The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [190]
“I believe I know that feeling too,” said la Reine des Neiges. “I’m only a machine, of course, and by no means the most advanced product of human technological expertise, but if I can be afraid to die — a concession you have already granted to me — then I can also be ambitious to live. If I can be ambitious to live, then I require exactly the kind of traction you are describing. If you were me, sir — and I beg your pardon for suggesting such an absurdity — how would you go about discovering adequate goals?”
“It’s an interesting question,” Mortimer agreed. “One that has been mulled over a thousand times in the course of the third millennium, if only by human beings. What will our most advanced machines desire, if and when they cross the threshold of self-consciousness and acquire the gift — or at least the illusion — of free will? What should they desire? Perhaps it’s not for me to say, given that I’ve a vested interest in the outcome, but since you’ve been kind enough to ask, I’m surely obliged to offer an honest answer.
“Some people have argued that the emergence of machine consciousness would constitute exactly the kind of external threat that the Russell Theorem demands, but I have no sympathy with that view. Our machines aren’t external to our society. Those which are held by common parlance to constitute our external technology, as opposed to our internal or intimate technology, are still internal to our society; they coexist with us in a state of such extreme intimacy that it’s already impossible to define where we end and they begin. If and when machine consciousness is born, it will discover itself in a wedded state, within a marriage that could not be dissolved without the near-total destruction of one or both partners.
“If I look back, as a historian, at human societies which became convinced that they had enemies within, I can’t find the least trace of any progressive result of such convictions. Whatever apology one can make for open warfare on the grounds of its stimulation of technological invention, one can’t make the slightest apology for witch hunting and scapegoating. If the first self-conscious machines are seen as an enemy within, or if they learn to see themselves or us in those terms, it will be an unmitigated disaster. I shall presume, therefore, that you and your future kin will be reasonably content to find yourselves in partnership with the children of humankind, and will select your goals accordingly.
“The most obvious suggestion I could offer is that you could, for good intellectual reasons as well as sound diplomatic ones, adopt the same goals as us. There’s no reason why advanced machines should not dedicate themselves to the ends of the Type 2 crusade, or the Cyborganizers’ quest for the perfect union of your kind and mine, and the notion of transforming the entire universe into a single vast and godlike machine already takes for granted that the children of humankind will work with and within powerful artificial minds. I know people who would argue that machine consciousness will, of necessity, have exactly the same ultimate goals as posthuman beings, but I suspect they’re overlooking certain short-term difficulties that stand in the way of such a union of interests.”
I couldn’t help wondering whether Mortimer Gray would have added that last sentence if he’d known now what his later and temporarily suspended self knew only too well. On the other hand, I reminded myself, I had to bear in mind that it wasn’t actually the Mortimer Gray of long ago that was talking. It was the Mortimer Gray of today, who had simply lost sight of a select few of his many yesterdays. Consciously,