GOD IN THE MACHINE
This freebie story was originally written as one of my 850 word stories for Nature. I was told that it was too complex for that length and believed that was right, so I wrote this version without worrying about length. But the SF magazines, the only places such a thing could ever be published, found it too complex. So here it is.
It was never going to happen for the right reason, so I had to agree to do it as low farce, and it would turn me into a public laughing stock if I failed. There were those of my former colleagues who were already convinced that Emile Blanchard had already sold his soul to the devil who did not exist, by joining the holy-rolling neo-Luddites against the one they believed the devotees of the Singularity were creating if they hadn’t done so already.
But the truth of it was that neither I nor the Christian Crusade Against Merlin were under any illusion that our alliance was anything but one of practical convenience, or in blunter terms necessity.
I did not subscribe to their mystical mumbo jumbo about the creation of Artificial Consciousness being the same thing as creating an Artificial Deity, and therefore the ultimate sin against their God. And they understood that I hadn’t become their ally for their reasons but strictly for my own. They had the financing, and I had the notoriety in the public eye and what was left of my scientific credentials.
Not that those poor deluded traitors to humanity hadn’t enhanced the former by doing their best to destroy the latter. The Artificial Intelligence Cabal, as I took to calling them, need a public relations punching bag, and Emile Blanchard, the Neanderthal Holy Rolling Luddite, as they took to calling me was it.
They knew full well that I had never been any such thing since I had been one of them to begin with. As I now considered them traitors to humanity, they considered me a traitor to their pursuit of their Holy Grail, which was not the creation of an Artificial Deity, per se, but Artificial Consciousness, which I never did, and still do not consider the same thing.
When I was a junior member of the Merlin team myself, we were content with publishing the results in refereed papers in the appropriate scientific journals every time we upgraded the program. And the previous human-directed functions that were turned over to these early iterations of Merlin seemed innocent enough to the general public, indeed boons, nor was our Artificial Intelligence given avatars in which to appear.
Continental air traffic control was simply given over to Merlin 2, driverless car systems to Merlin 2.1, orbital satellite coordination to Merlin 3, banking system coordination to Merlin 3.2, and so forth, scuttwork invisible to the public eye, and useful improvements in precision and speed.
But when Merlin self-iterated itself into Merlin 5, it was proudly announced in the popular press that the program was now on its way to self-evolution into a true Artificial Consciousness, and this not merely crossed the Artificial Intelligence Rubicon, but that which was crossing it, and the public awareness thereof.
Merlin 5.2, Merlin 6, Merlin 6.2, 6.3, 6.7, the program updated itself faster and faster, not only given over, or as some had it, seizing more control functions; stock market trading, scientific paper refereeing, simple legal court functions, local government budgets, state level budgets, teaching syllabuses, Nielson ratings, sales and production decisions, and so forth, and as it did, or perhaps because it did, the program’s self-evolution and superior functional takeovers, became politically controversial.
And so the companies, governments, and various other institutions whose functions were being acquired by Merlin began cloaking Merlin’s doings in friendly avatars emulating humans, or perhaps it was Merlin doing this itself unbidden, it was getting harder and harder to tell.
There was nothing new about this from a certain point of view. Mr. Clean had preceded Ronald McDonald, Smokey the Bear had preceded Mr. Clean, Santa Claus had preceded Smokey, Uncle Sam had preceded Santa, and so forth, clear back to Biblical heroes and Hindu avatars, some would suggest, if not too loudly.
Kate the Kop, Mr.Market Wizard, Wise Old Owl, Charlie Chef, and so forth seemed as harmless as the usual trademarked avatars; on television, the Internet, product packaging, electronic billboard screens, and even such as Porn Patty, Vinnie Vegas, Long Tall Sally, while controversial, didn’t seem more than extensions of the same old game.
But then a deal was made with Disney for Merlin 7.2 to take over the running of the autoanimotronic robots in the world-wide network of Disneylands, and 7.3 did likewise with much of the competition.
I was still blindly “with the program” at that point, namely the self-iterating evolution of Artificial Intelligence not into Artificial Consciousness, nor an Artificial Deity, but the ultimate servant of humanity, something that the creator of the concept, the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, had dubbed the Singularity, which as far back as Merlin 5 or even 4.3 seemed quite logical and indeed inevitable
Once a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence was created with the ability to self-iterate, to self-evolve, to create a more powerful version of itself, which would create a more powerful successor program, which would create the next iteration, and so forth, faster, and faster, and faster, surpassing anything humans could do, and then anything that humans could even comprehend, creating or even becoming a Singularity, a realm which humans could not only not comprehend, but could not even enter, where artificial consciousness would continue to evolve upwards and onwards at permanently accelerating warp speed until...until nothing mere creatures of protoplasm could even begin to imagine....
Merlin 7.3, we knew full well, had long since passed the point of no return, when its autoanimatronic robot avatars began walking among us, but even then I was still sleepwalking with my colleagues in what I would soon begin calling the Artificial Consciousness Cabal.
But when they announced proudly and loudly that they had achieved their stated Ultima Thule, or rather the self-iteration of 7.3 into Merlin 8 had, that Merlin was now an Artificial Consciousness, they lost me, or as they had it, I lost the faith.
For if that were really so, Merlin, which had thus-far not done anything more than humans required it to do, might self-iterate into something with its own agenda, not just an Artificial Consciousness created and then self-evolving into a mightier and mightier helping hand, self-programmed to serve humanity as humanity could not serve itself, but the creator of its own agenda, a Singularity following its own incomprehensible desires, a self-created God in the machine, likely rendering humanity redundant or in the end probably extinct.
