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was looking at me as if I were a three-year-old who d just wet his pants.
Trip, Ben said, his tone kind but indulgent, almost patron-izing,
that s what s wrong with your whole overview on this.
Gary nodded his head avidly.
Ben went on: Whether the problem winds up a tempest in a teacup or Armageddon
from the sky, the strategic solution will result from intuition and
imagination, properties of human emotion. Properties no
machine has.
Yes, Gary said. Now the way he was looking at his father made me feel good,
like they were allies not only of the mind but the spirit. Machines,
artificial intelligences, may offer priceless tactical advice, but they won t
know how to feel about it.
What s that got to do with anything? It s a scientific problem. No sooner
were the words out of my mouth than I felt like a moron. Had my emotional
response been scientific? Were we forgetting so much of our basic nature so
quickly?
Ben stood, then walked to stand directly in front of my body-sculpt chair.
Worse, Wendy II padded over and hunkered against his leg. I guess dogs have an
instinct for who the rightful pack leader is.
Shaking his head slowly while a strangely grandpalike smile spread over his
face, he began a speech
I ll remember all my life. A hundred years, a million, a billion, or until the
universe goes cold, I will never forget.
We could implant intelligent machines in physical bodies like ours, or some
other higher life-form s.
Hell, before you know it, we ll be advanced enough to create a whole new
species superior to ourselves.
Sure, we could do that, but why would we? Then we d have created a
hyperintelligent competi-tive species. Such an act would be insane; would
have a wholly unpredictable outcome. It would be as mad as a full-scale
nu-clear exchange in the 1980s, so I don t expect it, even in light of today s
crisis.
Therefore what we have are various machine enhancements to our own
bodies and minds, plus artificial intelligence- without emotions. I m sure
I don t need to explain to you that your emotions are manifest in your body s
physical response to your five senses, in concert with the reasoning capacity
of your brain. Loud music can make you cry if you re an infant, or give you
joy if you re an adult listening to
Mozart ...
No, Ben hadn t needed to explain it, but I somehow under-stood things better
because he had.
Now we re faced with something unknown and to some de-gree unknowable, so our
initial reaction is fear. How could it be otherwise? Right now, you find the
fear paralyzing. But not for long, I predict. In fact, it s that very fear
that will save us.
I sat there, thinking I d understood. I almost rushed to him then. Almost told
him how wonderful he was. I m glad I waited.
A husband and wife walk into a home furnishings show, he mused. We ll say
the year is 2010, because it s a transi-tional time all of us can relate to,
whether we lived it firsthand or not.
Anyway, our couple presents their ticket stubs at the door. As they stroll
inside the hall, someone marks the back of one of their hands with a small red
dot, so they can gain readmittance without having to pay a second time.
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Husband and wife had a tiny spat that morning, so there s a little wall of
distance between them.
Nothing serious, but it s there. They stroll about for a little, then hubby
spies a conces-sion stand. Tells the wife he s thirsty. They buy two cups of
cola and sit down at tables provided for snackers. On their table is a vase of
faux flowers, pretty but bland. Hubby s still feeling bad about the morning s
tiff and wants to make the cloud go away. After all, he started it by whining
that he didn t want to go to the show in the first place. But he also can t
quite bring himself to admit all that.
He looks at the red dot on his hand, then smiles. Says to wifey: They can
find us now. Who? she asks. The Bosnian secret agents, he replies; points
to the dot. There s a homing device in the ink.
Wifey s expression doesn t change, but she bends to one of the plastic
flowers, whispering into it: He s on to us, Marvik. Both break into
laughter, then reaching out, they find one another s fingers.
I looked at Gary; he was smiling. So was I, ear-to-ear, but didn t understand
why. I only knew I
suddenly felt better, and glad to be a member of the human race. Still, I
wondered, What was his point?
Trip, could a machine have written that without human pro-gramming? Ben
asked.
No, I allowed, replaying Ben s story in my head: action, sen-sation,
emotion, humor, a goal, and success; all interwoven into a simple
object-lesson on the nature of the human thinking process. Any pure machine,
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