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Authors: Mark Clifton
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whereby it might do its own coding.
They were not sure just what process had occurred which made Bossy distinguish safe hands from unsafe hands. She had the sense receptors to observe the outside world. She had the codes, a great many and more being added constantly, whereby through keyed harmonics she associated new perception with old. Some moves had been made to key her with similarities and differences. The mechanism was there to compare the new with the old and to determine the identities and the differences.
And now she had demonstrated that she could distinguish through the sense perceptors and the established coding.
Further, she had demonstrated that she could take automatic action.
The men cautioned one another, again and again, that they must not fall into the habit of thinking the machine could do anything they hadn’t keyed it to do. It had no sense. None at all. Really, this throwing up the bars to keep alien hands out was no more than any selenium cell would do—well, modified by coding.
Even without Joe’s warning glance, Billings felt they were reassuring one another on this point perhaps a little too much. He noticed, too, that the gender changed overnight from it to she. But it was several days before he noticed that Gunther had begun to stammer the name to B-b-b-ossy, each time he said it, although the man never stammered on anything else. And Hoskins always hesitated with an audible “ah” before saying the name.
The shadows beyond the door began to stir and swell, and seemed to writhe around one another.
Spring came, and then it was June. Commencement exercises were no more than a reluctant interlude from the work. Billings watched Joe throw off his graduat-ing cap and gown, and in almost the same movement start assembling the requests for student deferments from compulsory military service. A summer session extraordinary had been declared that no time be lost in the work on Bossy, and the entire university was humming on a factory schedule.
A new respect had been gained for a baby’s mind. Ordinarily adults thought of the newborn baby as just lying there, inert mentally, accomplishing little learning beyond finding out that a cry would summon attention, a nipple placed between its lips would start the reflex of sucking. Now they realized the multitudes of unrelated sense impressions that mind must be storing, the repeated patterns which impressed themselves upon its brain—and prediction of the future.
“If I cry, there will be approaching footsteps. I stop my crying to listen for them. If I do not hear them, I cry again. Soon there will be comforting hands and I will be dry and warm again.”
And any young mother knows this is accomplished in a few weeks. One by one the patterns are learned, the sensation relationships repeat themselves, a word is spoken in connection with an object or an action. Always the word and the object appear simultaneously—they are conjoined, one produces the other. Relationships become vaguely apparent. Cause and effect emerge as an expectancy.
If it were not that a baby was human, one might set up certain laws of procedure. An outside world datum makes an impact upon a sensory receptor. This is accompanied by other impacts of other data.
There is a relationship of each to the other. And long before there is any concept of self, as an entity, there is a realization of self to the data. Not all the data appear each time and in the same order. But if enough data appear to strike up the harmonics of association with a previous experience—judgment is assumed. Through repetition of patterns of trial and error, some reflex and some calculated, action upon judgment takes place.
But the baby is human, and therefore mysterious, and we may not simplify the awful metaphysics of an awakening human mind into a set of mechanical steps. The human mind is set apart, the human mind could not contemplate itself as being no more than an operation of an understandable
They were not sure just what process had occurred which made Bossy distinguish safe hands from unsafe hands. She had the sense receptors to observe the outside world. She had the codes, a great many and more being added constantly, whereby through keyed harmonics she associated new perception with old. Some moves had been made to key her with similarities and differences. The mechanism was there to compare the new with the old and to determine the identities and the differences.
And now she had demonstrated that she could distinguish through the sense perceptors and the established coding.
Further, she had demonstrated that she could take automatic action.
The men cautioned one another, again and again, that they must not fall into the habit of thinking the machine could do anything they hadn’t keyed it to do. It had no sense. None at all. Really, this throwing up the bars to keep alien hands out was no more than any selenium cell would do—well, modified by coding.
Even without Joe’s warning glance, Billings felt they were reassuring one another on this point perhaps a little too much. He noticed, too, that the gender changed overnight from it to she. But it was several days before he noticed that Gunther had begun to stammer the name to B-b-b-ossy, each time he said it, although the man never stammered on anything else. And Hoskins always hesitated with an audible “ah” before saying the name.
The shadows beyond the door began to stir and swell, and seemed to writhe around one another.
Spring came, and then it was June. Commencement exercises were no more than a reluctant interlude from the work. Billings watched Joe throw off his graduat-ing cap and gown, and in almost the same movement start assembling the requests for student deferments from compulsory military service. A summer session extraordinary had been declared that no time be lost in the work on Bossy, and the entire university was humming on a factory schedule.
A new respect had been gained for a baby’s mind. Ordinarily adults thought of the newborn baby as just lying there, inert mentally, accomplishing little learning beyond finding out that a cry would summon attention, a nipple placed between its lips would start the reflex of sucking. Now they realized the multitudes of unrelated sense impressions that mind must be storing, the repeated patterns which impressed themselves upon its brain—and prediction of the future.
“If I cry, there will be approaching footsteps. I stop my crying to listen for them. If I do not hear them, I cry again. Soon there will be comforting hands and I will be dry and warm again.”
And any young mother knows this is accomplished in a few weeks. One by one the patterns are learned, the sensation relationships repeat themselves, a word is spoken in connection with an object or an action. Always the word and the object appear simultaneously—they are conjoined, one produces the other. Relationships become vaguely apparent. Cause and effect emerge as an expectancy.
If it were not that a baby was human, one might set up certain laws of procedure. An outside world datum makes an impact upon a sensory receptor. This is accompanied by other impacts of other data.
There is a relationship of each to the other. And long before there is any concept of self, as an entity, there is a realization of self to the data. Not all the data appear each time and in the same order. But if enough data appear to strike up the harmonics of association with a previous experience—judgment is assumed. Through repetition of patterns of trial and error, some reflex and some calculated, action upon judgment takes place.
But the baby is human, and therefore mysterious, and we may not simplify the awful metaphysics of an awakening human mind into a set of mechanical steps. The human mind is set apart, the human mind could not contemplate itself as being no more than an operation of an understandable
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