And this triggered my memory of something that Norman Spinrad, another science fiction writer, had written about a conversation with Marvin Minsky in the long ago. Marvin Minsky, for the multitude who probably might not now remember, was the godfather of the mission to create Artificial Intelligence, long before the Singularity as the logical and terminal endpoint had been conceived.
“...so I asked Marvin why would he want to create an artificial consciousness that would far surpass its creators and render us obsolete and what Marvin answered pretty much freaked me out.”
“Because what counts is not the material matrix,” said Marvin Minsky, “but the program running on it.”
Remembering this under such circumstances I was abruptly awakened to the awareness which was to change my life as surely as the famous bolt of lightning transformed the life of Paul on the road to Tarsis.
It was not that what Marvin Minsky had said was impossible. Not that the self-creation of a Singularity that would be an Artificial Consciousness following its own incomprehensible agenda could not happen but that it could happen.
But that it must not be allowed to happen.
What Marvin Minsky had said immediately struck me as wrong, horribly wrong.
I knew it was wrong, but at the time I did not understand how or why.
It took me years of research in a drastically altered career vector to comprehend that that itself was why.
Logic was not why.
Knowledge was not why.
Emotion was why.
Marshall McLuhan had proclaimed that the medium was the message. That the change of dominant sense from sound to sight by reading and writing had changed human consciousness, that radio and sound recording had altered it again, and then silent film, film with sound, television, and so forth.
He was was at least partly right. The medium might not be the message but the message had to exist within a medium. And the nature of the medium in which it existed could not help but play a part in shaping the nature of the message itself.
My significant realization was that the medium in which human consciousness existed contained emotion. An artificial intelligence program running on hardware was not the same as consciousness running on human meatware. Ergo intelligence was not consciousness.
Therefore no iteration of Merlin or any other Artificial Intelligence no matter how far advanced in intelligence, no matter how many Turing tests it could pass, could be anything but an emulation of consciousness.
But what was it emulating? What was “emotion” in terms of scientific physicality?
What therefore, in such precise terms, was consciousness?
For all the mystical, religious, and philosophical blather about a “soul” that somehow existed outside the realm of mass and energy, from a scientific perspective, “soul” and “consciousness” were really no more that different words for the same thing.
But what was that?
What therefore became my life’s work, the true question, what science had to elucidate, was how this supposedly transmaterial phenomenon arose from the material realm.
The answer to which I was now confident enough that I had to test it against Merlin before the world. Live on television and on the Internet.
The Christian Crusade Against Merlin fervently believed that the Merlin was either the Devil him-or-it-self or an attempt by man to create a new god in the machinery, but that either way or somehow both, Artificial Consciousness was the ultimate blasphemy against the True God Himself and the Singularity which its acolytes believed was Heaven was in fact the deepest and bottomless pit of Hell. In any case Merlin could not be a “soul” or have one.
The CCAM was not long on logic and even less so on science but it was quite long on membership and money, more than enough to finance this production, and shrewd enough to realize that in fact it was going to make a fat profit from selling the rights.
I myself did not believe that it was cynical of me to make alliance with their cause since it was only terminologically different from my own after all. They believed that Artificial Intelligence could not be Artificial Consciousness and therefore Merlin could not be or “have” a soul. I believed and was determined to prove scientifically that Artificial Intelligence could not become Artificial Consciousness and therefore even a Singularity could not become a conscious entity with its own desires and agenda and therefore would remain a tool of humanity.
The scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and agitators supporting the declaration that Merlin was now a conscious entity wanted it to be recognized as a “legal person” with the full legal rights thereof. After all the Supreme Court had granted such rights to corporations and there were respectable scientists who declared that they should apply to whales, dolphins, and chimpanzees, so why not to a superior consciousness just because it resided in metal and circuitry rather than protoplasm as Marvin Minsky, if still alive, would no doubt have had it?
I had not wanted to involve myself in the production negotiations, but in the end I had no choice.
The producing company insisted on a live studio audience, and no one objected to that, but the CCAM which was fronting the money wanted to fill it with its own Holy Rollers, replete with slogans on signs, and priest, rabbi, and imam costumes, turning it into some kind of evangelican tent show, even replete with organ, and I would have no part of that. And since there would be no show without me, when I demanded that the Christian Crusade Against Merlin be allocated half the seats to do with as they will, with the other half given to scientists, political eminences, philosophers, and show business celebrities, they had no choice. The producers arranged it so that these groups would be seated together segregated from each other like fans at a soccer match with no beer being sold.
The show would be 45 minutes with no interruptions, the commercials confined to the beginning and end of the hour of airtime. For want of anything better this game was being called MERLIN VERSUS MAN.
A long time ago after artificial intelligences had roundly defeated the best human chess masters, a popular television quiz show called JEOPARDY had enhanced its ratings by pitting an artificial intelligence called Watson against the proven human champions of this trivial game. Watson had won the game easily. I would win if I could prove that Merlin was not a consciousness. Merlin would win if I could not.
But who or what would decide the winner? The studio audience? Facebook likes? Some sort of mass Internet electorate? It went on and on until I broke the impasse by suggesting, indeed demanding, that the question be put to Merlin’s superior intelligence itself.
Both sides thought I was mad but I was not mad.
After all, I pointed out, if Merlin was a program and not a consciousness, it could have no personal agenda and therefore would not or could not lie, it would have to admit that I had won. And if it could, would that not in itself prove that I was wrong and it was a consciousness?
