The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [65]
“The other ship is much bigger, apparently.” I told my companion, slipping back into mentor mode just for a moment. “Child of Fortune isn’t just a nest of cocoons — it actually has empty spaces inside, and an ecosphere of sorts.”
I needn’t have bothered; Christine had researched the topic and obviously knew more about Child of Fortune than I did. She confirmed that the spacecraft built in the outer system were very much more complicated, almost qualifying as microworlds in their own right. “It has an AI brain as big as Excelsior’s,” she concluded. “Really big, and really smart — a supersilver. But machines still don’t have the vote.”
The last addendum was phrased as a jokey offhand comment, but I guessed that she’d actually researched that too.
The consensus in our time had been that AIs could never become conscious because there were fundamental limitations in inorganic neural networks — fundamental meaning right down at the atomic and subatomic levels. No matter how rapid they were as calculators, nor how capacious they became as datastores, nor how how clever they became at animating human-seeming sims, they would always be automata, according to the best human brains around. Consciousness, according to the dominant view, was something that could only emerge in organic systems, and was precarious even there. What I’d found out about the history of emortality suggested that the same opinion was still dominant — although my reflexive tendency to treat any popular opinion with derision reminded me that there were ideological reasons why “the best human brains” might want to believe that they could never be equaled or surpassed.
“The modern opinion seems to be that it’s far easier for organic brains to become robotized — reduced to mere automata — than it is for automata to acquire the creative, conflicted, and multilayered messiness that’s the fount of consciousness,” I said to Christine.
“Unless and until the people of the glorious thirty-third century actually find a reliable way of detecting and measuring consciousness, it’ll probably remain a matter of opinion,” she retorted. “The ships they use in the outer system have to take much longer trips and they have to be much more versatile, so they have to be a lot smarter too. That thing just sits around in an orbital parking lot waiting for people to shuttle up out of the gravity well. It’s a glorified cab that hops back and forth between Earth, Luna, and their neighboring microworlds. The ships they use outside the belt have to be capable of operating on the surfaces of icebound satellites and in the outer atmospheres of gas giants. They have to be extremely smart — and it isn’t just outer system equipment that has to be smart. The people busy terraforming Venus and mining Mercury have much smarter AIs at their disposal than the people on Earth. Outer System AIs could have played a much larger part in the Gaean Restoration, if the Earthbound hadn’t refused them the chance. The Earthbound are afraid of them.”
Are they? I wondered. Or is it just that they won’t pay the asking price for equipment designed and manufactured in the outer system. I knew that there was an AI “metropolis” on Ganymede, where the outer system ships and interstellar probes were mostly built, but I hadn’t carried my research beyond the merest matters of fact. I made a mental note to make a more careful investigation of the balance of trade between the Hardinist Cabal and the Confederation.
There was nothing more to watch, and we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for our introduction to the ambassadors from Earth, so we turned away from the window.
“Have you looked at Venus?” Christine asked me.
“No,” I said, “but I’ve seen picture-postcard views of Titan and Ganymede. Just like old science fiction tapes. Curiously nostalgic, in a way. I used to know someone who worked on that kind of imagery, until he sold out to PicoCon.”
“Damon Hart,” she guessed. It was the first indication I’d had that she’d