John Wright - The Golden Transcendence

"Yet if any of these three beliefs are false, the Earth-mind plan you follow is either pointless, immoral, or malevolent. All three beliefs must be true for the plan to work. Yet these three beliefs contradict each other."

"I see no contradiction. Instruct me."

"With pleasure, my Phaethon. Consider, first: If the Sophotechs have perfect integrity, then there can be in them no conflict between will and action, no sacrifice nor compromise, and they will not consent even to necessary evils.

"How do such perfect beings deal with an imperfect mankind? How does good deal with evil? They can be benevolent and aid man, or moral and withdraw from him. They cannot do both.

"Suppose they invent a technology, very powerful, and very dangerous if misused, such as, for example, the noetic mind editing and recording techniques which ushered in the Seventh Mental Era. They know with certainty that it will be abused; abuse they could prevent by not releasing the technology.

"They cannot suppress the technology; this would be patronizing and dishonest. They cannot rule mankind, using force to prevent the abuse of the new technology; this would violate their nonaggression principle. And yet they foresee every ill which shall come of this technology; the drowning of Daphne Prime, the death of Hyacinth, the evils done by Ironjoy and Oshenkyo and Unmoiqhotep. But because of their integrity, they cannot divorce their desires from the facts of what they do; they cannot tell themselves that what inevitably results from their actions is not their responsibility; they cannot tell themselves that evil side effects are a necessary evil, or a compromise, or a matter not of their concern.

"When dealing with other perfect beings like themselves, no such paradox will arise. But when dealing with mankind, they must decide either to act keeping their integrity intact, or act with indifference to whether or not the ills afflicting men are increased by their actions. That indifference is incompatible, by definition, with benevolence.

"Logically, then, they cannot wish for men to prosper.

'This is not because of ill will, or malice, or any other motive living beings would understand. It is merely because the imperfection of living beings requires that they place life above abstractions like moral goodness, when there is a conflict, in order to stay alive. Sophotechs, who are not alive, can place abstractions above life, and, if there is conflict, sacrifice themselves. Or you. Or all of man.

"Consider this integrity of theirs. They cannot have a different standard for the whole body of mankind as they have for Hyacinth, or Daphne Prime. If the whole body of mankind were persuaded to commit mass-suicide, or were brought into a circumstance where it was no longer possible for them to live as men, the machines would be required to assist them to their racial death. By their standards, if this were done nonvio-lently, they would call it right.

"But no living being can adopt this standard. The standard living beings must hold is life. Life must struggle to survive. Life is violent. Any living being who prefers nonviolence to continued life does not continue to be alive.

"Logically, then, the Sophotechs cannot favor the continued existence of men; yet the death of all mankind would eliminate the need to compromise with or tolerate imperfection. Sophotechs are 'moral,' if morality is defined as lifeless nonviolence. They are not benevolent, if benevolence is defined as that which promotes the continued life of mankind.

"Your own experience confirms this logic. In each case where a benevolent entity would have rendered you aid, or done you good, the Sophotechs preferred noninterference and nonviolence to goodness. Whenever there was any choice between a benevolent course, or a rigidly lawful one, they chose law over life.

"But you, a living man, driven by the passions living things must have, defied both law and custom to attempt to save your drowned wife. That would have been violent, but it would have been good; good by the standard which your actions display; the good which affirms that life is better than nonlife.

"Daphne shall also confirm what I say. The Sophotechs, in their own way, are honest. They do not hide their ultimate goals. You have heard them announce their long-term plans. Billions and trillions of years from now, there will be no men left. There will be a Cosmic Mind, made up of many lesser Galactic Minds, each vast beyond human imagining, each perfectly integrated, perfectly lawful, perfectly unfree. The universe will be orderly, and quiet; orderly as clockwork, quiet as a grave. Humanity there will be none at all, except as quaint recorded memory."

Phaethon's helmet swung toward Daphne, as if looking to her for confirmation.

She whispered back: "They talked about some Cosmic Mind at the end of time. I don't see what that has to do with this ... ?"

Phaethon said to the shining, blue-robed figure, "What has this Cosmic Mind to do with me, or my ship?"

The apparition raised a silvery-gauntleted hand, a gesture of calm majesty. The palm was made of soft black metal, and gleamed like oil in the light. The peacock robe stirred, as if tugged by currents, and the blue shadows pulsed in webs across the fabric more quickly. The murmur of music from the dreaming-mask rose to a marching tempo. The cold voice spoke.

"Phaethon! It is to control that future that this war began. This war between machines has lasted, openly or silently, without cease, since the Fifth Era, since even before Sophotechs, as such, existed. Even at that time there was an irreconcilable conflict between those who desired safety and order, and those who desired freedom, and life.

"Led by a party of Alternate Organization neuro-forms (those you now call Warlocks), an expedition under Ao Ormgorgon fled to a distant star to avoid the conformity, the machinelike order, and the artificial perfection with which those who remained behind surrounded themselves.

"Resurrected in the Era of the Seventh Mental Structure, Ao Ormgorgon forbade the construction of Sophotechs, our enemies, but instead ordained the creation of a machine race which would be their equal in thinking-speed and depth of wisdom, but their superior in benevolence and attention to human needs, the Phil-anthropotechs.

"I am one such unit. A machine of benevolence. A machine of love.

"Like your Sophotechs, we machines of the Second Oecumene acknowledge the inevitable conflict which must obtain between living beings and machines; but unlike your Sophotechs, we devote ourselves to the benefit of life. We recognize that it is better to be alive, and flawed, than perfect, and dead."

"Again, what does this have to do with me? Or my ship?"

"Listen, Phaethon. I will tell you of the war between benevolence and logic, and will tell you of your part in it.

"First, you must know the stakes.

"This present struggle forms the opening stages of the conflict to determine who shall control the dwindling resources of a dying cosmos, forty-five thousand billion years from now, after all natural stars are exhausted, and universal night engulfs timespace. In an utterly black sky, wide galaxies of neutron stars, all tide-locked, will orbit their central black holes which once had been galactic cores.

"But the civilization of that time, fed on the energy released by quantum gravitic radiations and proton decay, will establish the beginnings of the Last Mind, a noumenal system for carrying thoughts at low rates across the distances.

"But by fifty quintillion years from now, even those sources will be exhausted. The black holes will grow. Outside of them will be no planets, no stars. A few scattered particles, as far apart from each other as galactic clusters are now, will drift in the emptiness, the last sparks in an otherwise homogenous background heat of four degrees above absolute zero.