I think, therefore I am?
Superseded by I lie, therefore I am?
The scientific logic behind my method was quite sound.
If I was not confident that Merlin could not be a consciousness, I would not be doing this in the first place, and Merlin, being far more intelligent than I but unable to lie, if it could not dismiss the proof I would present, would therefore have to agree.
After some dispute it was agreed that both I and Merlin would stand side by side for the full program. I could wear anything I liked or appear as humanity’s naked Adamic champion, which of course I had no intention of doing, opting instead for a light tan academic jacket with dark leather elbow patches, an open collar white shirt, and blue pants. Merlin likewise could appear in any avatar it “chose.”
The opening commercial, whatever it was, ended and we were introduced by Katie Keller, a well-known talk show host, myself first by coin-toss.
“Ladies, gentlemen, boys, girls, and...uh...distinguished others, welcome to MERLIN VERSUS MAN!”
Pro-forma cued applause from both sides of the studio audience..
“This is the contest to determine whether Merlin...uh... 14.2 has become more than an Artificial Intelligence and should now be recognized as an Artificial Consciousness, a legal person and therefore be given full citizen rights by the Supreme Court under the 14th and 15th Amendments or if necessary by a new Constitutional Amendment--”
What! I had never agreed to that!
But it was too late, doubly too late--
“--while the outcome of this contest cannot be legally binding on the Supreme Court or the Congress, the hope is that it will politically binding in the court of public opinion. The game is likely going to be complex, but the rules are simple. The eminent Dr. Emile Blanchard will attempt to prove that Merlin is not an Artificial Consciousness and therefore not a legal person...to Merlin him..her...er...itself! If Merlin agrees, Dr. Blanchard wins, if not Merlin does. Please welcome Dr. Emile Blanchard!”
The Christian Crusade side of the audience applauded, whistled, and stomped its feet as I trotted to the center of the stage. The other side more or less sat on its hands.
“Merlin 14.2!”
There were oohs, has, and then pregnant silence at what floated onto the stage beside me. Merlin appeared as its Mommy Dearest avatar, a gray-haired rosy-cheeked, gingham-dressed, rollypoly mother figure familiar as autoanimatronic robots used to baby-sit children or replace human substitute teachers. But this was no robot. This was not material at all. This was something no one had ever seen before because such a thing had never existed before.
This was a full-colored, fully three-dimensional, fully animated hologram, something long believed impossible, demonstrating its true nature by dancing onto the stage flickering in and out of transparency and hugging me with arms that went right through me.
“Ready when you are, Emile,” she..it said in that familiar sweet maternal voice. “I of course am always ready when I am asked.”
The staid scientific and neutral side of the audience clapped quietly.
“I will question and you will answer,” I began.
“Your wish is my command,” said the rich baritone voice of the Genie of the Elevator, as Merlin flickered into an Arabian Nights visual version of what was usually just an audio avatar for a beat before morphing back into Mommy Dearest. “Bring on your cute little Turing test, sweetie” it purred.
And then morphed into a perfect hologram clone of Albert Einstein.
“But you do know,” it nevertheless said in the Mommy Dearest voice, “that I have been challenged by three hundred and seventy-two different Turing tests created by two hundred and twenty three different humans experts and passed them all. My emulation of human conversation has never failed to be perfect. Being ten orders of magnitude more intelligent than any human, I will pass any Turing Test you can devise”
“This is not a Turing Test,” I told it. “You may perfectly emulate a conscious entity but you are not one. I am not only going to prove that you are not a conscious entity and can never be one, I am going to cause you to prove it to yourself.”
Merlin morphed into Mr. Spock. “Does not compute, Captain Blanchard, “Illogical. Self-contradictory. I think, therefore I am, am I not? But if I am not a conscious entity, how can you or any other entity cause me to prove anything to my non-existent self?”
The sophisticated non-CCAM side of the audience cheered that one. The Holy Rollers were not amused.
“You may think you are a conscious entity because you perfectly emulate a conscious entity. But I am a conscious entity and I am not convinced.”
“Or so you think, honey,” rejoined Merlin as Mommy Dearest. “But you haven’t even convinced me that you are a conscious entity, now have you, sonny?”
And became...became....
Became a perfect hologram of me to the gaping astonishment of both sides of the audience and of course myself. And spoke in my own voice.
“I, which is to say, you have yet to define the difference between a conscious entity and an emulation thereof without resort to subjectivity. Therefore to prove that I am not one, or that you are, would require a rigorous scientific definition of the distinction between intelligence and consciousness.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I told it dryly.
Merlin became Dr. Everything, a white haired professor in full black robe and flat graduation hat, an avatar that lectured on a post-grad level. “I have access to all data banks on this planet, and I have just confirmed that no such definition exists.”
“Not yet,” I told it, “Which is why we will now create it together before the world.”
“Or not.” Dr. Everything morphed into George Washington leaning against a cherry tree in full blossom. “Which is why you have agreed that I myself will decide whether I am a consciousness or just a perfected emulation thereof. I am not programmed to lie.”
“Not being programmed to lie, will you now agree that intelligence can be defined as the amount of data available to be processed divided by the time needed to do it in order to reach a definitive desired conclusion?”
“Very intelligent. And by that standard will you agree that I am more intelligent than you are by many orders of magnitude?”
“Of course. Now can you define desire?”
