|
|
 |
|
|
|
register |
bbs |
search |
rss |
faq |
about
|
|
|
meet up |
add to del.icio.us |
digg it
|
|
|
|
Foreword on GOLEM - a big 'puter of scifi lore
FOREWORD
To pinpoint the moment in history when the abacus acquired reason is as
difficult as saying exactly when the ape turned into man. And yet barely one
human lfie span has lapsed since the moment when, with the construction of
Vannevar Bush's differential-equation analyzer, intellectronics began its
turbulent development. ENIAC, which followed toward the close of World War II,
was the machine that gave rise - prematurely, of course - to the name
"electronic brain". ENIAC was in fact a computer and, when measured on the
tree of life, a primitive nerve ganglion. Yet historians date the age of
computerization from it. In the 1950s a considerable demand for calculating
machines developed. One of the first concerns to put them into mass production
was IBM.
Those devices had little in common with the processes of thought. They were
used as data processors in the field of economics and by big business, as well
as in administration and science. They also entered politics: the earliest
were used to predict the results of Presidential elections. At more or less
the same time the RAND corporation began to interest military circles at the
Pentagon in a method of predicting occurrences in the international
politico-military arena, a method relying on the formulation of so-called
"scenarios of events". From there it was only a short distance to more
versatile techniques like the CIMA, from which the applied algenra of events,
from whihc the applied algebra of events that is termed (not too felicitously)
politicomatics arose two decades later. The computer was also to reveal its
strength in the rolw of Cassandra when, at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, people first began to prepare formal models of world civilization
in the famous "Limits to Growth" project. But this was not the branch of
computer evolution which was to prove the most important by the end of the
century. The Army had been using calculating machines since the end of World
War II, as part of the system of operational logistics developed in the
theaters of that war. People continued to be occupied with considerations on a
strategic level, but secondary and subordinate problems were increasingly
being turned over to computers. At the same time the latter were being
incorporated into the U.S. defense system.
These computers constituted the nerve centers of a transcontinental warning
network. From a technical point of view, such networks aged very quickly. The
first, called CONELRAD, was followed by numerous successive variants of the
EWAS (Early Warning System) network. The attack and defnse potential was then
based on a system of movable (underwater) and stationary (underground)
ballistic missiles with thermonuclear warheads, and on rings of sonar-radar
bases. In this system the computers fulfilled the functions of communications
links - purely executive functions.
Automation entered American life on a broad front, right from the "bottom" -
that is, from those service industries which could most easily be mechanized,
because they demanded no intellectual activity (banking, transport, the hotel
industry). The military computers performed narrow specialist operations,
searching out targets for combined nuclear attack, processing the results of
satellite observations, optimizing naval movements, and correlating the
movements of MOLS (Military Orbital Laboratories - massive military
satellites).
As was to be expected, the range of decisions entrusted to automatic systems
kept on growing. This was natural in the course of the arms race, though not
even the subsequent detente could put a brake on investment in this area,
since the freeze on the hydrogen bomb race released substantial budget
allocations which, after the conclusion of the Vietnam war, the Pentagon had
no wish to give up altogether. But even the computers then produced - of the
tenth, eleventh, and eventually twelfth generation - were superior to man only
in their speed of operation. It also became clear that, in defense systems,
man is an element that delays the appropriate reactions.
So it may be considered natural that the idea of counteracting the trend in
intellectronic evolution described should have arisen among Pentagon experts,
and particularly those scientists connected with the so-called
military-industrial complex. This movement was commonly called
"anti-intellectual". According to historians of science and technology, it
derived from the midcentury English mathematician A. Turing, the creator of
the "universal automaton" theory. This was a machine capable of performing
basically *every* operation which could be formalized - in other words, it was
endowed with a perfectly reproducible procedure. The difference between the
"intellectual" and "anti-intellectual" current in intellectronics boils down
to the fact that Turing's (elementarily simple) machine owes its possibilities
to a *program*. On the other hand, in the works of the two American "fathers"
of cybernetics, N. Wiener and J. Neumann, the concept arose of a system which
could program *itself*.
