2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [35]
The first had been in the 1940s, when the long-obsolete vacuum tube had made possible such clumsy, high-speed morons as ENIAC and its successors. Then, in the 1960s, solid-state microelectronics had been perfected. With its advent, it was clear that artificial intelligences at least as powerful as Man’s need be no larger than office desks — if one only knew how to construct them.
Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically — self replicated — in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.
Whatever way it worked, the final result was a machine intelligence that could reproduce — some philosophers still preferred to use the word “mimic”— most of the activities of the human brain, and with far greater speed and reliability. It was extremely expensive, and only a few units of the HAL 9000 series had yet been built; but the old jest that it would always be easier to make organic brains by unskilled labor was beginning to sound a little hollow.
Hal had been trained for this mission as thoroughly as his human colleagues — and at many times their rate of input, for in addition to his intrinsic speed, he never slept. His prime task was to monitor the life-support systems, continually checking oxygen pressure, temperature, hull leakage, radiation, and all the other interlocking factors upon which the lives of the fragile human cargo depended. He could carry out the intricate navigational corrections, and execute the necessary flight maneuvers when it was time to change course. And he could watch over the hibernators, making any necessary adjustments to their environment and doling out the minute quantities of intravenous fluids that kept them alive.
The first generations of computers had received their inputs through glorified typewriter keyboards, and had replied through high-speed printers and visual displays. Hal could do this when necessary, but most of his communication with his shipmates was by means of the spoken word. Poole and Bowman could talk to Hal as if he were a human being, and he would reply in the perfect idiomatic English he had learned during the fleeting weeks of his electronic childhood.
Whether Hal could actually think was a question which had been settled by the British mathematician Alan Turing back in the 1940s. Turing had pointed out that, if one could carry out a prolonged conversation with a machine — whether by typewriter or microphone was immaterial — without being able to distinguish between its replies and those that a man might give, then the machine was thinking, by any sensible definition of the word. Hal could pass the Turing test with ease.
The time might even come when Hal would take command of the ship. In an emergency, if no one answered his signals, he would attempt to wake the sleeping members of the crew, by electrical and chemical stimulation. If they did not respond, he would radio Earth for further orders.
And then, if there was no reply from Earth, he would take what measures he deemed necessary to safeguard the ship and to continue the mission — whose real purpose he alone knew, and which his human colleagues could never have guessed.
Poole and Bowman had often humorously referred to themselves as caretakers or janitors aboard a ship that could really run itself. They would have been astonished, and more than a little indignant, to discover how much truth that jest contained.
Chapter 17
Cruise Mode
The day-by-day running of the ship had been planned with great care, and — theoretically