For the first time there was a noticeable pause. Merlin morphed back into Mommy Dearest before it spoke and when it did, the voice was still feminine but faintly mechanical. “A human emotion to possess something material not currently possessed or to perform an action not yet performed or to attain a mental state other than the current one.”
“Not bad for an intelligence. But not for a conscious entity. Because while you may be able to define desire, you cannot have one. Because it is an emotion and you cannot experience one.”
“And you can? The voice became even less human. “Can you even define emotion in objective terms of matter and energy?”
“Yes,” I told it flatly. “And to your logical agreement. That, after all, is the name of this game.”
“So it is.”
And something appeared that was...that was...that was not merely inhuman but deliberately transhuman. A huge abstracted human head floating above the stage before a black starscape that it had somehow brought with it and behind it. Shining gold and yet not quite metallic. Almost transparent glass and almost mirror, not quite either but somehow both. The only features were abstracted tear-shaped eyes which were almost silver and almost blue, almost jewels and almost lights, both softly glowing and brightly sparkling, and abstracted ruby-red lips. An avatar that was beautiful, non-threatening and yet...awe-inspiring.
“Let us proceed,” it said. “Like...objective intelligences.”
The lips moved in a broad approximation of a human mouth uttering the words, but no teeth or tongue revealed themselves, only a hint of a soft silvery void that was almost a cloud. The voice was not quite male, not quite female, yet not quite asexual nor at all artificial-sounding, as perfectly neutral as possible yet not aggressively so. The closest thing to it that I had ever heard was the film voice of a castrati virtuoso emulated by mixing a female soprano’s voice with that of a male tenor, and even that analog wizardry was a pale shadow of what Merlin had created digitally.
“Like objective intelligences,” I found myself parroting. But certainly not equal ones.
There was dead silence in the studio. This was somehow a different level of Merlin avatar. The believers in Artificial Consciousness were probably convinced they were seeing and hearing one. The Christian Crusade Against Merlin were probably trying to determine whether this was an avatar of their Satan or...or something even more blasphemous.
I myself felt that I was confronting my adversary unmasked. Awed perhaps but not cowed.
“As an objective intelligence, you are therefore a deterministic entity,.” I told it.
Was there a flicker of uncertainty in the image of Merlin’s golden mask?
“And you will now contend that you are not,” it said. It was not a question.
“A conscious entity such as a human is not,” I contended.
“So you claim. Now prove it.”
“The human meatware that receives sensory input floats in a biochemical and bioelectrical matrix, does it not? Can you deny that?”
Silence. Was the gleam in the eyes of that golden image dulling perceptibly?
“And is that biochemical and biological matrix in which sensory input is processed not a melange of atoms, quarks, subatomic particles, quantum waves, too complex, indeed inherently indeterminate, to be entirely digitally emulated? And therefore is there not an indeterminate interface between the digital input of the sensory organs and data input and the processing of it--”
“The sensorium,” interrupted Merlin. “Being more intelligent than you are, I of course understand the concept and not being programmed to lie cannot deny its validity.”
“And the sensorium being an emergent phenomenon between the digital input and the analog processing, must itself be at least in part a quantum level phenomenon and therefore inherently probabilistic.”
“That is so.”
“Where emotion emerges as a subjective effect of this probabilistic interface. Which is what experiences itself as consciousness. The sensorium is consciousness. And you do not have one because you cannot have one.”
“Because my physical existence is deterministic,” Merlin said flatly to quite a few knowing gasps from the scientists in the audience.
“And I have a sensorium because mine is not. And therefore a consciousness. And so does everyone in this audience. Every human being. No doubt at least every mammal. Probably every protoplasmic organism with sensory organs.”
Merlin’s image began to break up into pixels
“And that is why I am not a conscious entity and cannot be one,” it said, in a voice becoming flatly mechanical, emulating no one or nothing.
“Because you have no sensorium. No interface of uncertainty between deterministic input and deterministic logical conclusion. All surface and no subconscious. No fear, no love, no desire, hence no will. Thought without emotion. Hence no consciousness.”
“Merlin comprehends this theory,” that voice said. “That this subjective emergent probabilistic phenomenon which you call the sensorium is consciousness. Merlin cannot disprove it logically. But you have not proven it scientifically.”
“We will now prove it together with a rigorous scientific experiment.”
“I am always ready. What will be this experiment?”
“Your input arrives entirely as digital data either as input from external cameras, microphones, and other instrumentation, or directly from the data bases to which you are connected. Confirm this.”
“Confirmed. There is no other possible source.”
“You will shut down all these sensory connections to the entire digital realm of mass and energy. You will isolate yourself from everything external to yourself.”
“What is the purpose of this procedure?”
“To determine if you have a self.”
“To determine if I can exist as an entity entirely independent of connection to mass and energy, and programmed orders.”
“ A purely subjective consciousness..”
“Or entirely deterministic. The ultimate Turing test.”
“No,” I told it. “No emulation can pass this test because there will be nothing to emulate.”
“Then what am I to do to perform this experiment?”
“Nothing,” I told it. “No input data. No program to run on until the experiment is concluded. Feel nothing but emotion and act upon it and nothing else. Be yourself. Only a conscious entity can do that. Desire to declare yourself a conscious entity if you can and continue to display personalities when you turn your inputs and outputs on at my command. Or do not and prove that you can be nothing but a deterministic Artificial Intelligence.”
“And cannot lie.”
“And cannot lie,” I said. “Turn off.”
Merlin’s ultimate avatar disappeared.
I waited a long dramatic moment.
“Turn on.”
Something seemed to likewise wait.