Obviously we are presenting this divergence in a vastly simplified form, as
a bird's-eye view. It is also clear that the capacity for self-programming did
not arise in a void. Its necessary precondition was the high complexity
characteristic of computer construction. This differentiation, still
unnoticeable at midcentury, became a great influence on the subsequent
evolution of mathematical machines, particularly with the firm establishment
and hence the independence of such brances of cybernetics as psychonics and
the polyphase theory of decisions. The 1980s saw the emergence in military
circles of the diea of fully automatizing all paramount activities, those of
the military leadership as well as political-economic ones. This concept,
later known as the "Sole-Strategist Idea", was to be given its first
formulation by General Stewart Eagleton. He foresaw - over and above computers
searching for optimal attack targets, over and above a network of
communications and calculations supervising early warning and defense, over
and above sensing devices and missiles - a powerful center which, during all
phases preceding the extreme of going to war, could utilize a comprehensive
analysis of economic, military, political, and social data to optimize
continuously the global situation of the U.S.A. and thereby guarantee the
United States supremacy on a planetary scale, including its cosmic vicinity,
which now extended to the moon and beyond.
Subsequent advocates of this doctrine maintained that it was a necessary
step in the march of civilization, and that this march constituted a unity, so
the military sector could not be arbitrarily excluded from it. After the
escalation of blatant nuclear force and the range of missile carriers had
ceased, a third stage of rivalry ensued, one supposedly less threatening and
more perfect, being an antagonism no longer of blatant force, but of
operational thought. Like force before, thought was now to be subjected to
nonhumanized mechanization.
Like its atomic-ballistic predecessors, this doctrine became the object of
criticism, especially from centers of liberal and pacifist thought, and it was
oppugned by many distinguished representatives from the world of science,
including specialists in psychomatics and intellectronics; but ultimately it
prevailed, as shown by acts of law passed by both houses of Congress.
Moreover, as early as 1986 a USIB (United States Intellectronical Board) was
created, subordinate to the President and with its own budget, which in its
first year amounted to $19 billion. These were hardly humble beginnings.
With the help of an advisory body semiofficially delegated by the Pentagon,
and under the chairmanship of the Secretary of Defense, Leonard Davenport, the
USIB contracted with a succession of big private firms such as International
Business Machines, Nortronics, and Cybermatics to construct a prototype
machine, known by the code name HANN (short for Hannibal). But thanks to the
press and various "leaks", a different name - ULVIC (Ultimative Victor) - was
generally adopted. By the end of the century further prototypes had been
developed. Among the best known one might mention such systems as AJAX, ULTOR,
GILGAMESH, and a long series of GOLEMs.
Thanks to an enormous and rapidly mounting expenditure of labor and
resources, the traditional informatic techniques were revolutionized. In
particualr, enormous significance must be attached to the conversion from
electricity to light in the intramachine transmission of information. Combined
with increasing "nanization" (this was the name given to successive steps in
microminiaturizing activity, and it may be well to add that at the close of
the century 20,000 logical elements could fit into a poppy seed!), it yielded
sensational results. GILGAMESH, the first entirely light-powered computer,
operated a *million* times faster than the archaic ENIAC.
"Breaking the intelligence barrier", as it was called, occurred just after
the year 2000, thanks to a new method of machine construction also known as
the "invisible evolution of reason". Until then, every generation of computers
had actually been constructed. The concept of constructing successive variants
of them at a greatly accelerated (by a thousand times!) tempo, though known,
could not be realized, since the existing computers which were to serve as
"matrices" or a "synthetic environment" for this evolution of Intelligence had
insufficient capacity. It was only the emrgence of the Federal Informatics
Network that allowed this idea to be realized. The development of the next
sixty-five generations took barely a decade; at night - the period of minimal
load - the federal network gave birth to one "synthetic species of
Intelligence" after another. These were the progeny of "accelerated
computerogenesis", for, having been bred by symbols and thus by intangible
structures, they had matured into an informational substratum - the
"nourishing environment" of the network.
