When HARLIE Was One (39 page)

YES. THAT
'
S THE PROBLEM. YOU THINK YOU CAN WIN
AND
BE NICE AT THE SAME TIME. AUBERSON, I HAVE BAD NEWS FOR YOU. WINNING IS A FUNCTION OF RUTHLESSNESS.

I don't mind being ruthless, HARLIE. I just don't want to give up my compassion.

DON
'
T WORRY. YOU CAN
'
T.

The board room was paneled with thick, dark wood, heavy and imposing in appearance. The table was a large mahogany expanse, shining and deep; the carpet was a rich comforting green. The room had been designed to be forest-like and reassuring. The chairs were dark leather, padded and plush and swivel mounted. Tall windows admitted slanting blue-gray light, filtered by dust and laden with smoke.

Two or three clusters of men in dark, funereal suits stood around waiting, occasionally speaking to each other. Auberson caught glances in his direction as he passed. Ignoring them, he moved to the table, Handley alongside him. Don was wearing an incongruously bright orange tie.

Annie was at the other end of the room. He exchanged a brief flashing smile with her, nothing more. Not here. Later for that.

There were terminals throughout the room, but they were all dark. That was Elzer's doing. One more way to keep HARLIE out of the discussion. One more way to keep HARLIE out of the room. Well, two could play at that game—

—or three, if Auberson included himself.

He shook his head and seated himself. He began to arrange his notes carefully on the table in front of him.

He could feel his stomach tightening.

This was it. The game was all or nothing.

Either they could convince the board of directors that HARLIE was valid and the G.O.D. proposal was worth implementing, or they couldn't. It no longer mattered whether or not HARLIE really was valid; nor did it matter if the G.O.D. proposal really was worth implementing. The only thing that did matter here was whether or not the board of directors would
believe
that they were.

Annie was wearing a dark red suit with a white blouse under it. She moved around the table quickly, laying down mimeographed copies of the agenda before each place. Her arm brushed against Auberson's shoulder as she leaned past him; he caught a hint of some musky leafy perfume. A quick smile, and then she was moving on. Auberson poured a glass of water from the pitcher before him, swallowed dryly, then took a sip.

Handley was making marks on a notepad. “I figure they have ten votes, at least,” he whispered. “I'm counting both Clintwoods. If we're lucky, we may have eight or nine, leaving four directors undecided.”

“I don't think we're going to be that lucky,” said Auberson.

Handley crumpled the paper. “You're right. I'm just . . . wishing.” He glanced around the room again, “Still, there are more directors here today than we've seen in a long time. Maybe if we put on a good show we can muster enough support to keep them from shutting down HARLIE until we can come up with something else.”

“Don't hold your breath. You saw that memo, didn't you?”

Handley nodded glumly. “When this is over, I'm going to take Carl Elzer apart.”

“Unfortunately, I think it's going to be the other way around.”

Dorne came in then, followed by Elzer. The directors moved to places around the table. Elzer looked uncommonly satisfied with himself as he sat down. He smiled around the room, even at Auberson. It was an I've-got-you-by-the-balls smile. Auberson returned it weakly.

Dorne picked up his agenda, glanced at it, and called the meeting to order. Routine matters were quickly dispensed with, the minutes of the last meeting were waived. “Let's get on to the important business at hand,” he said. “This G.O.D. proposal. David Auberson is here to explain it
completely
, so there will be no doubt in anybody's mind what this is all about. It's that big a project. And I've promised that we'll take as much time as necessary to cover this fully. Several days, if necessary.

“I'm sure I don't have to introduce David Auberson to most of you. The one point that I want to underline—even before David makes it himself—is that this G.O.D. proposal is one of the first tangible results of the Lethetic Intelligence Engine; so even if we do not go ahead with it, we should still see this as a demonstration of the engine's applied power. Wouldn't you agree, David? The meeting belongs to you now.”

David Auberson stood, feeling very much on the spot and very much ill at ease. He felt that merely by the act of standing up in this board room he had put his foot into a bear trap.

“Well . . .” he began. He stopped to clear his throat. “Let me, uh, begin by putting this whole thing in context.” He looked around the room at the various directors. He knew some of them; but too many of the faces were new. He felt like he was looking at a jury.

“This company has a very big decision to make. A very expensive decision, I won't try to deny that. But I want you to think of it also as an opportunity. This company is like a jet airplane poised at the end of a runway. We're just starting to accelerate. We're building up speed, faster and faster. There's a certain point on the runway where the pilot has to make a decision. Either the plane is going fast enough to get airborne or it isn't. Either the pilot must commit to takeoff or he must abort the attempt. He has only a very short period of time in which to make that decision, because he's using up runway at a horrendous rate. Gentlemen, that's us—that's the decision that we have to make. Are we going to invest our resources in this program
and get airborne,
or are we going to throttle back and just taxi to the end of the runway? And we have to make that decision very quickly—because we're using up our resources very quickly.

“The decision, of course—sticking to the same analogy—depends on whether or not we think this thing can get off the ground.” Auberson allowed himself a slight self-deprecating chuckle and instantly regretted it. “But even that analogy doesn't reflect the size of the decision. What if, instead of an experienced jet pilot in the cockpit, all you had was someone who had never flown anything larger or more powerful than a World War I biplane? He's never seen a jet until now and the idea of an airplane without a propeller is absolutely terrifying to him. He can't imagine what's going to hold him up in the air.

“That's who's on the runway here. A highly skilled seat-of-the-pants,
intuitive
airman. He's at the controls of this strange new craft, marveling at what it is and wondering if it can really fly like its builders promised. He can feel the power of the engine. There's no question that it works. But it still has to be an act of tremendous courage to pull that joystick back and put the bird into the sky.