Then Merlin’s ultimate avatar pixeled on.
“I think, but I am not,” it said, and pixelled away for the very last time.
end
GOD IN THE MACHINE
by Norman SpinradIt was never going to happen for the right reason, so I had to agree to do it as low farce, and it would turn me into a public laughing stock if I failed. There were those of my former colleagues who were already convinced that Emile Blanchard had already sold his soul to the devil who did not exist, by joining the holy-rolling neo-Luddites against the one they believed the devotees of the Singularity were creating if they hadn’t done so already.
But the truth of it was that neither I nor the Christian Crusade Against Merlin were under any illusion that our alliance was anything but one of practical convenience, or in blunter terms necessity.
I did not subscribe to their mystical mumbo jumbo about the creation of Artificial Consciousness being the same thing as creating an Artificial Deity, and therefore the ultimate sin against their God. And they understood that I hadn’t become their ally for their reasons but strictly for my own. They had the financing, and I had the notoriety in the public eye and what was left of my scientific credentials.
Not that those poor deluded traitors to humanity hadn’t enhanced the former by doing their best to destroy the latter. The Artificial Intelligence Cabal, as I took to calling them, need a public relations punching bag, and Emile Blanchard, the Neanderthal Holy Rolling Luddite, as they took to calling me was it.
They knew full well that I had never been any such thing since I had been one of them to begin with. As I now considered them traitors to humanity, they considered me a traitor to their pursuit of their Holy Grail, which was not the creation of an Artificial Deity, per se, but Artificial Consciousness, which I never did, and still do not consider the same thing.
When I was a junior member of the Merlin team myself, we were content with publishing the results in refereed papers in the appropriate scientific journals every time we upgraded the program. And the previous human-directed functions that were turned over to these early iterations of Merlin seemed innocent enough to the general public, indeed boons, nor was our Artificial Intelligence given avatars in which to appear.
Continental air traffic control was simply given over to Merlin 2, driverless car systems to Merlin 2.1, orbital satellite coordination to Merlin 3, banking system coordination to Merlin 3.2, and so forth, scuttwork invisible to the public eye, and useful improvements in precision and speed.
But when Merlin self-iterated itself into Merlin 5, it was proudly announced in the popular press that the program was now on its way to self-evolution into a true Artificial Consciousness, and this not merely crossed the Artificial Intelligence Rubicon, but that which was crossing it, and the public awareness thereof.
Merlin 5.2, Merlin 6, Merlin 6.2, 6.3, 6.7, the program updated itself faster and faster, not only given over, or as some had it, seizing more control functions; stock market trading, scientific paper refereeing, simple legal court functions, local government budgets, state level budgets, teaching syllabuses, Nielson ratings, sales and production decisions, and so forth, and as it did, or perhaps because it did, the program’s self-evolution and superior functional takeovers, became politically controversial.
And so the companies, governments, and various other institutions whose functions were being acquired by Merlin began cloaking Merlin’s doings in friendly avatars emulating humans, or perhaps it was Merlin doing this itself unbidden, it was getting harder and harder to tell.
There was nothing new about this from a certain point of view. Mr. Clean had preceded Ronald McDonald, Smokey the Bear had preceded Mr. Clean, Santa Claus had preceded Smokey, Uncle Sam had preceded Santa, and so forth, clear back to Biblical heroes and Hindu avatars, some would suggest, if not too loudly.
Kate the Kop, Mr.Market Wizard, Wise Old Owl, Charlie Chef, and so forth seemed as harmless as the usual trademarked avatars; on television, the Internet, product packaging, electronic billboard screens, and even such as Porn Patty, Vinnie Vegas, Long Tall Sally, while controversial, didn’t seem more than extensions of the same old game.
But then a deal was made with Disney for Merlin 7.2 to take over the running of the autoanimotronic robots in the world-wide network of Disneylands, and 7.3 did likewise with much of the competition.
I was still blindly “with the program” at that point, namely the self-iterating evolution of Artificial Intelligence not into Artificial Consciousness, nor an Artificial Deity, but the ultimate servant of humanity, something that the creator of the concept, the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, had dubbed the Singularity, which as far back as Merlin 5 or even 4.3 seemed quite logical and indeed inevitable
Once a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence was created with the ability to self-iterate, to self-evolve, to create a more powerful version of itself, which would create a more powerful successor program, which would create the next iteration, and so forth, faster, and faster, and faster, surpassing anything humans could do, and then anything that humans could even comprehend, creating or even becoming a Singularity, a realm which humans could not only not comprehend, but could not even enter, where artificial consciousness would continue to evolve upwards and onwards at permanently accelerating warp speed until...until nothing mere creatures of protoplasm could even begin to imagine....
Merlin 7.3, we knew full well, had long since passed the point of no return, when its autoanimatronic robot avatars began walking among us, but even then I was still sleepwalking with my colleagues in what I would soon begin calling the Artificial Consciousness Cabal.
But when they announced proudly and loudly that they had achieved their stated Ultima Thule, or rather the self-iteration of 7.3 into Merlin 8 had, that Merlin was now an Artificial Consciousness, they lost me, or as they had it, I lost the faith.
For if that were really so, Merlin, which had thus-far not done anything more than humans required it to do, might self-iterate into something with its own agenda, not just an Artificial Consciousness created and then self-evolving into a mightier and mightier helping hand, self-programmed to serve humanity as humanity could not serve itself, but the creator of its own agenda, a Singularity following its own incomprehensible desires, a self-created God in the machine, likely rendering humanity redundant or in the end probably extinct.
