Robot and the Man - [Adventures in Science Fiction 04]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  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 recon-strutting 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!

  ~ * ~

  October 22, 1959

  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.

  ~ * ~

  October 25, 1959

  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.”

  “You mean,” the boss said with a smile, “that it’s stumping you.”

  I was relieved to see him taking it so well because I know how anxious he is to get results from the Pro lab. Since Pro is one of the few things going on at ifACS that can be talked about, he’s impatient for us to come up with something he can release to the press. As the public relations officer explained it to me at dinner the other night, people get worried when they know there’s something like ifacs going, but don’t get any real information about it, so the boss, naturally, wants to relieve the public’s curiosity with a good, reassuring story about our work.

  I knew I was taking an awful chance spilling the whole K-N thing to him the way I did, but I had to lay the groundwork for a little plan I’ve just begun to work on.

  “By the way, sir,” I said, “I ran into Len Ellsom the other day. I didn’t know he was here.”

  “Do you know him?” the boss said. “Good man. One of the best brains-and-games men you’ll find anywhere.”

  I explained that Len had gotten his degree at m.i.t. the year before I did. From what I’d heard, I added, he’d done some important work on the Remington-Rand ballistics computer.

  “He did indeed,” the boss said, “but that’s not the half of it. After that he made some major contributions to the robot chess player. As a matter of fact, that’s why he’s here.”

  I said I hadn’t heard about the chess player.

  “As soon as it began to play a really good game of chess, Washington put the whole thing under wraps for security reasons. Which is why you won’t hear any more about it from me.”

  I’m no Eniac, but I can occasionally put two and two together myself. If the boss’s remarks mean anything, they mean that an electronic brain capable of playing games has been developed, and that it’s led to something important militarily. Of course! I could kick myself for not having guessed it before.

  Brains-and-games—that’s what ms is all about, obviously. It had to happen: out of the mathematical analysis of chess came a robot chess player, and out of the chess p
layer came some kind of mechanical brain that’s useful in military strategy. That’s what Len Ellsom’s in the middle of.

  “Really brilliant mind,” the boss said after we’d sawed for a while. “Keen. But he’s a little erratic—quirky, queer sense of humor. Isn’t that your impression?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “I’d be the last one in the world to say a word against Len, but he was always a little peculiar. Very gay one moment and very sour the next, and inclined to poke fun at things other people take seriously. He used to write poetry.”

  “I’m very glad to know that,” the boss said. “Confirms my own feeling about him.”

  So the boss has some doubts about Len.

  ~ * ~

  October 27, 1959

  Unpleasant evening with Len. It all started after dinner when he showed up in my room, wagged his finger at me and said, “Ollie, you’ve been avoiding me. That hurts. Thought we were pals, thick and thin and till debt and death do us part.”

  I saw immediately that he was drunk—he always gets his words mixed up when he’s drunk—and I tried to placate him by explaining that it wasn’t anything like that; I’d been busy.

  “If we’re pals,” he said, “come on and have a beer with me.”

  There was no shaking him off, so I followed him down to his car and we drove to this sleazy little bar in the Negro part of town. As soon as we sat down in a booth, Len borrowed all the nickels I had, put them in the jukebox and pressed the levers for a lot of old Louie Armstrong records.

  “Sorry, kid,” he said. “I know how you hate this real jazzy stuff, but can’t have a reunion without music, and there isn’t a polka or cowboy ballad or hillbilly stomp in the box. They lack the folksy touch on this side of the tracks.” Len has always been very snobbish about my interest in folk music.

  I asked him what he’d been doing during the day.

  “Lushing it up,” he said. “Getting stinking from drinking.” He still likes to use the most flamboyant slang; I consider it an infantile form of protest against what he regards as the “genteel” manner of academic people. “I got sort of restless this morning, so I ducked out and beat it into New York and looked up my friend Steve Lundy in the Village. Spent the afternoon liquidating our joint assets. Liquidating our assets in the joints.”

  What, I wanted to know, was he feeling restless about?

  “Restless for going on three years now.” His face grew solemn, as though he were thinking it over very carefully. “I’ll amend that statement. Hell with the Aesopian language. I’ve been a plain lush for going on three years. Ever since-”

  If it was something personal—I suggested.

  “It is not something personal,” he said, mimicking me. “Guess I can tell an old cyberneticist pal about it. Been a lush for three years because I’ve been scared for three years. Been scared for three years because three years ago I saw a machine beat a man at a game of chess.”

  A machine that plays chess? That was interesting, I said.

  “Didn’t tell you the whole truth the other day,” Len mumbled. “I did work on the Remington-Rand computer, sure, but I didn’t come to ifacs directly from that. In between I spent a couple years at the Bell Telephone Labs. Claude Shannon— or, rather, to begin with there was Norbert Wiener back at m.I.t.—it’s complicated . . .”

  “Look,” I said, “are you sure you want to talk about it?”

