He wants to talk about Marilyn, I suppose. Naturally. He has a guilty conscience. I’ll have to make it quite clear to him that the whole episode is a matter of complete indifference to me. Marilyn is a closed book in my life; he must understand that. But can you beat that? He’s right in the middle of MS! That lad certainly gets around. It’s the usual Ellsom charm, I suppose.
The usual Ellsom technique for irritating people, too. He’s still trying to get my goat; he knows how much I’ve always hated to be called Ollie. Must watch Goldweiser. Thought he laughed pretty heartily at Len’s wisecracks.
Things are shaping up in the Pro lab. Here’s how I get the picture.
A year ago, the boss laid down a policy for the lab: begin with legs because, while the neuromotor systems in legs and arms are a lot alike, those in legs are much simpler. If we build satisfactory legs, the boss figures we can then tackle arms; the main difficulties will have been licked.
Well, last summer, in line with this approach, the Army picked out a double amputee from the outpatient department of Walter Reed Hospital—fellow by the name of Kujack, who lost both his legs in a land mine explosion outside Pyongyang—and shipped him up here to be a subject in our experiments.
When Kujack arrived, the neuro boys made a major decision. It didn’t make sense, they agreed, to keep building experimental legs directly into the muscles and nerves of Kujack’s stumps; the surgical procedure in these cine-plastic jobs is complicated as all getout, involves a lot of pain for the subject and, what’s more to the point, means long delays each time while the tissues heal.
Instead, they hit on the idea of integrating permanent metal and plastic sockets into the stumps, so constructed that each new experimental limb can be snapped into place whenever it’s ready for a trial.
By the time I took over, two weeks ago, Goldweiser had the sockets worked out and fitted to Kujack’s stumps, and the muscular and neural tissues had knitted satisfactorily. There was only one hitch: twenty-three limbs had been designed, and all twenty-three had been dismal flops. That’s when the boss called me in.
There’s no mystery about the failures. Not to me, anyhow. Cybernetics is simply the science of building machines that will duplicate and improve on the organs and functions of the animal, based on what we know about the systems of communication and control in the animal. All right. But in any particular cybernetics project, everything depends on just how many of the functions you want to duplicate, just how much of the total organ you want to replace.
That’s why the robot-brain boys can get such quick and spectacular results, have their pictures in the papers all the time, and become the real glamor boys of the profession. They’re not asked to duplicate the human brain in its entirety—all they have to do is isolate and imitate one particular function of the brain, whether it’s a simple operation in mathematics or a certain type of elementary logic.
The robot brain called the Eniac, for example, is exactly what its name implies—an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, and it just has to be able to integrate and compute figures faster and more accurately than the human brain can. It doesn’t have to have daydreams and nightmares, make wisecracks, suffer from anxiety, and all that. What’s more, it doesn’t even have to look like a brain or fit into the tiny space occupied by a real brain. It can be housed in a six-story building and look like an overgrown typewriter or an automobile dashboard or even a pogo stick. All it has to do is tell you that two times two equals four, and tell you fast.
When you’re told to build an artificial leg that’ll take the place of a real one, the headaches begin. Your machine must not only look like its living model, it must also balance and support, walk, run, hop, skip, jump, etc., etc. Also, it must fit into the same space. Also, it must feel everything a real leg feels—touch, heat, cold, pain, moisture, kinesthetic sensations—as well as execute all the brain-directed movements that a real leg can.
So you’re not duplicating this or that function; you’re reconstructing the organ in its totality, or trying to. Your pro must have a full set of sensory-motor communication systems, plus machines to carry out orders, which is impossible enough to begin with.
But our job calls for even more. The pro mustn’t only equal the real thing, it must be superior! That means creating a synthetic neuro-muscular system that actually improves on the nerves and muscles Nature created in the original!
When our twenty-fourth experimental model turned out to be a dud last week—it just hung from Kujack’s stump, quivering like one of my robot bedbugs, as though it had a bad case of intention tremor—Goldweiser said something that made an impression on me.
"They don’t want much from us," he said sarcastically. "They just want us to be God."
I didn’t care for his cynical attitude at all, but he had a point. Len Ellsom just has to build a fancy adding machine to get his picture in the papers. I have to be God!
Don’t know what to make of Kujack. His attitude is peculiar. Of course, he’s very co-operative, lies back on the fitting table and doesn’t even wince when we snap on the pros, and he does his best to carry out instructions. Still, there’s something funny about the way he looks at me. There’s a kind of malicious expression in his eyes. At times, come to think of it, he reminds me of Len.
Take this afternoon, for instance. I’ve just worked out an entirely different kind of leg based on a whole new arrangement of solenoids to duplicate the muscle systems, and I decided to give it a try. When I was slipping the model into place, I looked up and caught Kujack’s eye for a moment. He seemed to be laughing at something, although his face was expressionless.
"All right," I said. "Let’s make a test. I understand you used to be quite a football player. Well, just think of how you used to kick a football and try to do it now."
He really seemed to be trying; the effort made him sweat. All that happened, though, was that the big toe wriggled a little and the knee buckled. Dud Number Twenty-five. I was sore, of course, especially when I noticed that Kujack was more amused than ever.
"You seem to think something’s pretty funny," I said.
"Don’t get me wrong, Doc," he said, much too innocently. "It’s just that I’ve been thinking. Maybe you’d have more luck if you thought of me as a bedbug."
"Where did you get that idea?"
"From Doc Ellsom. I was having some beers with him the other night. He’s got a very high opinion of you, says you build the best bedbugs in the business."
I find it hard to believe that Len Ellsom would say anything really nice about me. Must be his guilt about Marilyn that makes him talk that way. I don’t like his hanging around Kujack.
The boss came along on our woodcutting expedition this morning and volunteered to work the other end of my two-handled saw. He asked how things were coming in the Pro lab.
"As I see it," I said, "there are two sides to the problem, the kinesthetic and the neural. We’re making definite progress on the K side—I’ve worked out a new solenoid system, with some miniature motors tied in, and I think it’ll give us a leg that moves damned well. I don’t know about the N side, though. It’s pretty tough figuring out how to hook the thing up electrically with the central nervous system so that the brain can control it. Some sort of compromise system of operation, along mechanical rather than neural lines, would be a lot simpler."