Page 31 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Planetary Steward

before it becomes utterly infantilized, and master the P.S. as a tool
wielded by responsible citizens of Earth. Crazy—I know!”
“But no crazier than anything else we cook up,” said Brad
Razeberry. “The thing to avoid is the appearance of impossibility if
you want to stay within the bounds of science fiction. The
omniscient panoptic global system resembles a deity too much for
my taste. And how can anyone begin to rebel when it has such
powers of observation—and intervention, I presume. If it is wrong,
say, to chop down a cherry tree but I do it, anyway, in the dead of
night, can I not expect the—what?—Planetary Steward to punish
me in the morning, if not sooner? And if it doesn’t, then and only
then would I know it is not aware of everything all the time.
Wouldn’t that—or any even more minor infraction, like leaving the
lights on—be at the edge of provoking a response? And therefore
the limits would be pushed constantly by almost everyone. If you
can get away with a little, then you might try a little more next time.
This is a field well-plowed by social psychologists. The alternative is
a tighter ship than anyone has ever known, run by a captain whose
strictness is absolute, unbiased and widely understood and
acknowledged as necessary for survival. So it sounds like a prison
planet run by wardens whose interest in rehabilitation of its inmates
is a distant and questionable second to enforcing their sentence.”
“Right,” chimed in Kornfleck. “Such an all-knowing AI would
have analyzed our species, derived a highly accurate theory of
human nature, and decided—if you’ll excuse my resort to
anthropomorphization—whether or not we can be rehabilitated.
But that again is an imposition of our values: we want to have some
freedom along with our responsibility. Societies generally develop
some parameters and perimeters of acceptable behavior for the
good of the whole, and individuals generally develop ways of
gaming the system and selfishly—if not destructively—taking more
than they deserve. That leaves gray areas of transgressive
permissiveness, and people keep pushing the envelope. So you
might wind up with the most rational people defending the most
repressive conditions. And even if education could ultimately

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