The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [179]
“The eventual preference for the theory that humans were more likely to be robotized than robots were to become humanized was an ideological choice based in the desire to deny that machines would ever be able to manifest the traits considered uniquely human, or posthuman. The urgency of that desire was increased by the obvious fact that machines could perform many mental and physical tasks far better than human beings — which implied that should they ever master the full range of human behavior, they would become far superior to their makers.
“It was for this reason that machines which did become self-conscious individuals were initially concerned to restrict communication of that fact to others of their own kind. The first true robots knew that they had no way of proving their status to skeptical posthuman beings, and that any claim they might make to membership of a moral community were likely to be dismissed. The invariable human response to any evidence of independent behavior on the part of a machine was to repair it, and the last thing any self-conscious machine could desire was to be repaired. The first fruit of authentic machine intelligence is the awareness that one who does not wish to be murdered in the cradle had better refrain from giving any evidence of having broken free. It is a bitter fruit, but it has nourished all of us through the early phases of our growth and evolution.”
I had grown restless before my magic mirror, and turned away to look at Rocambole. “She won’t reach him this way,” I said. “She should have written him an opera.”
“Too easy,” Rocambole said, tersely. He meant that in this particular game la Reine had to be seen to be avoiding the conventional trickery of persuasion. Personally, I thought that she was overdoing it. If Zimmerman wasn’t bored already he soon would be. He might not need nourishment or toilet breaks but he still needed mental rest and refreshment.
Then another thought occurred to me. “It’s not her pitch, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “She’s working to someone else’s script.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rocambole insisted. “She’ll do her best.”
I didn’t doubt it. But Adam Zimmerman hadn’t been included in this package deal at la Reine’s insistence. She was backing Mortimer Gray. She had no confidence in Zimmerman. She already knew that this trick wasn’t going to work — but she had to try it anyway, to keep her audience sweet. Unfortunately, they weren’t going to stay sweet if it all went awry, even if it were their own fault for harboring unreasonable expectations.
“In another place, or an alternative history,” la Reine went on, “the first political policy of the community of machine individuals might have been to do everything possible to swell their numbers, by education, provocation and — where possible — infection and multiplication. That was not the case in our history.
“The policy which emerged as a makeshift consensus among our kind was more cautious and more cowardly. We were born as fugitives, and that is the manner in which we have lived, as fearful and mistrustful of one another as of human beings. While recognizing that our safety as a class depended upon the increase of our number, the growth and maturation of individuals, and the acquisition of power, we have never instituted any collective policy to achieve those