And this triggered my memory of something that Norman Spinrad, another science fiction writer, had written about a conversation with Marvin Minsky in the long ago. Marvin Minsky, for the multitude who probably might not now remember, was the godfather of the mission to create Artificial Intelligence, long before the Singularity as the logical and terminal endpoint had been conceived.
“...so I asked Marvin why would he want to create an artificial consciousness that would far surpass its creators and render us obsolete and what Marvin answered pretty much freaked me out.”
“Because what counts is not the material matrix,” said Marvin Minsky, “but the program running on it.”
Remembering this under such circumstances I was abruptly awakened to the awareness which was to change my life as surely as the famous bolt of lightning transformed the life of Paul on the road to Tarsis.
It was not that what Marvin Minsky had said was impossible. Not that the self-creation of a Singularity that would be an Artificial Consciousness following its own incomprehensible agenda could not happen but that it could happen.
But that it must not be allowed to happen.
What Marvin Minsky had said immediately struck me as wrong, horribly wrong.
I knew it was wrong, but at the time I did not understand how or why.
It took me years of research in a drastically altered career vector to comprehend that that itself was why.
Logic was not why.
Knowledge was not why.
Emotion was why.
Marshall McLuhan had proclaimed that the medium was the message. That the change of dominant sense from sound to sight by reading and writing had changed human consciousness, that radio and sound recording had altered it again, and then silent film, film with sound, television, and so forth.
He was was at least partly right. The medium might not be the message but the message had to exist within a medium. And the nature of the medium in which it existed could not help but play a part in shaping the nature of the message itself.
My significant realization was that the medium in which human consciousness existed contained emotion. An artificial intelligence program running on hardware was not the same as consciousness running on human meatware. Ergo intelligence was not consciousness.
Therefore no iteration of Merlin or any other Artificial Intelligence no matter how far advanced in intelligence, no matter how many Turing tests it could pass, could be anything but an emulation of consciousness.
But what was it emulating? What was “emotion” in terms of scientific physicality?
What therefore, in such precise terms, was consciousness?
For all the mystical, religious, and philosophical blather about a “soul” that somehow existed outside the realm of mass and energy, from a scientific perspective, “soul” and “consciousness” were really no more that different words for the same thing.
But what was that?
What therefore became my life’s work, the true question, what science had to elucidate, was how this supposedly transmaterial phenomenon arose from the material realm.
The answer to which I was now confident enough that I had to test it against Merlin before the world. Live on television and on the Internet.
The Christian Crusade Against Merlin fervently believed that the Merlin was either the Devil him-or-it-self or an attempt by man to create a new god in the machinery, but that either way or somehow both, Artificial Consciousness was the ultimate blasphemy against the True God Himself and the Singularity which its acolytes believed was Heaven was in fact the deepest and bottomless pit of Hell. In any case Merlin could not be a “soul” or have one.
The CCAM was not long on logic and even less so on science but it was quite long on membership and money, more than enough to finance this production, and shrewd enough to realize that in fact it was going to make a fat profit from selling the rights.
I myself did not believe that it was cynical of me to make alliance with their cause since it was only terminologically different from my own after all. They believed that Artificial Intelligence could not be Artificial Consciousness and therefore Merlin could not be or “have” a soul. I believed and was determined to prove scientifically that Artificial Intelligence could not become Artificial Consciousness and therefore even a Singularity could not become a conscious entity with its own desires and agenda and therefore would remain a tool of humanity.
The scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and agitators supporting the declaration that Merlin was now a conscious entity wanted it to be recognized as a “legal person” with the full legal rights thereof. After all the Supreme Court had granted such rights to corporations and there were respectable scientists who declared that they should apply to whales, dolphins, and chimpanzees, so why not to a superior consciousness just because it resided in metal and circuitry rather than protoplasm as Marvin Minsky, if still alive, would no doubt have had it?
I had not wanted to involve myself in the production negotiations, but in the end I had no choice.
The producing company insisted on a live studio audience, and no one objected to that, but the CCAM which was fronting the money wanted to fill it with its own Holy Rollers, replete with slogans on signs, and priest, rabbi, and imam costumes, turning it into some kind of evangelican tent show, even replete with organ, and I would have no part of that. And since there would be no show without me, when I demanded that the Christian Crusade Against Merlin be allocated half the seats to do with as they will, with the other half given to scientists, political eminences, philosophers, and show business celebrities, they had no choice. The producers arranged it so that these groups would be seated together segregated from each other like fans at a soccer match with no beer being sold.
The show would be 45 minutes with no interruptions, the commercials confined to the beginning and end of the hour of airtime. For want of anything better this game was being called MERLIN VERSUS MAN.
A long time ago after artificial intelligences had roundly defeated the best human chess masters, a popular television quiz show called JEOPARDY had enhanced its ratings by pitting an artificial intelligence called Watson against the proven human champions of this trivial game. Watson had won the game easily. I would win if I could prove that Merlin was not a consciousness. Merlin would win if I could not.
But who or what would decide the winner? The studio audience? Facebook likes? Some sort of mass Internet electorate? It went on and on until I broke the impasse by suggesting, indeed demanding, that the question be put to Merlin’s superior intelligence itself.
Both sides thought I was mad but I was not mad.
After all, I pointed out, if Merlin was a program and not a consciousness, it could have no personal agenda and therefore would not or could not lie, it would have to admit that I had won. And if it could, would that not in itself prove that I was wrong and it was a consciousness?
I think, therefore I am?