  “Stop wearing your loyalty oath on your sleeve,” he said belligerently. “Sure I want to talk about it. Greatest subject I know. Begin at the beginning. Whole thing started back in the Thirties with those two refugee mathematicians who used to be here at the Institute for Advanced Studies when Einstein was around. Von Morgan and Neumanstern, no, Von Neumann and Aforganstern. You remember, they did a mathematical analysis of all the possible kinds of games, poker, tossing pennies, chess, bridge, everything, and they wrote up their findings in a volume you certainly know, The Theory of Games.

  “Well, that got Wiener started. You may remember that when he founded the science of cybernetics, he announced that on the basis of the theory of games, it was feasible to design a robot computing machine that would play a better than average game of chess. Right after that, back in ‘49 or maybe it was ‘50, Claude Shannon of the Bell Labs said Wiener wasn’t just talking, and to prove it he was going to build the robot chess player. Which he proceeded withforth—forthwith—to do. Sometime in ‘53, I was taken off the Remington-Rand project and assigned to Bell to work with him.”

  “Maybe we ought to start back,” I cut in. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “The night is young,” he said, “and you’re so dutiful. Where was I? Oh yes, Bell. At first our electronic pawn-pusher wasn’t so hot—it could beat the pants off a lousy player, but an expert just made it look silly. But we kept improving it, see, building more and more electronic anticipation and gambit-plotting powers into it, and finally, one great day in ‘55, we thought we had all the kinks ironed out and were ready for the big test. By this time, of course, Washington had stepped in and taken over the whole project.

  “Well, we got hold of Fortunescu, the world’s champion chess player, sat him down and turned the robot loose on him. For four hours straight we followed the match, with a delegation of big brass from Washington, and for four hours straight the machine trounced Fortunescu every game. That was when I began to get scared. I went out that night and got really loaded.”

  What had he been so scared about? It seemed to me he should have felt happy.

  “Listen, Ollie,” he said, “for Christ’s sake, stop talking like a Boy Scout for once in your life.”

  If he was going to insult me-

  “No insult intended. Just listen. I’m a terrible chess player. Any five-year-old could chatemeck—checkmate—me with his brains tied behind his back. But this machine which I built, helped build, is the champion chess player of the world. In other words, my brain has given birth to a brain which can do things my brain could never do. Don’t you find that terrifying?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You made the machine, didn’t you? Therefore, no matter what it does, it’s only an extension of you. You should feel proud to have devised a powerful new tool.”

  “Some tool,” he sneered. He was so drunk by now that I could hardly understand what he was saying. “The General Staff boys in Washington were all hopped up about that little old tool, and for a plenty good reason—they understood that mechanized warfare is only the most complicated game the human race has invented so far, an elaborate form of chess which uses the population of the world for pawns and the globe for a chessboard. They saw, too, that when the game of war gets this complex, the job of controlling and guiding it becomes too damned involved for any number of human brains, no matter how nimble.

  “In other words, my beamish Boy Scout, modern war needs just this kind of strategy tool; the General Staff has to be mechanized along with everything else. So the Pentagon boys set up ifacs and handed us a top-priority cybernetics project: to build a superduper chess player that could oversee a complicated military maneuver, maybe later a whole campaign, maybe ultimately a whole global war.

  “We’re aiming at a military strategy machine which can digest reports from all the units on all the fronts and from moment to moment, on the basis of that steady stream of information, grind out an elastic overall strategy and dictate concrete tactical directives to all the units. Wiener warned this might happen, and he was right. A very nifty tool. Never mind how far we’ve gotten with the thing, but I will tell you this: I’m a lot more scared today than I was three years ago.”

  So that was the secret of ms! The most extraordinary machine ever devised by the human mind! It was hard to conceal the thrill of excitement I felt, even as a relative outsider.

  “Why all the jitters?” I said. “This could be the most wonderful tool ever invented. It might eliminate war altogether.”

  Len was quiet for a while, gulping his beer and looking off into space.
Then he turned to me.

  “Steve Lundy has a cute idea,” he said. “He was telling me about it this afternoon. He’s a bum, you see, but he’s got a damned good mind and he’s done a lot of reading. Among other things, he’s smart enough to see that once you’ve got your theory of games worked out, there’s at least the logical possibility of converting your Eniac into what he calls a Strategy Integrator and Computer. And he’s guessed, simply from the Pentagon’s hush-hush policy about it, that that’s what we’re working on here at ifacs. So he holds forth on the subject of Emsiac, and I listen.”

  “What’s his idea?” I asked.

  “He thinks Emsiac might eliminate war, too, but not in the way a Boy Scout might think. What he says is that all the industrialized nations must be working away like mad on Emsiac, just as they did on the atom bomb, so let’s assume that before long all the big countries will have more or less equal ms machines. All right. A cold war gets under way between countries A and B, and pretty soon it reaches the showdown stage. Then both countries plug in their Emsiacs and let them calculate the date on which hostilities should begin. If the machines are equally efficient, they’ll hit on the same date. If there’s a slight discrepancy, the two countries can work out a compromise date by negotiation.