They'd Rather Be Right

by Mark Clifton

  “Have you given any thought, Joe, to what you intend to do with your life? Any way you can turn your gift into constructive use?”

  “A great deal, of course,” Joe answered without hesitation. “In that, at least, I’m no different from the average fellow. You want me to work with you on this synthetic brain, don’t you, doctor? You think I may have some understanding you lack? Is that it?”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  “It could destroy the human race, you know,” Joe said quietly.

  Billings was brought up short. He felt a sudden chill, not entirely due to the bleak and heatless room in which they sat.

  “You foresee that, Joe, definitely?” he asked. “Or are you merely speculating?”

  “I’m an imperfect,” Joe answered quietly. “I often see seconds or minutes ahead. Occasionally I see days or weeks but not accurately. The future isn’t fixed. But I’m afraid of this thing. I’m afraid that if we make a machine which can think better than man, mankind wouldn’t survive it.”

  “Do you think man is worth surviving, Joe? After the things he’s done?”

  Joe fell silent, looking down at the table. Seconds became minutes. The cheap clock on the dresser ticked away a quarter of an hour. The coffee in the cups grew cold. Billings shivered in the damp cold of the unheated room, contrasted it with the animal warren comfort of the dormitories, the luxury of the frat houses. He became suddenly afraid of Joe’s answer. He had at least some conception of what it must be like to be alone, the only one of its kind, a man who could see in a world of totally blind without even a concept of sight. How much bittereness did Joe carry over from childhood?

  “Do you believe that man has reached his evolutionary peak, doctor?” Joe asked at last, breaking the heavy silence.

  “No-o,” Billings answered slowly.

  “Couldn’t the whole psi area be something which is latent, just really beginning to develop as the photosensitive cells of primitive life in animals once did? I have the feeling,” he paused, and changed his phrasing. “I know that everyone experiences psi phenomena on a subconscious level. Occasionally a freak comes along”—he used the term without bitterness—“who has no barrier to shut it out of the conscious. I… I think we’re trending toward the psi and not away from it.”

  “You think man should be given the chance to go on farther, then?” Billings asked.

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “And you think that if he finds out what the true nature of thought is, at the level he uses it, it would destroy him?”

  “It might.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s proud, vain, superficial, egotistical, superstitious,” Joe said without any emphasis. “This machine, to do what Washington wants, would have to use judgment, determine right from wrong, good from bad. Man has kept a monopoly on that—or thinks he has.”

  “What do you mean—thinks he has?” Billings asked, and felt he was nearing some door which might open on a new vista.

  “Suppose we say that white is good and black is bad,” Joe said quietly. “Any photoelectric cell then can tell good from bad. Suppose we say a high number is right and a low number is wrong. Any self-respecting cybernetic machine then can tell right from wrong.”

  “But those are purely arbitrary values, Joe,” Billings objected. “Set up for a specific expediency.”

  “You’re something of a historian, doctor,” Joe answered obliquely. “Aren’t all of them?”

  Billings started to argue along the lines of inherent human nature, instinct for good and right, basic moralities, the things man believed set him apart from the other animals. He realized that he would be talking to a telepath; that he had better stick to the facts.

  “At least man has arbitrarily set his own values, Joe,” he said. “The photoelectric cell or cybernetic machine can’t do that.” Yet he caught a glimpse of things beyond the opening door, and became suddenly silent.

  “We must emphasize that fact, doctor,” Joe said earnestly. “Man must go on, for a while, thinking that; in spite of the contrary evidence which this servomechanism will reveal. That shouldn’t be too hard to maintain. Man generally believes what he prefers to believe. Most evidence can be twisted to filter through his screen mesh of prejudices and tensions, so that it confirms rather than confounds.”

  Billings felt a wave of apprehension. He almost wished that he had not come to Joe for help on this project. Yet he felt relief, too. Joe, by the plural pronoun, had indicated that he would work on the project. Relief, because he knew that he had no knowledge whereby the problem could be approached. And he believed Joe did.

  The illusion of a door opening remained before his vision. There were dark stirrings beyond.

  The work did not progress.

  It was not due to lack of organization, or lack of cooperation. The scientists had long ago adapted to the appointment of most anyone as head of a project, and they saw nothing unusual in a specialist in psychosomatics being assigned to make up a new servomechanism.

  The lack of progress stemmed from the fact that their objective was not clearly defined. Through the days that followed, Billings was bothered, more than he cared to admit, by Joe’s warning that the semantics of their objective must be kept away from any concept of duplicating the work of the human brain. Yet that was what they were trying to do.

  He was helped none, either, by the several incidents, in meetings, when one or the other of the scientists on the project tried to tell him that was what they were trying to do.

  “If you want a servomechanism,” Gunther, the photoelectric man, said, “which will make the same decisions and take the same actions as a human plane pilot, then you must duplicate that pilot’s mental processes.”

  “If we are trying to duplicate the processes of human thought, why have no psychologists, other than yourself, been assigned to this project?” asked Hoskins, the cybernetic man.

