Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

‘He merely guards my interests,’ Cree placated. ‘He will do the same for you when he is yours. And as his advice is invariably sound, I stick at the figure of ten thousand imperials, and you may do your worst.’

After some bad-tempered bickering the landlord finally agreed. They went downstairs, where he produced the required sum in the form of a banker’s note, thus protecting Cree from being waylaid and robbed. Cree then turned to Jasperodus with a show of sternness.

‘Jasperodus, this is your new master. Serve him as you have served me.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Jasperodus said meekly.

After Cree Inwing had gone the landlord looked Jasperodus over and chuckled. ‘I heard about your little fracas this morning. A robot that cannot be commandeered – that’s a valuable commodity in this city! I’ll get a few days’ work out of you first, then, with a new ownership deed, you should fetch … let’s see … twenty-five thousand with no questions asked!’

He directed Jasperodus to his duties and went off laughing.

Late that night Jasperodus slipped away and once more turned his steps to the slums where, by means of study, he proposed to turn himself into a fully urbanised being.

8

The small room was a box ten feet by eight. The unpainted plaster of the walls was broken in places, revealing bare brick; the single window looked down three storeys to a dusty courtyard where grew a few stunted shrubs. There was, however, a chair on which Jasperodus sat – a habit he had picked up along the way, although it was physiologically unnecessary for him.

Otherwise the room was filled with books. Piles of books, tumbling in terraces and seracs, books on nearly every science that was available to the New Empire, but especially on mathematics, physics, engineering and robotics.

With the help of this untidy library of mainly second-hand volumes Jasperodus had filled in many gaps in his knowledge, and could count himself an expert in several spheres, notably that of mathematics. He had no cause now to fear he had an educational inferiority to the sophisticates of Tansiann.

His primary aim had been, as he frequently reminded himself, to excel at everything and thus to prove his equality with mankind. But time and time again he had been drawn to one particular subject: robotics. This he had studied with manic intensity, until he was conversant with all the main principles of robot design.

In his hands at the present moment was a slim volume that came to the heart of his inquiries:

ON AN ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Much study and investigation has gone into the possibility of producing an artificial consciousness which would make construct minds virtually indistinguishable from the natural variety. The formulae on which such a consciousness would have to be based have even been elucidated.

These formulae refer themselves to the central feature of consciousness, namely its characteristic property of self-reference, or the ‘problem of the perceiving “I”’ as it has been called. The nature of conscious perception is such that the perceived object becomes perfectly blended, or ‘identified’ with the perceiving subject or ‘I’. In other words ‘I’ becomes the object and at the same time remains itself. The problem of an artificial consciousness then hinges on duplicating this phenomenon.

Unfortunately no arrangement of material or energy can achieve this. All matter is essentially particulate: perfect blending does not occur. The same holds for any conceivable type of logic circuitry, no matter how advanced its state of integration may be. Early attempts at machine consciousness relied on the principle, where ‘I’ is the directrix (i.e. subject) and ‘X’ the object, of raising each to the power of the other in an alternating series, thus:

    And so on with variations, such as bending the process into an ever-accelerating cycle known as the ‘perception vortex’. No positive result was ever obtained from this method, beyond defining some techniques for ordinary machine (i.e. un-conscious) perception that were already available. The reason for this failure is that the arrangement is asymptotic – however far it is carried a unity cannot be achieved between the ‘perceiving directrix’ and the object. It may be stated categorically that consciousness cannot be artificially created in the physical universe as it is constituted, because that would require the operation of a physical entity having no differentiation between its parts, and no such entity can exist in the material realm. Consciousness must therefore have a spiritual, not a material source, and cannot be duplicated.