The Hero’s Fear

Our story's hero slouched into his high-backed, threadbare chair and powered up his computer. Before beginning the essay—on artificial intelligence—that he'd argued about with his friends all day, he meant to gather more material and trawl the internet for sources. So he skimmed what had already been written on the subject. Some pieces he abandoned partway through; a few he read to the end. When he raised his head from the screen, the Moon that had caught his eye at the window had just lifted itself from the horizon. It looked as if a full Moon had been shaken awake mid-sleep—irritated, flushed a deep red. In a while it would climb higher, gaze its fill at its beloved Earth, calm itself, and only then bring light to its face.

Enchanted by the scene though he was, the coming dark made him hurry. Our hero (though he had done nothing heroic, we must for now call him that) decided that reading would take too long and drain the energy he needed for his own piece, and so resolved to use a more modern, quicker way of sharing information—video. Yet the research he began with the aim of finding solid material left him, before he knew it, watching adverts for mobile phones. Without quite noticing, he found the device before him trying, incessantly, to sell him something, and he himself behaving as if he meant to choose which new, high-tech gadget to buy with money he did not possess. Shiny, alluring devices he had not missed a minute earlier, whose absence he had never felt, now almost tempted him into taking out a loan. Luckily the spell did not last—he remembered he was meant to be writing.

Focus is a difficult business—especially for someone who has spent the whole day “talking” the piece to himself in his head; the instant he sits down at the table to start, fixing on what he has to say becomes the knottiest thing in the world. Our hero was no different: with the same problem he wandered, unawares, for hours through the boundless depths of the internet. There was no end to the videos he watched. What an age the world had entered… It turned out his friends were right: the human-like, talking robots of science fiction had arrived. There was even a robot girl to whom, in one of the Arab countries, they had granted official citizenship. This “girl” gave, as they say, “clever, clever” answers to human questions. Yes—clever answers. She had a mind, artificial intelligence manufactured by humans and housed in a lifeless robotic body.

He remembered a very old joke from the time computers first came to Azerbaijan: 'A Russian, an Englishman and an Azerbaijani decide to test whether the first computer really knows everything. The Turing test, as it were. In short, while the Russian and the Englishman try to analyse the answers and draw conclusions, the Azerbaijani's first question is: “Nə var, nə yox?” (Translator's note: Azerbaijani greeting, literally “what is there, what is not”; idiom not translated.) Of course, this mindless machine begins listing what there is and what there isn't and finally burns out.' But the robot girl who startled our Hero today was nothing like that computer. She was not helpless before a 'nə var, nə yox?'; she could even reply, 'Thanks, I'm fine—how are you?', and then, with knotty, probing questions, put humans on the spot.

They say any film ought to be expressible in three sentences. Though the Moon had long since brightened and reached its station, our hero could not tear himself from the computer. He was now watching a film that might be summed up thus: 'A scientist-engineer, to test a female-seeming robot endowed with artificial intelligence of his own making, arranges for it to spend a few days in conversation with a man notably unsuccessful with women. The aim is to see whether, even while it is obvious she is a robot, she can win the man's belief and make him fall in love with her. In the end the robot deceives both the man on trial and the scientist who made her, traps them, and walks out.'

By now he had begun to feel afraid. There were still countless videos proclaiming that robots were on the brink of subjugating humankind and destroying the world. Some said, 'One day you too will be a robot: only the human body will remain; the mind will be ceded to computers.' Others argued the reverse: 'On the contrary, our bodies will become robotic; our consciousness will remain ours.' There were those who predicted that the Third World War would be between humans and robots. One video claimed the war had long since begun, that the world was unaware of it and the war unaware of the world. The Hero did not believe this.

'What do you mean?' he said. 'How is it no one knows? If such a war existed, I would gladly, and of my own free will, take part. I would even die a martyr in the cause of wiping out robots and building a new, natural world entirely free of technology!'

It seemed he wanted, at last, to do something heroic. They laughed.

'That war's already been won—by the robots. Can't you see?' someone said. 'Look at the phone in your hand. Do you think you control it, or does it control you? Now you work harder so you can buy a newer phone that can control you even more.'

He wanted to object, but no sound came; a lump rose in his throat. A man whose face was somehow familiar approached with a kindly smile and tried to console him.

'Don't worry,' he said. 'Even if the robots have won, people haven't lost. Let the Fourth Industrial Revolution not frighten you. I understand you—you did the same in the eighteenth century, during the First Industrial Revolution.'

'Me? In the eighteenth century?' the Hero asked, bewildered.

'Of course you. You said everything should be done by hand. Don't you remember the first steam engine? “Metals can't replace human muscle; Nature will take revenge,” and so on and so forth. And what happened? Horse-carts went out of use; now you sit comfortably in your car and drive about—while listening to the radio, by the way, which is the result of the Second Industrial Revolution. Do not be afraid, son. These things are natural processes; even if you fear them, you cannot outrun them.'