  These questions were not easy to parry. Both of these men were first-rate scientists, and in the figurative underground, among friends who could be trusted, they asked questions to which they expected answers. The line which Joe had insisted he adopt did not satisfy them.

  “We must not permit ourselves to get confused with arguing the processes of human thought,” Billings had replied. “We will bog down in that area and get nowhere. This is simply a machine and must be approached from the mechanical.”

  Yes, it was unsatisfactory, for it was precisely the same kind of thought control which had blanketed the country. You must solve the problem, but you are not permitted to explore this and this and this avenue in your search for the possible solution.

  Joe, too, was a disappointment. Billings had succeeded in getting him appointed as project secretary. No one objected since the job required a great deal of paper work, carried little prestige, and the pay was not enticing. There would be other students assigned later to various phases of production. Billings made a mental note to assign young Tyler to something which sounded particularly impressive. The undercurrents of that cartoon could not go ignored. Joe’s appointment, therefore, seemed natural enough, and brought him into the thick of activity.

  But Joe did no more than the recording. Billings found himself in the frustrating position of having engineered the situation so that Joe would be there for question on how they should proceed, but Joe gave only vague and evasive answers. The progress reports, turned over to Rogan for forwarding on to Washington, contained a great deal of wordage and little else. That would keep Washington quiet for a while, since their tendency was to measure the worth of a report by its poundage; but it was also dangerous in case anybody felt he was slipping out of the public eye, and began to cast about for some juicy publicity.

  One of Joe’s typical answers brought typical results.

  “We already know enough to build it,” Joe had said firmly. “We’ve got all the basic principles. We can duplicate the action of the human brain, at its present level of thinking, any time we want to. Only if we
realize that’s what we’re doing, we won’t want to do it. So, on a mechanical level, we simply have to bring all the principles together and coordinate them.”

  That added up to nothing when Billings tried it. Suggestions from various departments, working piecemeal, ranged all the way from pinhead size transistors, to city block long banks of cybernetic machines. Even though they had the knowledge, if they did, to build a separate machine to take care of each possible pattern which might arise in the piloting of a plane, it would create an accumulation large enough to fill the old Empire State building.

  In exasperation, Billings called Joe to account in his office. They were alone, and Billings minced no words about the way Joe was dragging his feet.

  “Why do you want to build this machine, doctor?” Joe asked abruptly. “You’re not afraid of the consequences if you fail?”

  Billings had not expected this attack from Joe. As the weeks had passed, he had felt a growing urgency to succeed, but he had not tried to put his feelings into words. To answer Joe, he tried now.

  “Every man, who thinks, wants there to be a meaning to his life,” he said carefully, for he sensed that this was the critical point. “I’ve spent my life trying to know, to understand. Everything I’ve ever learned seems to come together in this one thing. Say I’m looking for a monument, that there should be an apex, a crowning achievement. Every man would like there to be something remaining after him, which says, ‘This is the meaning of his life.’”

  Joe was silent, and looked at him steadily. Billings realized he had expressed only a part of it, perhaps the most insignificant part. He picked up a cigarette, lit it, and took another approach.

  “A civilization, too,” he said. “Each one of them has produced some one great achievement, one specialty. There’re not all the same and with the same goals. But each succeeding civilization seems to adopt what results it can use from past achievements. It synthesizes them into its own special achievement. Our specialty has been technological advance. Never mind that everything else is borrowed and doesn’t fit us—we have achieved that. But what we have achieved could be meaningless to some future civilization unless we give it meaning now. Here, again, this thing would sum up and embody in one object the total of our technology.

  “If man’s advance is toward a broader intellect, it seems we should sum up his intellect to this point—if we can, and in our own language, that of technology. It’s the only one we speak without an accent.”

  Still Joe sat in silence, and picked absently at a frayed thread in the drape which hung near his chair. Though he meant them to be constructive, Billings realized that to Joe such arguments were futile, hopeless, destructive. An old man may think with detachment about thousand-year periods of history, and view with little concern the infinitesimal part his own life plays out of all the trillions of people who may live. But a young man is impatient with such maundering. He wants the answers to his own life, the drive which will give purpose to his own acts. And the purpose was there, too, enough to satisfy even—a Joe.

  “No man watches happily,” Billings said, “while his civilization passes and sinks back into the Dark Ages. Every man has the tragic feeling that it need not happen; that if some eventual civilization is to endure, then why not his own? True, most civilizations had one spurt which made them shine for a while before they flickered out again. But some had several spurts. Some new thing entered the life of the people. They found the energy to meet the new challenge and solve its problem.”

  Joe’s head came up at this, and he stopped pulling at the string on the curtain.

  “According to you, Joe,” Billings said in final argument, “this thing may destroy man. It may also bump him up to the next step of evolution.”

  “You’d be willing to face personal danger for that, doctor?” Joe asked suddenly.

