Bruce Sterling - Essays. FSF Columns

They believe them because these beliefs make them feel better.

They believe them because they are sick of believing in conventional

modernism with its vast corporate institutions, its secularism, its

ruthless consumerism and its unrelenting reliance on the cold

intelligence of technical expertise and instrumental rationality.

They believe these odd things because they don't trust what they are

told by their society's authority figures. They don't believe that

what is happening to our society is good for them, or in their

interests as human beings.

The clash of world views inherent in creation-science has

mostly taken place in the United States. It has been an ugly clash in

some ways, but it has rarely been violent. Western society has had a

hundred and forty years to get used to Darwin. Many of the

sternest opponents of creation-science have in fact been orthodox

American Christian theologians and church officials, wary of a

breakdown in traditional American relations of church and state.

It may be that the most determined backlash will come not

from Christian fundamentalists, but from the legions of other

fundamentalist movements now rising like deep-rooted mushrooms

around the planet: from Moslem radicals both Sunni and Shi'ite, from

Hindu groups like Vedic Truth and Hindu Nation, from militant

Sikhs, militant Theravada Buddhists, or from a formerly communist

world eager to embrace half-forgotten orthodoxies. What loyalty do

these people owe to the methods of trained investigation that made

the West powerful and rich?

Scientists believe in rationality and objectivity -- even though

rationality and objectivity are far from common human attributes,

and no human being practices these qualities flawlessly. As it

happens, the scientific enterprise in Western society currently serves

the political and economic interests of scientists as human beings.

As a social group in Western society, scientists have successfully

identified themselves with the practice of rational and objective

inquiry, but this situation need not go on indefinitely. How would

scientists themselves react if their admiration for reason came into

direct conflict with their human institutions, human community, and

human interests?

One wonders how scientists would react if truly rational, truly

objective, truly nonhuman Artificial Intelligences were winning all

the tenure, all the federal grants, and all the Nobels. Suppose that

scientists suddenly found themselves robbed of cultural authority,

their halting efforts to understand made the object of public ridicule

in comparison to the sublime efforts of a new power group --

superbly rational computers. Would the qualities of objectivity and

rationality still receive such acclaim from scientists? Perhaps we

would suddenly hear a great deal from scientists about the

transcendant values of intuition, inspiration, spiritual understanding

and deep human compassion. We might see scientists organizing to

assure that the Pursuit of Truth should slow down enough for them

to keep up. We might perhaps see scientists struggling with mixed

success to keep Artificial Intelligence out of the schoolrooms. We

might see scientists stricken with fear that their own children were

becoming strangers to them, losing all morality and humanity as they

transferred their tender young brains into cool new racks of silicon

ultra-rationality -- all in the name of progress.

But this isn't science. This is only bizarre speculation.

For Further Reading:

THE CREATIONISTS by Ronald L. Numbers (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

Sympathetic but unsparing history of Creationism as movement and

doctrine.

THE GENESIS FLOOD: The Biblical Record and its Scientific

Implications by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris (Presbyterian

and Reformed Publishing Company, 1961). Best-known and most

often-cited Creationist text.

MANY INFALLIBLE PROOFS: Practical and Useful Evidences of

Christianity by Henry M. Morris (CLP Publishers, 1974). Dr Morris

goes beyond flood geology to offer evidence for Christ's virgin birth,

the physical transmutation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, etc.

CATALOG of the Institute for Creation Research (P O Box 2667, El

Cajon, CA 92021). Free catalog listing dozens of Creationist

publications.

CULT ARCHAEOLOGY AND CREATIONISM: Understanding

Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past edited by Francis B. Harrold

and Raymond A. Eve (University of Iowa Press, 1987). Indignant

social scientists tie into highly nonconventional beliefs about the

past.

We are now seven years away from the twenty-first century. Where are all our robots?

A faithful reader of SF from the 1940s and '50s might be surprised to learn that we're not hip-deep in robots by now. By this time, robots ought to be making our breakfasts, fetching our newspapers, and driving our atomic-powered personal helicopters. But this has not come to pass, and the reason is simple.

We don't have any robot brains.

The challenge of independent movement and real-time perception in a natural environment has simply proved too daunting for robot technology. We can build pieces of robots in plenty. We have thousands of robot arms in 1993. We have workable robot wheels and even a few workable robot legs. We have workable sensors for robots and plenty of popular, industrial, academic and military interest in robotics. But a workable robot brain remains beyond us.

For decades, the core of artificial-intelligence research has involved programming machines to build elaborate symbolic representations of the world. Those symbols are then manipulated, in the hope that this will lead to a mechanical comprehension of reality that can match the performance of organic brains.

Success here has been very limited. In the glorious early days of AI research, it seemed likely that if a machine could be taught to play chess at grandmaster level, then a "simple" task like making breakfast would be a snap. Alas, we now know that advanced reasoning skills have very little to do with everyday achievements such as walking, seeing, touching and listening. If humans had to "reason out" the process of getting up and walking out the front door through subroutines and logical deduction, then we'd never budge from the couch. These are things we humans do "automatically," but that doesn't make them easy -- they only seem easy to us because we're organic. For a robot, "advanced" achievements of the human brain, such as logic and mathematical skill, are relatively easy to mimic. But skills that even a mouse can manage brilliantly are daunting in the extreme for machines.

In 1993, we have thousands of machines that we commonly call "robots." We have robot manufacturing companies and national and international robot trade associations. But in all honesty, those robots of 1993 scarcely deserve the name. The term "robot" was invented in 1921 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek, for a stage drama. The word "robot" came from the Czech term for "drudge" or "serf." Capek's imaginary robots were made of manufactured artificial flesh, not metal, and were very humanlike, so much so that they could actually have sex and reproduce (after exterminating the humans that created them). Capek's "robots" would probably be called "androids" today, but they established the general concept for robots: a humanoid machine.

If you look up the term "robot" in a modern dictionary, you'll find that "robots" are supposed to be machines that resemble human beings and do mechanical, routine tasks in response to commands.