Page 36 - The Perpetrations of Captain Kaga

Resolving the Mechanalog Ambiguity

The Colonel looked up, fixing Kaga in his opaque olive eyes.
“We’ll have to see, won’t we, Captain?” he said in flawless Galactic
Standard English.
“Yes, yes, of course, sir,” said Kaga hastily. “I know we must make
an objective examination of the situation before a decision can be
reached, but what are the criteria to apply in this case? It seems
awfully ambiguous to me.”
Krif stretched his long body over the top of his desk and made an
impatient gesture with three of his upper limbs. “Captain, that is a
particularly human way of approaching problems. You search for a
gray area between black and white, and usually find it by inventing it.
Then you have two boundaries to defend instead of one. What you
call ambiguities are in fact failures either to know what you’re looking
for or to recognize it when you find it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Kaga with a frown, “but it seemed to me that we
have a compound condition to meet in this case; that is, intelligence
and life are not necessarily coextensive attributes. A living creature
may not be intelligent and a computer may be. In other words, both
life and intelligence are qualities established by drawing somewhat
arbitrary lines somewhere along the continua of life-nonlife and
intelligence-nonintelligence. When you overlay these two scales in the
case of any particular being, the gray area is real; there is room for
doubt if a creature does not fall beyond the dividing line in both
dimensions. How does the PKU deal with this?”
“Captain,” replied the Hurgan, “your knowledge is all theoretical,
the result of too much studying at the Academy. You will now
observe and learn the practical aspects of your job; they are of much
greater value in the long run. To answer your question, I need only
point out that the PKU has yet to sign an agreement with either
caretaker robots or highly social but alingual bipeds; both instances
have been encountered in the recent past, in case you weren’t aware
of it.”
“Urn, no sir, I wasn’t,” said Kaga sheepishly, and fiddled
unnecessarily with his equipment.
As everything was in fact squared away, they set their Languexes to
interpret the local language, and went out to meet the Mechanalog
leaders. Breathing tubes extended around to their mouths from tanks
strapped to their backs; the apparatus sensed the moment that the
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