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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
 |
| Learning Circuit | ||
| The watchbirds can learn and teach each other. |
| "I object only to the watchbird's learning circuits. They serve, in effect, to animate the machine and give it a pseudo-consciousness. I can't approve of that."
"But, Mr. Gelsen, you yourself testified that the watchbird would not be completely efficient unless such circuits were introduced. Without them, the watchbirds could stop only an estimated seventy per cent of murders." "I know that," Gelsen said, feeling extremely uncomfortable. "I believe there might be a moral danger in allowing a machine to make decisions that are rightfully Man's," he declared doggedly... "It is sad that we must put a human problem into the hands of a machine, sadder still that we must have a machine enforce our laws." |
| Technovelgy from Watchbird,
by Robert Sheckley. Published by Galaxy in 1953 Additional resources -
|
The watchbird manufacturing representatives go on to say:
"It's a fact that the watchbirds can put their learning into action. No one is monitoring them..."
"The watchbirds are no more dangerous than an automobile, an IBM calculator or a thermometer. They have no more consciousness or volition than those things. The watchbirds are built to respond to certain stimuli, and to carry out certain operations when they receive that stimuli." And the learning circuits?" You have to have those," Macintyre said patiently, as though explaining the whole thing to a ten-year-old. "The purpose of the watchbird is to frustrate all murder-attempts, right? Well, only certain murderers give out these stimuli. In order to stop all of them, the watchbird has to search out new definitions of murder and correlate them with what it already knows."
"I don't like the idea of the learning circuits..."
Compare to the learning robot from Callahan and the Wheelies (1960) by Stephen Barr and the Thorsen memory tube from The Door Into Summer (1956) by Robert Heinlein.
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'...each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived.'
'...there's a narrow belt where the climate is moderate.'
'The leg was to function, in a way, as a servo-mechanism operated by Larry’s brain, through the mediation of the electronic brain in the leg.'
'... every veephone on the continent would display, over and over, two propositions.'
'Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil...'
'He wore spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.'
