“A robot nurse? Housekeepers are tough enough to program.”
“This is a new model, lately developed by a small company in the city,” Edmond said. “We consented to test it. To date it goes fairly well.”
“Huh! I hadn’t heard a thing. Ah, hell, who can keep up?”—when computer models and nanolevel experiments compress former years’ worth of R & D into hours. The obstacle that progress must overcome wasn’t innovation, Dagny understood; it was capital investment and market acceptance. “Isn’t this a tad dicey?”
“We’ve got plenty of fail-safes, never fear,” she said. “Besides, it’s just a guardian, a d6er of simple chores, and an entertainer. That is, it has a repertory of song and story elements to combine. We aren’t making it a substitute for us, only a helper. We wouldn’t want more.”
“You’d scarcely get more anyway. This much surprises me.”
“Is advancement in artificial intelligence slowing to a halt?” wondered Edmond. “I have seen it claimed, but the man who had Clementine built, he does not agree.”
“Oh, we’re getting remarkable machines, amazing programs. You know from your field trips what the top-chop robots are capable of these days, and better are in the works. Yeah. Including a kind of—what you might call thought, creativity. But that’s still basically stochastic, no different in principle from your nanny’s kaleidoscope method of plotting new stories. Real thought, consciousness, mind, whatever you dub it— the way I read the accounts and reports that’ve come to me, we’re as far from that as ever.”
“Strange,” Dagny mused.
“Could it be the fundamental approach is mistaken?” Edmond speculated.
“I suspect those thinkers are right who say it is,” Guthrie replied. “You may remember, according to their school of thought, the mind is not completely algorithmic. If that’s true, then the ultimate Omega that fellow Xuan has been touting, it’ll never come to be. Not by that route, anyhow.”
“Are you sure?” Dagny asked. “You don’t believe in a disembodied soul or anything like that.”
Guthrie laughed. “To be exact, I have a bare smidgen more faith in the supernatural than I do in the wisdom and beneficence of governments.”
Dagny frowned, intent. She had long puzzled over this. “Then the mind does have a material basis. In which case, we should be able to produce it artificially.”
“I s’pose. However, the job may be trickier than the algorithm school imagines. For openers, ‘material’ is a concept full of weirdities. Read your quantum mechanics.”
“What about downloading?”
“You mean scanning a brain and mapping its contents into a neural, network designed for the purpose? Well, again judging by what reports I’ve seen, that does look promising. Though I’m not sure it’s a promise I’ll like to see kept.”
“Then we would have a machine with consciousness.”
“Sort of, I reckon.” Guthrie drank beer while he assembled words. “But you see, if my guess is right, we wouldn’t have created that mind ourselves. It’d be something that came from, that was a functioning of, a live body and everything that body ever experienced. The whole critter, not an isolated brain. If wecan someday impose its ‘.. molecular encoding … on an electronic or photonic matrix, maybe that’ll help us figure out what a mind really is, and maybe then we can generate one from scratch. I dunno.” He grimaced. “Me, I’d mainly feel sorry for the downloaded personality, what shadow of it there was in the machine. No belly, no balls, no nothing.”
“It would have sensors and effectors,” Edmond pointed out. “And it need never grow old.”
‘Til settle for what nature gave me, thank you.”
“Plus antisenescents, ongoing cellular repairs, and the rest of the medical program,” Dagny gibed gently.
“Okay, I admit I’d rather not spend my last ten or twenty years doddering,” Guthrie conceded. “And a download of me might find existence interesting after all. But I think I’d be glad it wasn’t me.”
Dagny glanced at her watch. “Not to interrupt—“ she began.
“Do,” Guthrie urged. “As Antony said to Cleopatra, I am not prone to argue. I came here to relax for a bit in good company.”
“An intelligent argument, that is among the high pleasures in life,” Edmond reminded him.