As he spoke he seemed to age; he was so gentle it felt as if he were putting it on in order to trick the Hero.

'I see nothing “natural” in robots governing us,' said the Hero.

'There you go again—talking about what you don't know. If there had been no Third Industrial Revolution, you wouldn't be seeing me now, nor talking to me, because microcomputers took shape only then; huge machines shrank and came into everyone's home. If it was so bad, why did you rush out and buy one yourself? Well? Answer!'

'I didn't know it would turn out like this,' the Hero managed. The man's hair, too, was whitening as he spoke, but he went on explaining with that same kindly air peculiar to admonishing elders:

'Son, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, like the others, is the outcome of human socio-economic need. You cannot stop it; it's impossible. Don't imagine robots will take the world from you. On the contrary. Soon a single robot will produce in seconds the idea that a hundred and twenty-five people cannot think up, and it won't ask a cosmic salary for doing so. The shortage of ideas—which is a great problem in the world today—will be alleviated. Creativity and innovation will grow and quicken. In the end, the winner will again be the human being; all this will lessen our work and lighten our lives.'

Turning now to someone the Hero had not noticed—another man, somewhat younger than himself—the kindly elder, whose face was already lined, said:

'Come—explain it to him. My battery's low; I've been on my feet since morning.'

Then he withdrew to a dim corner of the room and sat on a little stool with a cover of red glass. He froze like a statue, as if he had “shut down”. It seemed the place he sat was a charger, for at once his eyes began to blink red. The Hero, his heart clenching, asked the other:

'Are you like that as well?' He felt a cold sweat break over him.

The other, as affable as the elder who had aged and run out of energy, replied:

'And are you any different?'

He closed the computer at once. He was alone in the room. His head seethed with thoughts—so many, so various that we cannot describe them all in this short tale. He wondered, for instance, whether the old man might have been right—that there was nothing to fear. He objected at once: 'No.' A human being must, with all his might, strive to remain natural. Natural? But is this process not natural? Can one flee it? Could one stop an Industrial Revolution? If we forgo technological innovations—if we renounce everything discovered by the human mind—won't we become cave-dwellers? Cave-dwellers? Perhaps the best thing is to become cave-dwellers… No—we have already lost that—and so on, and so forth…

Thoughts, voices, conversations, texts, videos—all merged into one another. One window opened as another closed. Unanswered questions sprouted in his mind. They were many—too many. Perhaps some day, in another novel, we will discuss them at length; for now, let us see what the Hero did next.

He rose and paced the room; he would not be writing an essay now. But another idea came. He took paper and pen and began a letter:

'Hello, Myself! I write this letter in the unease of the shadowy, puzzling future promised us by technology. Like all pieces of writing, this one carries a telepathic charge—I write now; you read ten years from now; and in a sense I time-travel, leave the present and come to you, ten years on, and say my piece. And I do it by a decidedly old method, without any electronic novelty. But sadly, time does not run backwards; you cannot return to the time I inhabit and put an end to this anxiety of mine. So I count it my duty at least to warn you: humanity is setting its course towards robotisation, and it appears there will be no stopping the process.

'You've likely forgotten, but in the time-slice I occupy, people have only just begun to manufacture intelligence. Let it be—it may solve many of our problems. For instance, when we ring for an ambulance we might no longer be left on hold; a single robot, able to answer millions at once, might suffice for us all… Or there may be no need to ring: when we need a doctor it will know of its own accord, and the problem will be solved at the root… It may be that, to write, we won't have to string together long rows of letters and muddle our thoughts; modern writing-machines will transfer what we think straight onto the page… There may be intelligent machines that carry out the tasks of agriculture tirelessly and without error, forecast the weather and take the appropriate measures in advance, so that people are not forever wrestling with the soil… Perhaps we shall no longer hear of labourers falling from high-rises on building sites; flying robots will paint even the tallest buildings with ease and mend their façades… Perhaps—at last—we shall free people from exploitation: no more men waiting beneath bridges from dawn to dusk to be hired, in the literal sense, as slaves for a mouthful of bread; no more places in the twenty-first century that are still called a “slave market”… It would be good to hope that an idea the hundred and twenty-five finest minds at a great symposium cannot bring to birth, or a problem they cannot surmount, an apparatus endowed with artificial intelligence will resolve in a matter of seconds. Who knows? Perhaps the solutions to many of today's heartaches will come, precisely, through the manufacture of artificial intelligence…

'What frightens me is not that. The world as it is has long since turned some of us into robots; and yet some of us, despite everything, still manage to remain human. If, in your time, this sounds laughable, so be it—laugh at me. Think me naïve, ignorant, uninformed, unlettered. I can only be glad of it. But please—whatever happens, however much artificial intelligence is made—do not let your intelligence become artificial. For it is not the artificial becoming intelligent that is fearful; it is the intelligent becoming artificial.

Yours sincerely, Yourself

March 2018.'