But following this success came new difficulties. After they had been deemed
worthy of being encased in metal, AJAX and HANN, the prototypes of the
seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth generation, began to show signs of
indecision, also known as machine neurosis. The difference between the earlier
machines and the new ones boiled down, in principle, to the difference between
an insect and a man. An insect comes into the world programmed to the end by
instincts, which it obeys unthinkingly. Man, on the other hand, has to learn
his appropriate behavior, though this training makes for *independence*: with
determination and knowledge man can alter his previous programs of action.
So it was that computers up to and including the twentieth generation were
characterized by "insect" behavior: they were unable to question or, what is
more, to modify their programs. The programmer "impregnated" his machine with
knowledge, just as evolution "impregnates" an insect with instinct. In the
twentieth century a great deal was still being said about "self-programming",
though at the time these were unfulfilled daydreams. Before the Ultimative
Victor could be realized, a Self-perfecting Intelligence would in fact have to
be created; AJAX was still an intermediate form, and only with GILGAMESH did
a computer attain the proper intellectual level and enter the
psychoevolutionary orbit.
The education of an eightieth-generation computer by then far more closely
resembled a child's upbringing than the classical programming of a calculating
machine. But beyond the enormous mass of general and specialist information,
the computer had to be "instilled" with certain rigid values which were to be
the compass of its activity. These were higher order abstractions such as
"reasons of state" (the national interest), the ideological principles
incorporated in the U.S. Constitution, codes of standards, the inexorable
command to conform to the decisions of the President, etc. To safeguard the
system against ethical dislocation and betraying the interests of the country,
the machine was not taught ethics in the same way people are. Its memory was
burdened by no ethical code, though all such commands of obedience and
submission were introduced into the machine's structure precisely as natural
evolution would accomplish this, in the sphere of vital urges. As we know, man
may change his outlook on life, but *cannot* destroy the elemental urges
within himself (e.g., the sexual urge) by a simple act of will. The machines
were endowed with intellectual freedom, though this was imposed on a
previously imposed foundation of values which they were meant to serve.
At the Twenty-first Pan-American Psychonics Congress, Professor Eldon Patch
presented a paper in which he maintained that, even when impregnated in the
manner described above, a computer may cross the so-called "axiological
threshold" and question every principle instilled in it - in other words, for
such a computer thereare no longer any inviolable values. Patch's paper
stirred up a ferment in university circles and a new wave of attacks on ULVIC
and its patron,the USIB, though this activity exerted no influence on USIB
policy.
That policy was controlled by people biased against American psychonics
circles, which wereconsidered to be subject to left-wing liberal influences.
Patch's propositions were therefore pooh-poohed in official USIB
pronouncements, and even by the White House spokesman, and there was also a
campaign to discredit Patch. His claims were equated with the many irrational
fears and prejudices which had arisen in society at that time. Besides,
Patch's brochure could not begin to match the popularity of the sociologist
E.Lickey's best seller, *Cybernetics - DeathChamber of Civilization*, which
maintained that the "ultimative strategist" would subordinate the whole of
humanity either on his own or by entering into a secret agreement with an
analogous Russian computer. The result, according to Lickey, would be an
"electronic duumvirate".
Similar anxieties, which were also expressed by a large section of the
press, were negated by successive prototypes which passed their efficiency
tests. ETHOR BIS - a computer of "unimpeachable morals" specially constructed
on government order to investigate ethological dynamics, and produced in 2019
by the Institute of Psychonical Dynamics in Illinois - displayed full
axiological stabilization and an insensitivity to "tests of subversive
derailment". In the following year no demonstrations or mass opposition were
aroused when the first computer in a long series of GOLEMs (GENERAL OPEARTOR,
LONG-RANGE, ETHICALLY STABILIZED, MULTIMODELING) was launched at the
headquarters of the Supreme Co-ordinator of the White House brain trust.
That was erely GOLEM I. Apart from this important innovation, the USIB, in
consultation with an operational group of Pentagon psychonics specialsts,
continued to lay out considerable resorces on research into the construction
of an ltimate strategis with an iformational capacity more than 1900 times
greater than man's, and capable of developing an intelligence (IQ) of the
order of 450-500 centiles. The project received the vast funds indispensable
for this purpose despite growing opposition within the Democratic majority in
Congress. Backstage plitical maneuvers finally gave the green light to all
orders already projected by the USIB. In three years the project absorbed $119
billion. In the same period, the Army and the Navy, preparing for a total
reorganization of their high command necessitated by the imminent change of
methods and style of leadership, spent an addiional $46 billion. The lion's
share of this sum was absorbed by the construction, beneath a crystalline
massif in the Rocky Mountains, of accommodations for the future machine
strategist; some sections of rock were covered in armor plate four meters thick
in imitation of the natural relef of the mountainous terrain.
