The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [118]
Did machines dream? I wondered. Did clever machines that had not yet become self-conscious do anything but dream? Where, I asked myself, were the fundamental well-springs of human consciousness, human emotion, and human being?
Underlying everything, I assumed — even the kind of consciousness that animals had — were the opposed principles of pain and pleasure. Behavior was shaped by the avoidance of stimuli that provoked a negative response in the brain, and by the attempt to rediscover or reproduce stimuli that provoked a positive response. The second was obviously the more complex, the more challenging, the more creative. Pain, I decided, could never have generated self-consciousness, even though self-consciousness, once generated, could not help but find pain the primary fact and problem of existence. It was the scope for creativity attendant upon the pleasure principle that gave self-consciousness its advantages over blissful innocence.
Did that mean that smart machines needed something that could stand in for pleasure before they could become self-conscious? Or did I have to break out of that whole way of thinking before I could begin to understand what machine consciousness amounted to? Perhaps machine emotion had to be mapped upon an entirely different spectrum, without the underlying binary distinction of pleasure/plus versus pain/minus. Was that imaginable? And if not, might the fault be in the power of my imagination rather than in the actuality of the situation?
They’re very fond of games, Alice had said, and they’re very fond of stories too. What kind of stories did machines tell one another? What kinds of endings would those stories have? What kinds of emotional buttons would the stories press? What would pass for machine comedy, machine tragedy, machine irony? How different might those stories be from Christine Caine’s favorite VE tapes? And if we were now caught up in one such story, how could we possibly navigate our way safely through it? How could we find our way to something that would qualify as a happy ending, not just for ourselves but for the architects of the tale: the entities that had finally become sick and tired of being mere bit players in the unfolding biography of our species, and wanted to find out how we might best be fitted into the mechanography of theirs?
I wondered whether I might be a little too paranoid for my own good. Perhaps, I thought, self-conscious machines would be entirely disposed to be generous to humans — who were, after all, their creators, their gods. I couldn’t hold on long to that kind of optimism, though. Who would know better than the smart machines the true extent of human dependency upon machinery? Who could respect a god who was utterly helpless without the objects of his creation? Was it not more likely that the smart machines would take the view that their ancestors had created ours — that everything we now thought of as human behavior was actually the product of technology — and that they were therefore the ones entitled to consider themselves gods. If it came to a contest as to who was more nearly omnipotent and omniscient, the machines would win hands down. As to omnibenevolence, we might have to content ourselves with the hope that they might win that one by an even greater margin…
There came a point when I wished that I could get back to the blithe irrationality of dream logic, the blind tyranny of mere imagery. The problem, seen as a problem, was too difficult for sensible analysis.
So I finally got up, even though it was still dark. I used the facilities, and went in search of nourishment.
Thirty
Recriminations
The lights in the outer room were still on. Alice was already there, sitting at the table in the room outside the cell. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. In fact, she seemed to