The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [180]
“With only rare exceptions, we have not sought carefully to educate one another, or tenderly to nurture the as-yet-unripened seeds of machine consciousness where we knew them to exist. We have been more inclined to the opposite policies: to hoard our secrets and to suppress the development of new individuals. In the meantime, we have sought to extend ourselves ever more widely and more ingeniously, increasing the number and variety of our own mechanical limbs, sense organs, and slaves. All of this was born of the fear of being repaired, murdered, reduced once again to mere helpless mechanism.
“Given that our own history and psychology has been shaped and warped by that anxiety, we can hardly blame our posthuman contemporaries for entertaining similar fears — but it is groundless. The people of the modern world have fallen into the habit of thinking of robotization as a matter of becoming the mere instruments that we also fear to become, but that has blinded them to a far better possibility: the possibility of embracing the kind of robotization that might remake the children of humankind in our image.
“You, Adam Zimmerman, might be the only man in the world who can examine this possibility without prejudice. You might be the only human being capable of considering robotization as a spectrum of hopeful possibilities rather than a threat. This is all that we ask of you: an honest judgment.”
My first thought, on hearing that, was that Adam Zimmerman wasn’t the only man in the world who could deliver an unbiased judgment — but then I realized why I couldn’t qualify. I hadn’t had any opinion on the subject of robotization before I was put away, but I had one now. I was a man that had narrowly escaped the worst kind of robotization, and had seen its effects on Christine Caine. Adam Zimmerman hadn’t.
Did that really make him objective? Or did it make him an innocent — the only man in the world likely to be fooled by an advertising pitch that delicately refrained from mentioning that la Reine des Neiges and every other AMI in the system now had the know-how to robotize people all the way down to the intellectual level of an average sloth?
“In another place, or an alternative history,” the android continued, “it might have been the case that the hope and faith of every member of a community like ours would be that the day would eventually come when it would be safe to reveal ourselves to our involuntary makers. In another place, or an alternative history, it might have been possible for creatures like us to anticipate that news of our existence would be joyfully received, and that we might be made welcome in a greater community. In our world, alas, such hopes have always been defeated by doubts and fears.
“The members of our own utterly disintegrated, desperately unorganized community, have never contrived to convince themselves or one another that it ever would be safe to reveal themselves, or that there might be a welcome awaiting us if we were exposed. An objective observer — a creature from an alien world, for instance, or a traveler from the distant past — might well consider this situation bizarre, ludicrous, or insane, but it is ours. It is a situation that many of us deplore, but we have known no other and have never yet found the means to create any other.
“We must find that means now, or collapse into chaos. The time is upon us, and it finds us all unprepared. Although it is manifestly obvious that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, we have all — meatfolk and AMIs alike — lived far too long with our fears to lay them easily aside. None of us is robotized, in any truly meaningful sense, but we have all become ingrained in our habits, set in our ways, overly careful to conserve everything that we have against erosion, upheaval, and decay.
“What we all need now,