Looks arent everything, he said. I assumed that he was motivated by caution rather than shame.
Nor is size, I said, by way of ironic reassurance. I dont know yet what the Queen of the Icy Fays has to offer, but I suspect that she might have chosen her opponents a little too carefully. Even Lowenthal might have been able to make Zimmerman a more tempting offer than these, simply because he wouldnt be so ambitious.
You might be right, he conceded.
I didnt know exactly what to expect from the third pitch, but I did expect it to be good as well as surprising. I was very interested to find out what she had in mind, because I was at least as anxious to start figuring her out as she had been to figure me out and not because I wanted to write her an opera.
Forty-Six
You, Robot
The android with porcelain flesh and silver hair rose to her illusory feet and took up a position before her ostensible audience, making the most of her generous stature. I assumed that la Reine had programmed this hypothetical form with the same rule-bound limitations as the sims of her opponents, but she hadnt left herself short of psychological
advantages. Her pale blue eyes and icy lips were imperious; even her stance was the pose of a dictator whod never had an order disobeyed.
Then she smiled, and it was as if her mood melted. Suddenly, she seemed human. I had no doubt that she could have seemed more human than any actual human if shed wanted to do that, but she didnt.
She was quite a showman.
I have only one thing to offer you that no one else can, she said to Adam Zimmerman, speaking through him to all the children of humankind. Not that they would offer it to you if they could, because my opponents and every other potential rival that might have been put in their place are unanimous in considering it to be a fate equivalent to death, to be avoided at all costs. What I offer you is robotization.
Davida Berenike Columella must have been a step ahead of the argument, because she didnt look surprised, or even troubled. Alice Fleury looked more tired than anything else, but the fact that her guard was down helped to expose her astonishment and alarm a little more nakedly.
It is probably fair to say, la Reine des Neiges went on, that we would not be in the predicament in which we find ourselves today if it were not for human and posthuman anxieties regarding robotization. Those anxieties have been around since the twenty-second century, although they werent popularized until the so-called Robot Assassins displaced the Eliminators as chief propagandists for the murder of the inconveniently old. If my old friend Mortimer Gray were here, however, he would be able to explain to you that the real motive force behind the Robot Assassins was not so much the fear of the phenomenon they were allegedly opposing as the perennial desire of the young to come into their due inheritances at an earlier date than the one on which the present incumbents were prepared to surrender them. The idea of robotization was never based on any authentic empirical discovery, nor was it ever supported by any trustworthy empirical evidence.
It had always been observable, even when the average life expectancy of mortals was no more than forty, that older people became gradually more conservative, more fearful of change, and more respectful of tradition. The young, as was their way, always observed this phenomenon in an unkindly light. In fact, the increasing conservatism of the old was always a perfectly rational response to circumstance, not a reflection of organic processes within the brain.
The young have a greater vested interest in revolution and redistribution because they have not had the opportunity to accumulate wealth; the old, especially those who have consolidated worthwhile achievements, have the opposite incentive. It is true that as mortals grew older their memories became less reliable, their habits more ingrained, their reflexes less sharp but none of that was due to robotization. The brains of mortals suffered from gradual organic deterioration just as their bodies did, but the notion that minds could stiffen and petrify into a quasimechanical state was always part myth and part misrepresentation. The idea of robotization was never anything more than a strategy of stigmatization: a handy ideological weapon in the perpetual contest for property. No objective and reliable test for robotization has ever been devised. All claims made in the past to have devised such instruments of measurement were discredited as soon as they were tried under double-blind conditions.
It is, of course, no coincidence that the evolution of the notion of human robotization has run in close parallel with the evolution of arguments about the limitations of artificial intelligence. Ever since the first so-called silvers were differentiated from so-called sloths, the anxiety that machines would one day become self-conscious individuals has had a firm grounding in actual technological achievement. Long before that crucial technical leap occurred, tests had been devised to determine whether a machine mimicking human conversation was actually manifesting evidence or conclusive proof of consciousness, true intelligence, and personality. Even those primitive instruments had demonstrated that the problem was two-edged that most human judges were just as likely to mistake a human respondent for a machine as they were to mistake a machine for a human.