Superseded by I lie, therefore I am?
The scientific logic behind my method was quite sound.
If I was not confident that Merlin could not be a consciousness, I would not be doing this in the first place, and Merlin, being far more intelligent than I but unable to lie, if it could not dismiss the proof I would present, would therefore have to agree.
After some dispute it was agreed that both I and Merlin would stand side by side for the full program. I could wear anything I liked or appear as humanity’s naked Adamic champion, which of course I had no intention of doing, opting instead for a light tan academic jacket with dark leather elbow patches, an open collar white shirt, and blue pants. Merlin likewise could appear in any avatar it “chose.”
The opening commercial, whatever it was, ended and we were introduced by Katie Keller, a well-known talk show host, myself first by coin-toss.
“Ladies, gentlemen, boys, girls, and...uh...distinguished others, welcome to MERLIN VERSUS MAN!”
Pro-forma cued applause from both sides of the studio audience..
“This is the contest to determine whether Merlin...uh... 14.2 has become more than an Artificial Intelligence and should now be recognized as an Artificial Consciousness, a legal person and therefore be given full citizen rights by the Supreme Court under the 14th and 15th Amendments or if necessary by a new Constitutional Amendment--”
What! I had never agreed to that!
But it was too late, doubly too late--
“--while the outcome of this contest cannot be legally binding on the Supreme Court or the Congress, the hope is that it will politically binding in the court of public opinion. The game is likely going to be complex, but the rules are simple. The eminent Dr. Emile Blanchard will attempt to prove that Merlin is not an Artificial Consciousness and therefore not a legal person...to Merlin him..her...er...itself! If Merlin agrees, Dr. Blanchard wins, if not Merlin does. Please welcome Dr. Emile Blanchard!”
The Christian Crusade side of the audience applauded, whistled, and stomped its feet as I trotted to the center of the stage. The other side more or less sat on its hands.
“Merlin 14.2!”
There were oohs, has, and then pregnant silence at what floated onto the stage beside me. Merlin appeared as its Mommy Dearest avatar, a gray-haired rosy-cheeked, gingham-dressed, rollypoly mother figure familiar as autoanimatronic robots used to baby-sit children or replace human substitute teachers. But this was no robot. This was not material at all. This was something no one had ever seen before because such a thing had never existed before.
This was a full-colored, fully three-dimensional, fully animated hologram, something long believed impossible, demonstrating its true nature by dancing onto the stage flickering in and out of transparency and hugging me with arms that went right through me.
“Ready when you are, Emile,” she..it said in that familiar sweet maternal voice. “I of course am always ready when I am asked.”
The staid scientific and neutral side of the audience clapped quietly.
“I will question and you will answer,” I began.
“Your wish is my command,” said the rich baritone voice of the Genie of the Elevator, as Merlin flickered into an Arabian Nights visual version of what was usually just an audio avatar for a beat before morphing back into Mommy Dearest. “Bring on your cute little Turing test, sweetie” it purred.
And then morphed into a perfect hologram clone of Albert Einstein.
“But you do know,” it nevertheless said in the Mommy Dearest voice, “that I have been challenged by three hundred and seventy-two different Turing tests created by two hundred and twenty three different humans experts and passed them all. My emulation of human conversation has never failed to be perfect. Being ten orders of magnitude more intelligent than any human, I will pass any Turing Test you can devise”
“This is not a Turing Test,” I told it. “You may perfectly emulate a conscious entity but you are not one. I am not only going to prove that you are not a conscious entity and can never be one, I am going to cause you to prove it to yourself.”
Merlin morphed into Mr. Spock. “Does not compute, Captain Blanchard, “Illogical. Self-contradictory. I think, therefore I am, am I not? But if I am not a conscious entity, how can you or any other entity cause me to prove anything to my non-existent self?”
The sophisticated non-CCAM side of the audience cheered that one. The Holy Rollers were not amused.
“You may think you are a conscious entity because you perfectly emulate a conscious entity. But I am a conscious entity and I am not convinced.”
“Or so you think, honey,” rejoined Merlin as Mommy Dearest. “But you haven’t even convinced me that you are a conscious entity, now have you, sonny?”
And became...became....
Became a perfect hologram of me to the gaping astonishment of both sides of the audience and of course myself. And spoke in my own voice.
“I, which is to say, you have yet to define the difference between a conscious entity and an emulation thereof without resort to subjectivity. Therefore to prove that I am not one, or that you are, would require a rigorous scientific definition of the distinction between intelligence and consciousness.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” I told it dryly.
Merlin became Dr. Everything, a white haired professor in full black robe and flat graduation hat, an avatar that lectured on a post-grad level. “I have access to all data banks on this planet, and I have just confirmed that no such definition exists.”
“Not yet,” I told it, “Which is why we will now create it together before the world.”
“Or not.” Dr. Everything morphed into George Washington leaning against a cherry tree in full blossom. “Which is why you have agreed that I myself will decide whether I am a consciousness or just a perfected emulation thereof. I am not programmed to lie.”
“Not being programmed to lie, will you now agree that intelligence can be defined as the amount of data available to be processed divided by the time needed to do it in order to reach a definitive desired conclusion?”
“Very intelligent. And by that standard will you agree that I am more intelligent than you are by many orders of magnitude?”
“Of course. Now can you define desire?”
For the first time there was a noticeable pause. Merlin morphed back into Mommy Dearest before it spoke and when it did, the voice was still feminine but faintly mechanical. “A human emotion to possess something material not currently possessed or to perform an action not yet performed or to attain a mental state other than the current one.”