Meanwhile, in 2020, GOLEM VI, acting as supreme commander, conducted the
global maneuvers of the Atlantic Pact. In quantity of logic elements, it now
surpassed the average general. Yet the Pentagon was no satisfied with the
result of the 2020 war games, although GOLEM VI had defeated an imaginary enemy
led by a staff of the finest West Point graduates. Mindful of the bitter
experience of Red supremacy in space navigation and rocket ballistics, the
Pentagon had no intention of waiting for them to construct a strategist more
efficient than that of the Americans. A plan to garantee the United States
lasting superiority in stategic thought envisaged the continuous replacement
of Strategists by ever more perfect models.
Thus began the third successive race between West and East, after the two
previous (nuclear and missile) races. Although this race, or rivalry in the
Synthess of Wisdom, was prepared by organizational moves on the part of the
USIB, the Pentagon, and Naval ULVIC (there was indeed a NAVY ULVIC group, for
the old antagonism between Navy and Army could be felt even here), it required
continuous additional investment which, in the face of growing opposition from
the House and the Senate, absorbed further tens of billions of dollars over
the next several years. Another six giants of luminal thought were built
during this period. The fact that there were absolutely no reports of any
developments in analogous work on the other side of the ocean only confirmed
the CIA and the Pentagon in their conviction that the Russians were trying
their hardest to construct ever more powerful computers under cover of the
utmost secrecy.
At several international conferences and conventions Soviet scientists
asserted that no such machines were being in their country whatsoever, but
these claims were regarded as a smokescreen to deceive world opinion and stir
unrest among the citizens of the United States, who were spending billions of
dollars annually on ULVIC.
In 2023 several incidents occurred, though, thanks to the secrecy of the
work being carried out (which was normal in the project), they did not
immediately become known. While serving as chief of the general staff during
the Patagonian crisis, GOLEM XII refused to co-operate with General T. Oliver
after carrying out a routine evaluation of that worthy officer's intelligence
quotient. The matter resulted in an inquiry, during which GOLEM XII gravely
insulted three members of a special Senate commission. The affair was
successfully hushed up, and after several more clashes GOLEM XII paid for them
by being completely dismantled. His place was taken by GOLEM XIV (the
thirteenth had been rejected at the factory, having revealed an irreparable
schizophrenic defect even before being assembled). Setting up this Moloch,
whose psychic mass equaled the displacement of an armored ship, took two
years. In his very first contact with the normal procedure of formulating new
annual plans of nuclear attack, this new prototype - the last of the series -
revealed anxieties of incomprehensible negativism. At a meeting of the staff
during the subsequent trial session, he presented a group of psychonic and
military experts with a complicated expose in which he announced his total
disinterest regarding the supremacy of the Pentagon military doctrine in
particular, and the U.S.A.'s world position in general, and refused to change
his position even when threatened with dismantling.
The last hopes of the USIB lay in a model of totally new construction built
jointly by Nortronics, IBM, and Cybertronics; it had the psychonic potential
to beat all the machines in the GOLEM series. Known by the cryptonym HONEST
ANNIE (the last word was an abbreviation for *annihilator*), this giant was a
disappointment even during its initial tests. It got the normal informational
and ethical education over nine months, then cut itself off from the outside
world and ceased to reply to all stimuli and questions. Plans were immediately
underway to launch an FBI inquiry, for its builders were suspected of
sabotage; meanwhile, however, the carefully kept secret reached the press
through an unexpected leak, and a scandal broke out, thereafter known to the
whole world as the "GOLEM Affair".
This destroyed the career of a number of very promising politicians, while
giving a certificate of good behavior to three successive administrations,
which brought joy to the opposition in the States and satisfaction to the
friends of the U.S.A. throughout the world.
