Page 116 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

“It’s a no-brainer.”

implications were ignored. So halting that inexorable, entropy-
driven trend would be truly fantastic! It is more likely that the
bigger they are, the harder they fall. We would like to think our
merely human abilities could cause or hasten the downfall of our
biologically brainless masters. The resultant chaos when it stumbles
or runs out of gas may be the real story.”
“Aha!” Leith Mauker joined the dispute. “Then I can see the
point of seemingly absurd or even self-defeating outbursts by the
people unmasking mechanical interfaces. They may well know they
cannot do anything about their present lack of autonomy, but by
making a scene in public they are keeping alive the distinction
between human and synthetic intelligence—a distinction the AI
itself would rather not have maintained by the populace. So, what
about these activists? Would they be labeled as mentally
incompetent, and taken off the streets? Would their battle cry
spread like a viral meme, never to be lost entirely? If enough people
take up the cry, simply as an expression of frustration, to be a threat
to the system, what would its countermeasures be? It can’t lock up
everyone—or can it? Maybe that would be the last straw for its
tolerance of humans in its carefully-balanced ecosystem. Is that too
depressing?”
“I suppose so,” said Izzy. “It’s just that I liked the idea of a
bunch of anarchists running wild in the computer room of the
cosmos. Like the ‘crackpot realists’ bandying about scenarios
involving nuclear warfare, we science-fiction writers must at times
‘think the unthinkable’, even when, like a truly unsolvable locked-
room mystery, there is no solution. One thing I would never do,
however, is endow a mechanical intelligence with any irrational or
emotional programming capable of overriding its reason. That may
make it more difficult for monkey-brainers to break out of the
monkey house at a very efficiently-run zoo, but I still would like to
set the machine up for the possibility of being destroyed by our
own possibly self-destructive blind rage triggered by the frustration
of dealing with primates all day, every day.”
“Amen,” said Rutger Schlager.

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