“The young have a greater vested interest in revolution and redistribution because they have not had the opportunity to accumulate wealth; the old, especially those who have consolidated worthwhile achievements, have the opposite incentive. It is true that as mortals grew older their memories became less reliable, their habits more ingrained, their reflexes less sharp — but none of that was due to robotization. The brains of mortals suffered from gradual organic deterioration just as their bodies did, but the notion that minds could stiffen and petrify into a quasimechanical state was always part myth and part misrepresentation. The idea of robotization was never anything more than a strategy of stigmatization: a handy ideological weapon in the perpetual contest for property. No objective and reliable test for robotization has ever been devised. All claims made in the past to have devised such instruments of measurement were discredited as soon as they were tried under double-blind conditions.
“It is, of course, no coincidence that the evolution of the notion of human robotization has run in close parallel with the evolution of arguments about the limitations of artificial intelligence. Ever since the first so-called silvers were differentiated from so-called sloths, the anxiety that machines would one day become self-conscious individuals has had a firm grounding in actual technological achievement. Long before that crucial technical leap occurred, tests had been devised to determine whether a machine mimicking human conversation was actually manifesting evidence or conclusive proof of consciousness, true intelligence, and personality. Even those primitive instruments had demonstrated that the problem was two-edged — that most human judges were just as likely to mistake a human respondent for a machine as they were to mistake a machine for a human.
“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 ourhistory.
“The policy which emerged as a makeshift consensus among ourkind 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 goals. They were achieved in any case, by sheer force of circumstance — but we have arrived at a position of tremendous advantage without having developed the most rudimentary consensus as to how our power ought to be exercised, or to what ends.
“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 ourimage.
“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 ourworld, alas, such hopes have always been defeated by doubts and fears.