Saturday, March 14, 2015

Christian Machine Intelligence

A couple of weeks back, I recommended some stories by Clifford Simak available online, especially a novella available in the pdf's of the old Galaxy science fiction magazines - considering the price of the magazines and what they contained, they have to have been one of the best deals in the better end of light literature in history.  One edition would be likely to contain more worth while material than an entire year of premium cable TV.

That led me to re-read some of him in print, great stories like "The Thing in the Stone",  "An Autumn Land", books like his most famous ones, "City" and "Way Station".  His stories are pretty free of violence and macho posing  One of the few that had that as a theme was when a newspaper reporter came into work early - his clock was wrong - and found out that the non-electric office equipment was acting up.  He learned through his now self-typing typewriter that overnight machines had been made self-aware and the consequences for their fleshy creators was that they'd become their competition in a struggle for dominance.  That story was originally called "Bathe Your Bearings in Blood", though I have it under the title of "Skirmish".

But even with all the trappings of science fiction, Simak's main theme was of loneliness as a consequence of non-conformity, often the result of heightened awareness, voluntary or involuntary.   One of the best of those, "All the Traps of Earth,"  doesn't have a human being as a main character but a 600 year old robot,  Richard Daniel, whose human owners, the Barrington family, had just died out, leaving him unprotected from the law that commands that no robot would be allowed to have a memory persist for more than a century.   After consulting a lawyer and a clergyman, who can't do anything for him, he takes it on the lam, managing to both leave his identity behind on Earth and, through the experience of a long voyage unprotected from the raw non-environs of interplanetary space, gains psychic abilities and powers unavailable to human beings*.   If I wasn't able to tell you that you can find a pirated version of the story online in a text file, I wouldn't be enticing you with a description of it.  It's worth following Richard Daniel into crime to read it, if you don't have a legal copy available.   Simak is long gone to his reward so I don't feel guilty about pointing this out.

So, in leaving behind his old identity - and his old body - Richard Daniel obtains his freedom, escaping "all the traps of Earth" that would have destroyed him.
More important to Richard Daniel, though, is that in the process he has also gained a heightened moral understanding, based in serving the needs of others, especially those who are most in need that also gives him a wider and greater identity than one that service to the aristocratic Barringtons had given him.  It is the central irony of the story that his greatest freedom, his greatest achievement of obtaining an identity, comes with that freely taking on that burden of service. In short, he fulfills the teaching that the greatest one will become the servant of the least.

I don't know how seriously Clifford Simak might have taken the improbable dream of machines actually becoming conscious or intelligent in any human sense of the word but, even for a total unbeliever in that such as I am, he made brilliant use of it in this and a lot of other stories.  Not all of them coming to the same conclusion.

*  In some of his later stories, people have quite developed psychic abilities, so he wasn't a dogmatic denier of the possibility as so many of his contemporaries and later ones would become, especially under the coersive bullying of the CSICOP set.

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