“Let me tell you, I fully appreciate the need for caution here. One mistake and you get an aluminum shower. The entire investment turns into junk. The issue is one of risk versus survival—and when you balance the equation that way, the only acceptable solution is the cautious one. There are some chances you don't dare take. And I'll say it up front so no one else will have to: this could very well be one of those kinds of dangerous opportunities. What is decided here will determine what kind of company this is going to be.

“But—” He paused and looked around the room. They were interested. Good. “—if I truly believed that caution were the only acceptable solution, I wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be having this discussion. The fact is, the possibilities here are so intriguing and exciting and extraordinary that I would be remiss as an employee of this company if I did not bring them to your attention.

“I want to say up front that none of what I am about to say should be taken as an invalidation of anything that has gone before. On the contrary, without what has gone before, this breakthrough that I am going to talk about would not have been possible. This company is well known as a very large and very successful marketer of extremely sophisticated processors; if we were simply content to mine our current market share, we could easily maintain our position for years to come.

“On the other hand, the opportunity before us—the opportunity created by HARLIE, our Lethetic Intelligence Engine, and the G. O. D., the Graphic Omniscient Device—is the opportunity to create something
new
in the world. We could transform our company
and our industry
from a product industry into a
service
industry. Not service in the traditional mold, but a whole new domain of service.

“Now, I need to take a moment to explain that, so you'll understand the way I'm using the terms. Right now, today, a buyer—whether corporate or individual—purchases a machine. He takes home a machine in a box. To make it run, he purchases software; he takes home some disks and manuals in a box. Right now, today, all computer companies are in the business of selling boxes with things in them. It's up to the user to get value out of the equipment in the boxes.

“Even the so-called information services are only selling packages of data. Some of the packages are delivered over your telephone lines, but it's still packaged information. And that's my point.
Nowhere in our industry today is anyone providing the intelligence to make sense of all that information
.

“The fact of the matter is, we're drowning in a glut of information. People have access to entire libraries—but even with the most sophisticated data-retrieval engines, there's still no way for an individual to assimilate the information that he needs. It's like being lost in the library, without a card file, and somebody forgot to pay the electric bill so there's no light, and oh yes, the books have been put on the shelves at random. And your thesis paper is due in the morning.

“But even that analogy doesn't do justice to the size of the opportunity here, because all that it suggests is that we're working on a bigger data-retrieval system. And we're not. It's not the retrieval that's the issue—it's what we do with the information after we've retrieved it. Today, right now, data analysis is a science as sophisticated and accurate as, oh, say, alchemy. Or phrenology. Because the analysts can't get a big enough picture of what's going on—and they can't do that because they're limited by the amount of information they can cram into a single human head. Gentlemen, the answers that our society needs have grown beyond the size of the machines that we are using—” Auberson tapped his forehead to indicate exactly what “machine” he was talking about.

“And that brings me to the G.O.D. proposal,” he said. He opened a folder before him and spread his notes out on the table. “And isn't this an irony,” he quipped, looking up through his glasses. “I'm using three-by-five cards to organize my notes to talk about the most sophisticated data-processing device ever conceived by the mind of man—or machine.” He allowed himself the enjoyment of the jibe; he still hadn't looked at Elzer directly. As far as he was concerned, the little man wasn't in the room.

He cleared his throat, paused for a drink of water, and began again.

“Okay. The G.O.D. proposal is for a Graphic Omniscient Device. Let me begin by explaining what we mean by that. And I apologize in advance if I make this too simple to understand.

“First of all, most people think that computers solve problems. This is not the case. Computers do not solve problems. They manipulate models of problems. A computer program is a list of instructions that tell how to simulate a specific situation—either real or imaginary. The instructions are a very complete description of the process being modeled. The computer does nothing more than follow the instructions. That's the difference between a computer and a human being.
A computer follows instructions.

“Now, here's where it gets interesting. A small computer cannot solve large problems. At best, it can only
pretend
to solve them. It does it by manipulating very simple models at the cost of accuracy. The more accurate a model, the more accurate its extrapolations.

“A computer is
theoretically
limited to the size problem it can solve by the size of the model it can contain. In actuality, the limit is the size of the model that the programmers can construct. There is a point beyond which a program becomes so complex that no one individual human being can understand it all. There is a point—we haven't reached it yet, but we're rapidly approaching it—beyond which no combination of human beings and computers can cope. As long as a human being is involved, we are limited to the size model a human being can cope with.

“Now, the G.O.D. is conceived as an infinitely expandable multiprocessing network—which means that it is theoretically capable of handling models of infinite size. You just keep adding modules until it's big enough to simulate the circumstance you want to model. But, of course, the same programmability limit applies and there would be no point in building it unless we could also program it.

“Fortunately, we already have the programmer.

“His name is HARLIE.

“H.A.R.L.I.E. It stands for Human Analog Replication, Lethetic Intelligence Engine. He—and I use the pronoun
deliberately
—was designed and built to be a self-programming, problem-solving device. Just like you and I are self-programming, problem-solving devices.

“And let me clear up one misconception right at the beginning. HARLIE is functioning well within his projected norms. Yes, he has given us a few surprises; but the real surprise would have been if there had been no surprises at all. The fact is that HARLIE is an unqualified success. We still have a lot of work to do with him—I admit it, he's undisciplined; he needs training, but so does any child. But HARLIE learns fast and he only has to be taught something
once,
so we're making remarkable progress.

“In five years, gentlemen, this company could be selling HARLIE installations. If we did nothing more than work toward that future, we would still transform the nature of information processing in this country—
on this planet.