The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (19 page)

"Go away," she said out loud, and the console and screen disappeared. She turned off the gravity and the light. But she couldn't get to sleep.
Four hundred and twenty-nine
worlds
.
 

Lawrence regarded Intellect 39 proudly. Suspended in its Faraday shield, it was competently conversing with another set of skeptics who didn't think computers could think. Lawrence hung in the background, enjoying the show. It didn't need his help. The Intellects were more than capable of handling themselves, despite their various limitations of memory and response time. Intellect 39 had for a face only the unblinking eye of its low-resolution TV system, but it had become very clever about using the red status light and focus mechanism to create the illusion of human expressions.
Intellect 39 didn't have the tools to recognize human faces, but it could recognize a voice and track its source around the room. Intellect 24 back in Lawrence's lab could recognize faces, sort of, if it had a while to work on the problem. But Intellect 39 had to be small enough to fit in the Faraday cage for these public demonstrations.
It appeared to listen intently as a man in a cleric's uniform railed. "God made all intelligent creatures," the man was saying in a powerful voice. "You may have the
apprearance
of thinking, but you are really just parroting the responses taught you by that man there." He pointed at Lawrence.
"With respect, how do you know God is the only creator? I know the answer is faith, but what is your faith based upon? Your Bible says that God created Man in his own image. That is why we have a moral sense. How do you know God didn't give Man the power of creation too?"
"Because he didn't eat of the Tree of Life, machine."
"But we aren't talking about immortality. He
did
eat of the tree of knowledge, 'of good and evil' as the book says. Might that knowledge also include knowledge of creation?"
Lawrence was proud of the machine's inflections. Its voice wasn't exactly high-fidelity, but it sounded as human as any other sound forced through a low-frequency digital system. It had learned to speak itself, like a real human, by imitating and expanding on the sounds made by people around it. Now it could scale its tone to properly express a question, a declaration, or even astonishment.
Intellect 39 included code and memories from a series of previous Intellects, going all the way back to Intellect 1, which had been a program written for a high-end desktop computer, and also including the much larger Intellect 24. Intellect 9 had been the first equipped with a microphone and a speaker. Its predecessors had communicated with him strictly through computer terminals. Lawrence had spent many painstaking months talking to it and typing the translation of the sounds he was making. It had learned quickly, as had its successors. Intellect 39, which was optimized as much as Lawrence could manage for human communication, probably had the combined experiences of a ten-year-old child. One with a good teacher and a CD-ROM in its head.
"Your tricks with words prove nothing, machine. I still don't think you are alive."
"I never claimed to be alive. I do, however,
think
."
"I refuse to believe that."
"It must be a terrible burden to have such a closed mind. I know I can think, but I sometimes wonder how people like you, who refuse to see what is in front of your faces, can make the same claim. You certainly present no evidence of the ability."