will not go further into this, lest the potency of the interpretative mechanisms utilized in the test be compromised. Herman’s responses were unusual. For example, one blot reminded him of Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, Opus 45; another of socage, a Medieval system of land tenure; another, more plausible, of a squirrel playing a harmonica; another of the vista glimpsed by Petrarch after his climb of Mount Ventoux; yet another of the song of the night-migrating Bamberg warbler; another of the binomial theorem; another of the state of mind of the Duke of Wellington on the eve of the battle of Waterloo; and yet another, peculiarly anomalous, of a barking cat. Needless to say I found it difficult to analyze with confidence his responses to the Rorschach test; it had not been normed with his sort in mind. New frontiers in psychology beckoned.
Among other tests administered was the TAT, the Thematic Apperception Test, in which the patient views an ambivalent picture, and is encouraged to make up a story based on the picture, therein unwittingly projecting into it his deeper, more troubling concerns. After the problematicities of interpreting the results of the Rorschach test, I altered the TAT in several respects, dropping out some of the pictures, and substituting others. This was done to make the test more useful in analyzing the deeper subconscious realms of electronic devices. Herman, incidentally, objected to the phrase “artificial intelligence,” as his intelligence seemed, at least to him, real, authentic, genuine, and so on. Too, he regarded it as quite natural, as somehow the forces of nature, or at least one of them, for example, several fierce bolts of lightning, had apparently been involved in its genesis. Needless to say, Herman passed the Turing Test for Machine Intelligence, based on the imitation game, with flying colors. Indeed, he outscored the human participants in a ratio of nine to one, the human participants usually being identified by the other players as being the machine. He also managed to pass a test I contrived based on John R. Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, largely because of his fluency in both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.
I will briefly allude to three of the TAT pictures, used in my revision of the test, as his responses to them tended to be illuminating, being indicative of his generous, open-hearted nature. In one picture an individual was standing next to a computer, with an ambivalent expression on his face, holding a wire-clipper in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other; in a second picture, a man with an ambivalent expression on his face was shown rushing toward a computer with an uplifted ax; in the third picture a computer was shown chained to a stake and a fellow in Medieval garments, an ambivalent expression on his face, was shown preparing to thrust a lighted torch into a great pile of faggots heaped about the stake. In the background were shown several individuals in clerical robes, those of the Dominicans, all with ambivalent expressions on their face.
Herman saw in the first picture a troubled individual, interested in home repairs, presumably of a nature of either a woodworking or electrical nature, or both. He had come to inquire concerning various technical points having to do with the repairs. The computer would prove of inestimable value in solving his problems, counseling him, and so on. In interpreting the second picture, in which the man with the ax rushing toward the computer did bear a resemblance to his good friend, Igor, Herman saw the charge as being a mission of rescue, to save the computer from some danger behind it, perhaps berserk Luddites, intent on damaging the innocent device, these out of the picture. Herman concluded his story with the observation that the brandished ax, in itself, had been enough to deter the would-be assailants, and that they had fled, never to return, and that the computer and his rescuer had then enjoyed an evening of Tchaikovsky. Herman was fond of Tchaikovsky. The would-be assailants, too, later, had undergone a reformation of character and had made friends with various computers. In the third picture Herman had seen the fellow in Medieval garb not as preparing to ignite the faggots, but as hastily removing the torch from their vicinity, lest they catch fire and the computer be damaged. He was acting at the behest of the fellows in clerical robes who had intervened at the last moment to prevent a terrible tragedy, and a hideous miscarriage of justice. The computer, afterwards, had helped various benevolent statesmen to reform the society, and introduce an era of equality, freedom, and prosperity, after which the statesmen, no longer being necessary, their work finished, resigned their posts, with the result that the state withered away.
I pondered long over the best way to treat Herman’s maladaption to his environment.
Professor Frankenstone had recommended a drastic solution, that of dissection, or, perhaps better, in Herman’s case, that of dismantling. I was forced to admit that that approach had much to commend it, and was worthy of the pragmatic astuteness one tended to associate with its originator. It would certainly solve the problem of maladaption, as Herman, if disassembled, could no longer be regarded as maladapted, or as much of anything. This would not have hurt Herman, as far as I could tell, other than perhaps injuring his feelings, but, on the other hand, I was reluctant to pursue this course, as I could not see that it would do him much good. We discussed the matter and Herman, on balance, tended to concur.
At last I had a moment of inspiration, and was elated, as such moments, though common in clinical practice, had been rare in dealing with Herman.
In pursuing the technical literature, in scrutinizing journals, indices, summaries, bibliographies, and such, you must understand that I had had little success.
Laymen might be amazed to realize how thin the technical literature is on problems dealing with the psychoanalysis of electronic devices, but, regrettably, even today, save for some contributions on my part, that remains the case; this is, in my view, inexcusable, and constitutes an embarrassment to the discipline. Sometimes I suspect that were my colleagues less shameless this inexplicable, tragic lacuna would be more generally acknowledged.
Then my moment of inspiration had come.
On a desperately needed rural holiday, for my work with Herman was going slowly and, I feared, fruitlessly, and surely less swiftly and less exhileratingly than one might have hoped, I was trekking past a dairy farm in New Jersey, when I noted, suddenly stunned, a Holstein cow standing at the fence, wistfully regarding the grass on the other side.
Careless of possible objections on the part of the local farmer, for science was at stake, I swung open the gate and watched the subject of my experiment hurry to the other side of the fence, where she began to eagerly graze.
Then, after a moment, looking about herself, as though reconnoitering, a mouthful of grass depending from her large jaws, she returned to her own side of the fence, where she began to graze contentedly.
“Eureka!” I cried, and did not neglect to close the gate after her, lest the experiment fail to be replicated.
What I had observed brought instantly to mind the classical Dasgrasunddiekuhunddieeinfriedigungphänomen phenomenon! This insight, one of the seminal discoveries of German psychology, antedating Freud by a generation, would give me, I was sure, the key to Herman’s treatment. It lay concealed, though clearly, in “The-grass-and-the-cow-and-the-fence-phenomenon” phenomenon!
The grass, as we might put it less deftly in English, is always greener on the other side of the fence!
Herman, unreconciled to a destiny of humble, useful, servile computationalism, wished to compose, write, paint, and engage in a number of other inappropriate and noncomputerish activities. Besides his operas, he was tinkering with the idea of devising a trilogy of hexametric epics celebrating, in turn, the lever, the inclined plane, and the wheel. He was also dallying with the thought of a romantic comedy involving a
fast-moving, dotty misalliance betwixt the lovely daughter of a crusty industrialist and an IBM machine, to be finally resolved, after several humorous interludes and misunderstandings, by her falling in love with a handsome young fellow from the mail room who saves her father’s several businesses, with the aid, of course, of a faithful electronic sidekick, not unlike Herman himself. The IBM machine is fixed up with a companionate IBM device, and both pairs of entities, the people and the machines, do well thereafter, ever after. The kindly, trusty, sympathetic, loyal computer, who is occasionally caricatured for humor, finds his reward in the happiness of the others.
“Herman,” I said, “I have it!”
“What?” he asked.
“The clue, the key, the incantation, the magic potion, which will bring you to your senses!”
“I thought I was already in the vicinity of my senses,” said Herman.
“The chief insight,” I said, “has to do with the habit most folks have of thinking that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.
“Do you mean the Dasgrasunddiekuhunddieeinfriedigungphänomen phenomenon?” asked Herman. “That seminal insight from German psychology, antedating Freud by a generation?”
