Reflections
But sure as oft as women weep
It is to be supposed they grieve,
“No, Trurl, a sufferer is not one who hands you his suffering, that you may touch it, weigh it, bite it like a coin; a sufferer is one who behaves like a sufferer!”
It is interesting, the choice of words that Lem uses in describing his fantastic simulations. Words like “digital,” “nonlinear,” “feedback,” “self-organizing,” and “cybernetic” come up over and over again in his stories. They have an old-fashioned flavor different from that of most terms that come up in current discussions of artificial intelligence. Much of the work in AI has wandered off in directions that have little to do with perception, learning, and creativity. More of it is directed toward such things as simulating the ability to use language—and we say “simulating” advisedly. It seems to us that many of the most difficult and challenging parts of artificial intelligence research lie ahead—and the “self-organizing,” “nonlinear” nature of the human mind will then come back as an important mystery to be attacked. In the meanwhile Lem vividly brings out some of the powerful, heady scents that those words ought to carry.
In his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,[25] Tom Robbins has a passage that is strikingly similar to Lem’s vision of a tiny manufactured world:
For Christmas that year, Julian gave Sissy a miniature Tyrolean village. The craftsmanship was remarkable.
There was a tiny cathedral whose stained-glass windows made fruit salad of sunlight. There was a plaza and ein Biergarten. The Biergarten got quite noisy on Saturday nights. There was a bakery that smelled always of hot bread and strudel. There was a town hall and a police station, with cutaway sections that revealed standard amounts of red tape and corruption. There were little Tyroleans in leather britches, intricately stitched, and, beneath the britches, genitalia of equally fine workmanship. There were ski shops and many other interesting things, including art orphanage. The orphanage was designed to catch fire and burn down every Christmas Eve. Orphans would dash into the snow with their nightgowns blazing. Terrible. Around the second week of January, a fire inspector would come and poke through the ruins, muttering, “If they had only listened to me, those children would be alive today.”
Although in subject it resembles the Lem piece greatly, in flavor it is completely different. It is as if two composers had independently come up with the same melody but harmonized it utterly differently. Far from drawing you into believing in the genuine feelings of the tiny people, Robbins makes you see them as merely incredible (if not incredibly silly) pieces of fine clockwork.
The repetition of the orphanage drama year after year, echoing the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence—that everything that has happened will happen again and again—seems to rob the little world of any real meaning. Why should the repetition of the fire inspector’s lament make it sound so hollow? Do the little Tyroleans rebuild the orphanage themselves or is there a “RESET” button? Where do the new orphans come from, or do the “dead” ones come back to “life”? As with the other fantasies here, it is often instructive to think about the details omitted.
Subtle stylistic touches and narrative tricks make all the difference as to whether you get sucked into belief in the genuineness of the tiny souls. Which way do you tilt?
D.R.H.
D.C.D.
Professor Dobb’s book is devoted to personetics, which the Finnish philosopher Eino Kaikki has called “the crudest science man has ever created.” Dobb, one of the most distinguished personeticists today, shares this view. One cannot escape the conclusion, he says, that personetics is, in its application, immoral, we are dealing, however, with a type of pursuit that is, though counter to the principles of ethics, also of practical necessity for us. There is no way, in the research, to avoid its special ruthlessness, to avoid doing violence to one’s natural instincts, and if nowhere else it is here that the myth of the perfect innocence of the scientist as a seeker of facts is exploded. We are speaking of a discipline, after all, which, with only a small amount of exaggeration, for emphasis, has been called “experimental theogony.” Even so, this reviewer is struck by the fact that when the press played up the thing, nine years ago, public opinion was stunned by the personetic disclosures. One would have thought that in this day and age nothing could surprise us. The centuries rang with the echo of the feat of Columbus, whereas the conquering of the Moon in the space of a week was received by the collective consciousness as a thing practically humdrum. And yet the birth of personetics proved to be a shock.
The name combines Latin and Greek derivatives: “persona” and “genetic” — “genetic” in the sense of formation or creation. The field is a recent offshoot of the cybernetics and psychonics of the eighties, crossbred with applied itellitronics. Today everyone knows of personetics; the man in the street would say, if asked, that it is the artificial production of intelligent beings—an answer not wide of the mark, to be sure, but not quite getting to the heart of the matter. To date we have nearly a hundred personetics programs. Nine years ago identity schemata were being developed—primitive cores of the “linear” type—but even that generation of computers, today of historical value only, could not yet provide a field for the true creation of personoids.
The theoretical possibility of creating sentience was divined some time ago by Norbert Wiener, as certain passages of his last book, God and Golem, bear witness. Granted, he alluded to it in that half-facetious manner typical of him, but underlying the facetiousness were fairly grim premonitions. Wiener, however, could not have foreseen the turn that things would take us twenty years later. The worst came about—in the words of Sir Donald Acker—when at MIT “the inputs were shorted to the outputs.”
At present a “world” for personal “inhabitants” can be prepared in a matter of a couple of hours. This is the time it takes to feed into the machine one of the full-fledged programs (such as BAAL 66, CREAN IV or JAHVE 09). Dobbs gives a rather cursory sketch of the beginnings of personetics, referring the reader to the historical sources; a confirmed practitioner-experimenter himself, he speaks mainly of his own work—which is much to the point, since between the English school, which Dobb represents, and the American school at MIT, the differences are considerable, both in the area of methodology and as regards experimental goals. Dobb describes the procedure of “6 days in 120 minutes” as follows. First one supplies the machine’s memory with a minimal set of givens, that is—to keep within a language comprehensible to laymen—one load sits memory with substance that is “mathematical.” This substance is the protoplasm of a universum to be “habitated” by personoids. We are now able to supply the beings that will come into this mechanical, digital world—that will be carrying on an existence in it, and in it, only—with an environment of nonfinite characteristics. These beings, wherefore, cannot feel imprisoned in the physical sense, because the environment does not have, from their standpoint, any bounds. The medium possesses only one dimension that resembles a dimension given us also—namely, that of the passage of time (duration). Their time is not directly analogous to ours, however, because the rate of its flow is subject to discretionary control on the part of the experimenter. As a rule, the rate is maximized in the preliminary phase (the so-called creational warm-up) so that our minutes correspond to whole eons in the computer, during which there takes place a series of successive reorganizations and crystallizations—of a synthetic cosmos. It is a cosmos completely spaceless, though possessing dimensions, but these dimensions have a purely mathematical, hence what one might call an “imaginary” character. They are, very simply, the consequences of certain axiomatic decisions of the programmer and their number depends on him. If, for example, he chooses a ten dimensionality, it will have for the structure of the world created altogether different consequences from those where only six dimensions are established. It should be emphasized that these dimensions bear no relation to those of physical space but only to the abstract, logically valid constructs made use of in systems creation.
25
Excerpt from
26
“Non Serviam” from