  The room grew very still. Billings did not answer lightly, for he suspected Joe saw farther beyond the door than he could.

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Of course.”

  That was the turning point in Joe’s attitude toward the project, but it had no effect upon the various scientists, of course. They still operated on the basis of a separate machine for every requirement, and the list of requirements was endless.

  Superficially, to anyone who had not thought it through, the problem seemed not too difficult, as Washington had stated. A self-aiming gun, a self-guided missile which fastened upon a distant object, plotted its course to intersect the object, and changed its course to compensate for the change in the fleeing object’s maneuvers—these should certainly show the way.

  And back of that there had been pilotless radio-controlled planes. And back of that the catapult and the bow and arrow.

  But whether it was a self-guided missile, or a spear, there was a human mind back of it which had already predicted, used judgment, set the forces in motion according to that judgment.

  Human mind? What about the monkey who threw the coconut from the tree at its enemy? What about the skunk with its own version of the catapult? Well, mind of some kind.

  Even the amoeba varied its actions to suit the circumstances. There couldn’t be much of a brain in one cell. Yet it did react, within its limits, through variable patterns. Any psychosomaticist knows that every cell has a sort of mind of its own. But certainly a cybernetic machine has capacity for varied patterns, too, according to the circumstances. But preset, man, prechosen! But didn’t blind and reasonless environment present and prechoose what an amoeba would do? Need it be a mind, as we think of mind?

  Billings was not the only one whose thoughts went around and around in this vein, exploring the possible concepts; not the only one who found a yea for every nay. All the scientists, singly and in groups, inescapably followed the same train of reasoning; and came up against the same futility. In spite of Billings’ instructions to keep their concepts mechanical, if they were to duplicate the results of judgment between the best courses of action among the many courses of action a plane or an automobile might take, then they had to think about the processes of judging; and the nature of choosing.

  Unfortunately, each of them had had courses in psychology, absorbed its strange conclusions, allowed themselves to be influenced by its influence on man’s thinking. They arrived nowhere in their analyses. They made the mistake of judging it by the other sciences, assumed it had its foundation based in fact; and felt it must be their own fault when its results gave them nothing.

  Yet Billings remembered that Joe had told him they knew enough to build the machine. Still, what was the use of the finest watch if one had no concept of the measurement of time? One might build endless and complex speculation on the way its metal case flashed in the sun, or how it ticked with a life of its own against the ear, in the way that psychology and philosophy speculated endlessly and built complex structures of pointless word games about the nature of man.

  Billings smiled with wry amusement at the position in which he found himself. He was like a student who has been given a knotty problem to solve, knows there must be a solution but can’t find it. For he did not doubt the conviction of Joe’s statement.

  Like the bewildered student, he went to teacher. He was sincere enough and had sufficient stature that he could disregard the disparity of their ages, positions, experience, credentials. He was not too proud to accept knowledge, wherever he may find it.

  “It’s inability to communicate with each other,” Joe answered his question. “It’s like the spokes of a wheel, without any bridging rim connecting them. The hub is basic scientific knowledge. Specialized sciences radiate out from that, and in moving outward they build up their own special semantics.”

  “I’ve heard the analogy before,” Billings objected. “It’s not a good one; because, if you think about it, you’ll see that none get very far out from the hub without the assistance of the others. The concepts of one must be incorporated into the other before any of them can progress very far.”

  “They use
one another’s products, doctor,” Joe corrected without emphasis. “Whether those products be gadgets or ideas, they’re still the result of another’s specialized thinking, A mechanical engineer uses the product of the petroleum engineer without more than superficially knowing or caring about how its molecules were tailored. Say the product doesn’t work. The mechanical engineer doesn’t drop everything and spend a dozen years or so trying to find the proper lubricant. He goes back to the petroleum engineer, puts in his beef, describes the conditions which the lubricant must meet. The petroleum engineer goes away, polymerizes and catalyzes some more molecules, brings back a new sample, and now the mechanical engineer can go a little farther out on his spoke. But he doesn’t communicate except at the product use level.”

  “Then how are we going to get these men to use each other’s products, Joe?” Billings asked impatiently. “This thing is all out of hand. It isn’t taking shape at any point. The more we think about it the less it resolves itself, the more chaotic it becomes.”

  He turned to Joe and spoke levelly, almost accusingly.

  “You seem to know what needs to be done, but you don’t do anything about it, Joe. I counted on you. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did. It seemed to me that this thing was a solution for you as well as for me. You’ve never known how to put your talent to use constructively, and you must have wanted that. Well, here’s your chance.”

  He saw Joe’s face turn pale, and a mask of no expression settle over it. But his irritation and frustration made Billings plunge in where consideration had held him back before.

  “Why can’t you do that, Joe?”

  “That would mean going into their minds,” Joe said slowly, through stiff lips. “Taking over portions of their thinking, directing their actions. I haven’t done that since I played around with it as a child, before I realized what I was doing. It isn’t right for one human being—and I do think of myself as human—to control another human being.”