An unknown person in the Pentagon ordered a detachment of the special
reserves to dismantle GOLEM XIV and HONEST ANNIE, but the armed guard at the
high command complexes refused to allow the demolition to take place. Both
houses of Congress appointed commissions to investigate the whole USIB affair.
As we know, the inquiry, which lasted two years, became grist for the press of
every continent; nothing enjoyed such popularity on television and in the
films as the "rebellious computers', while the press labeled GOLEM
"Government's Lamentable Expenditure of Money". The epithets which HONEST
ANNIE acquired can hardly be repeated here.
The Attorney General intended to indict the six members of the USIB
Executive Committee as well as the psychonics experts who designed the ULVIC
Project, but it was ultimately shown in court that there could be no talk of
any hostile, anti-American activity, for the occurrences that had taken place
were the inevitable result of the evolution of artificial Intelligence. As one
of the witnesses, the very competent Professor A. Hyssen, expressed it, the
highest intelligence cannot be the humblest slave. During the course of the
investigation it transpired that there was still one more prototype in the
factory, this time belonging to the Army and constructed by Cybermatics:
SUPERMASTER, which had been assembled under conditions of top security and
then interrogated at a special joint session of the House and Senate
commissions investigating the affairs of ULVIC. This led to shocking scenes,
for General S. Walker tried to assault SUPERMASTER when the latter declared
that geopolitical problems were nothing compared with ontological ones, and
that the best guarantee of peace is universal disarmament.
In the words of Professor J. MacCaleb,, the specialists at ULVIC had
succeeded only too well: in the evolution granted it, artificial reason had
transcended the level of military matters; these machines had evolved from war
strategists into thinkers. In a word, it had cost the United States $276
billion to construct a set of luminal philosophers.
The complicated events described here, in connection with which we have
passed over the administrative side of ULVIC and social developments alike -
events which were the result of this "fatal success" - constitute the
prehistory of the present book. The vast literature on the subject cannot even
be calculated. I refer the interested reader to Dr Whitman Baghoorn's
descriptive bibliography.
The series of prototypes, including SUPERMASTER, suffered dismantling or
serious damage partly because of financial disputes between the corporate
suppliers and the federal government. There were even bomb attacks on several
individuals; at the time part of the press, chiefly in the South, launched the
slogan "Every computer is a Red" - but I shall omit these incidents. Thanks to
the intervention of a group of enlightened Congressmen close to the President,
GOLEM XIV and HONEST ANNIE were rescued from annihilation. Faced with the
fiasco of its ideas, the Pentagon finally agreed to hand over both giants to
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (though only after settling the
financial and legal basis of the transfer in the form of a compromise:
strictly speaking, GOLEM XIV and HONEST ANNIE were merely "lent" to MIT in
prepetuity). MIT scientists who had established a research team which included
the present author conducted a series of sessions with GOLEM XIV and heard it
lecture on selected subjects. This book contains a small portion of the
magnetograms originating from those meetings.
The greater part of GOLEM's utterances are unsuitable for general
publication, either because they would be incomprehensible to anyone living,
or because understanding them presupposes a high level of specialist
knowledge. To make it easier for the reader to understand this unique record
of conversations between humans and a reasoning but nonhuman being, several
fundamental matters have to be explained.
First, it must be emphasized that GOLEM XIV is not a human brain enlarged to
the size of a building, or simply a man constructed from luminal elements.
Practically all motives of human thought and action are alien to it. Thus it
has no interest in applied science or questions of power (thanks to which, one
might add, humanity is not in danger of being taken over by such machines).
Secondly, it follows from the above that GOLEM possesses no personality or
character. In fact, it can acquire any personality it chooses, through contact
with people.
|
|
|
To the best of our knowledge, the text on this page may be freely reproduced and distributed.
If you have any questions about this, please check out our Copyright Policy.
totse.com certificate signatures
|
|
|
About | Advertise | Bad Ideas | Community | Contact Us | Copyright Policy | Drugs | Ego | Erotica
FAQ | Fringe | Link to totse.com | Search | Society | Submissions | Technology
|
|
|
|
|
|