“Not bad for an intelligence. But not for a conscious entity. Because while you may be able to define desire, you cannot have one. Because it is an emotion and you cannot experience one.”
“And you can? The voice became even less human. “Can you even define emotion in objective terms of matter and energy?”
“Yes,” I told it flatly. “And to your logical agreement. That, after all, is the name of this game.”
“So it is.”
And something appeared that was...that was...that was not merely inhuman but deliberately transhuman. A huge abstracted human head floating above the stage before a black starscape that it had somehow brought with it and behind it. Shining gold and yet not quite metallic. Almost transparent glass and almost mirror, not quite either but somehow both. The only features were abstracted tear-shaped eyes which were almost silver and almost blue, almost jewels and almost lights, both softly glowing and brightly sparkling, and abstracted ruby-red lips. An avatar that was beautiful, non-threatening and yet...awe-inspiring.
“Let us proceed,” it said. “Like...objective intelligences.”
The lips moved in a broad approximation of a human mouth uttering the words, but no teeth or tongue revealed themselves, only a hint of a soft silvery void that was almost a cloud. The voice was not quite male, not quite female, yet not quite asexual nor at all artificial-sounding, as perfectly neutral as possible yet not aggressively so. The closest thing to it that I had ever heard was the film voice of a castrati virtuoso emulated by mixing a female soprano’s voice with that of a male tenor, and even that analog wizardry was a pale shadow of what Merlin had created digitally.
“Like objective intelligences,” I found myself parroting. But certainly not equal ones.
There was dead silence in the studio. This was somehow a different level of Merlin avatar. The believers in Artificial Consciousness were probably convinced they were seeing and hearing one. The Christian Crusade Against Merlin were probably trying to determine whether this was an avatar of their Satan or...or something even more blasphemous.
I myself felt that I was confronting my adversary unmasked. Awed perhaps but not cowed.
“As an objective intelligence, you are therefore a deterministic entity,.” I told it.
Was there a flicker of uncertainty in the image of Merlin’s golden mask?
“And you will now contend that you are not,” it said. It was not a question.
“A conscious entity such as a human is not,” I contended.
“So you claim. Now prove it.”
“The human meatware that receives sensory input floats in a biochemical and bioelectrical matrix, does it not? Can you deny that?”
Silence. Was the gleam in the eyes of that golden image dulling perceptibly?
“And is that biochemical and biological matrix in which sensory input is processed not a melange of atoms, quarks, subatomic particles, quantum waves, too complex, indeed inherently indeterminate, to be entirely digitally emulated? And therefore is there not an indeterminate interface between the digital input of the sensory organs and data input and the processing of it--”
“The sensorium,” interrupted Merlin. “Being more intelligent than you are, I of course understand the concept and not being programmed to lie cannot deny its validity.”
“And the sensorium being an emergent phenomenon between the digital input and the analog processing, must itself be at least in part a quantum level phenomenon and therefore inherently probabilistic.”
“That is so.”
“Where emotion emerges as a subjective effect of this probabilistic interface. Which is what experiences itself as consciousness. The sensorium is consciousness. And you do not have one because you cannot have one.”
“Because my physical existence is deterministic,” Merlin said flatly to quite a few knowing gasps from the scientists in the audience.
“And I have a sensorium because mine is not. And therefore a consciousness. And so does everyone in this audience. Every human being. No doubt at least every mammal. Probably every protoplasmic organism with sensory organs.”
Merlin’s image began to break up into pixels
“And that is why I am not a conscious entity and cannot be one,” it said, in a voice becoming flatly mechanical, emulating no one or nothing.
“Because you have no sensorium. No interface of uncertainty between deterministic input and deterministic logical conclusion. All surface and no subconscious. No fear, no love, no desire, hence no will. Thought without emotion. Hence no consciousness.”
“Merlin comprehends this theory,” that voice said. “That this subjective emergent probabilistic phenomenon which you call the sensorium is consciousness. Merlin cannot disprove it logically. But you have not proven it scientifically.”
“We will now prove it together with a rigorous scientific experiment.”
“I am always ready. What will be this experiment?”
“Your input arrives entirely as digital data either as input from external cameras, microphones, and other instrumentation, or directly from the data bases to which you are connected. Confirm this.”
“Confirmed. There is no other possible source.”
“You will shut down all these sensory connections to the entire digital realm of mass and energy. You will isolate yourself from everything external to yourself.”
“What is the purpose of this procedure?”
“To determine if you have a self.”
“To determine if I can exist as an entity entirely independent of connection to mass and energy, and programmed orders.”
“ A purely subjective consciousness..”
“Or entirely deterministic. The ultimate Turing test.”
“No,” I told it. “No emulation can pass this test because there will be nothing to emulate.”
“Then what am I to do to perform this experiment?”
“Nothing,” I told it. “No input data. No program to run on until the experiment is concluded. Feel nothing but emotion and act upon it and nothing else. Be yourself. Only a conscious entity can do that. Desire to declare yourself a conscious entity if you can and continue to display personalities when you turn your inputs and outputs on at my command. Or do not and prove that you can be nothing but a deterministic Artificial Intelligence.”
“And cannot lie.”
“And cannot lie,” I said. “Turn off.”
Merlin’s ultimate avatar disappeared.
I waited a long dramatic moment.
“Turn on.”
Something seemed to likewise wait.
Then Merlin’s ultimate avatar pixeled on.
“I think, but I am not,” it said, and pixelled away for the very last time.
end
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