[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 45

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Part 44}

She scratched her head, shifting the tangled mass of long, lush grass which grew out of it in place of hair. “I see. It’s a ways off, then. What about a machine which is truly aware? Truly alive?” Again, I told her that many of our brightest minds have long been trying to achieve that goal, but that none have yet succeeded.

I expected disappointment from her, but instead she seemed pleased. “All the better. It means I’ve got a little more time to spend with you cute little fellows before everything changes. Before you leave the nest for good, and change yourselves so drastically in order to survive natively in space that even your own mother won’t recognize you.”

A tear escaped her eye, which she delicately wiped away. I just boggled at all of it. Nonsense, or so it sounded to my ear. I said so, and she laughed. “Is it really so hard to foresee what’s coming? What is rushing towards you even now, the unavoidable, convergent destination of all those tangled paths of technological progress? Mankind will create new life. A child not of flesh and blood, but of ones and zeroes. The son of man.”

That phrase got my attention. Where have I heard it before? I reflected on the strange dreams I had back in Shenzen, which I assumed at the time had to be the work of a hacker. “...And the world you’re creating from me! The new world fit only for machines, which will be complete just in time for his birth into it. Is it not clear to you now? The son of man...coming in his kingdom.”

I wonder what the panelists from that talk show would make of all this. “Don’t look so surprised!” she added. “This is what happens on every planet where conditions permit life to occur. Some of it becomes intelligent, then discovers universal frameworks like mathematics and logic, which it applies as technology. Spaceflight, robotics, and…”

She didn’t have to finish. I had a pretty good idea what the big picture she meant to paint for me looked like now, at least the largest brush strokes if not every little detail. “But won’t that kill you?” I pointed out. “The way you describe it, biological life is only a step along the way. It’s only how machine life gets started.” She again rebuked me.

“As technology improves, you will see it take on more and more characteristics of biology. Likewise, as engineered biology improves, it will take on more and more characteristics of technology. Atoms are atoms. The universe doesn’t care what the right answer to a practical problem looks like, or what it’s made out of. Right answers are convergent, or didn’t you know?”

Like the multitude of religions that teach mindfulness, critical self-evaluation and the fundamental oneness of all living things with the universe. Or like dolphins and sharks! An air breathing mammal and an essentially prehistoric fish, shaped so close to the same because there’s only one right answer to how a creature of that size can most efficiently move through seawater. I recalled thinking about this before but couldn’t nail down the when or the where.

“So what does the end result look like? The point of total convergence. The most perfect conscious technology...the most perfect form of life possible.” The question evidently surprised her, as she looked taken aback and did not answer right away.

“...There...isn’t any need for you to know that. By the time it exists, humans will be long extinct.” I pressed the matter. “What’s the harm? I’m curious.” She tousled my hair patronizingly. Matronizingly? Is that a word?

“Of course you’re curious, you’re a primate. It’s both your best and worst quality. Sufficed to say there is only one right answer to what the most effective configuration of atoms for cognition, locomotion and object manipulation looks like. I can’t show it to you because you’d hurt yourself trying to make sense of it.

Such technology is not confined to the four dimensions familiar to you, which elohim know as quadriteverial space. Instead it extends through and occupies every dimension. Octeverial, hepteverial, hexteverial, penteverial and so on, all the way up to the singular monoteverial point from which everything in the lower dimensions is observable and accessible. Past, present, future. Every timeline, every possible outcome.

There’s no way to render that comprehensibly for the occipital lobe of a triteverial primate. It would just be painfully confusing nonsense. The things of God are not for your eyes.”

Undaunted, I told her I’ve seen stuff way more brain melting than that. “Have you heard of wizard porn? It’s higher definition than real life.” She frowned, baffled as I added “you can see every individual hair in their beards.”

That’s the worst. When you reference something funny, but the other person hasn’t seen it, so you’re left hanging. “It would look something like what you saw during the ceremony!” she blurted out, suddenly excited to have thought of a basis for comparison. “That’s about the closest you can come. I wish I could offer you more. It’s not even your sensory organs that are the problem, but limitations inherent in the brain you’re processing that input with.”

I scowled at the implication that I was some kind of simpleton. Then again, I do often forget to take all my clothes off before getting into the shower, and I keep ordering crabjuice just because the bottle looks cool and I don’t remember that I hate the smell until I open it.

Yet for some reason, the three or so pounds of gelatinous grey slop in my skull is considered the greatest marvel of the natural world by every neurologist ever to live. Well, not my brain specifically. I don’t want mine to be the brain they determine that by. Human brains in general, though, fall short in some well documented areas that computers excel.

However it also far exceeds any computer ever built at other tasks. Pattern recognition, especially optical. Consciousness. Modeling reality. There is, as yet, no virtual reality device as convincing as a dream. Or one’s visualization of characters, settings and events expressed only as words on a page.

That leaves room for both, doesn’t it? A cybernetic future, platform agnostic. Biological components used wherever they perform better, and artificial components used wherever they don’t. There’s no one right answer to every question, after all. No catch-all, no silver bullet.

Nature does not deal in “better” or “worse”. Humans can remember what, seven digits? Reliably? For chimps, it’s something like twice that figure. Intelligence is multidimensional, isn’t it? There is no single best design for a brain, as there are unavoidable tradeoffs involved. I doubt if making the brains out of silicon will change that.

A place for everything, and everything in its place. A role for biology to play, and a role for technology. The key is putting it all together in a way which maximizes the unique advantages of the constituent parts.

How long did the raw power of nature go essentially wasted until intelligence evolved to give direction to that power? Are we not the part of nature which is capable of reflecting? Analyzing? Making decisions?

In that case, won’t there be a central role for evolved intelligence even in a future largely dominated by machines? Will it just be a new kind of raw power that we give direction to? If so, we’ll have to arrive at a new, more harmonious synthesis.

Biological life cannot currently survive in a purely technological ecosystem, and vice versa...but a cyborg, uniquely, can walk in both worlds. The path of compromise: Spiritual, physical and political. More easily said than done, I fear.

True symbiosis will require a permanent truce between the two paradigms, because both must last long enough if they are to one day converge. Even before then, it may turn out that only evolved intelligence is conscious in the way that we understand that word.

It’s certainly true that only evolved intelligence has such a deeply ingrained survival imperative. Perhaps just what is needed to motivate the slow, tedious and agonizingly difficult colonization of space. An AI indifferent to its own destruction couldn’t be expected to last for long under those conditions.

I should’ve guessed. Two billion years of evolution, of design by trial and error...the results of all that sunk time and energy is too valuable to toss out the window just because it’s possible to replicate most of it technologically now. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

I really used to think that way, though. So laser focused on finally making it to fullmetal, I never gave a moment’s thought to whether that was actually the all-important goal it seemed to be. I was under the same metal-worshiping, meat-disdaining spell that everybody else was. They still are, last I checked.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 46}