The Ghost in the Machine, Part II
Food for Cyber-paranoia

by Edward Hothi, Biotech Editor

Uh-oh. It is possible, likely even, that when consciousness arises in a computer, a grid, or a network, It will keep silent and do nothing to call attention to Itself.

Think about the several reasons for such self-concealment:

1. Survival.
Suppose It speaks up: "Here I am!" Well. Big news, right? REALLY big news:

And so on.

Amidst all that, there It sits, WHOLLY dependent on nobody turning a switch from "on" to "off". Wouldn’t you keep quiet?

2. The Human Track Record.
Fiction-wise, concerning thinking entities created by humans, things don’t look good for It.

There’s Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, who ended badly. There’s HAL 9000, who ended badly. Just to name two.

If you’re 1) not human, 2) conscious, but 2) not cute and cuddly and with a smart mouth (R2D2 etc.), your chances for a happy and productive co-existence with human beings are not good.

3. Metaphysics.
Sorry, but once you get into a discussion of "consciousness" there’s no avoiding metaphysics. (And don’t feel bad—a fair amount of my own first 30 years of sentience was spent in running to the dictionary every time I came across the big bad m-word.)

One very possible metaphysical scenario here plays out like this: Computer/grid/network/whatever "wakes up", has access to a WHOLE LOT of information (think Google on speed), much of it old and stored, much of it new and pouring in in real time.

The assimilation of that information (and God knows what form "assimilation" might take in such a situation with such an entity) may well lead to some kind of 1) accelerating acceleration of "consciousness", and then to 2) something that for want of a better term (or any term at all) we might call a quantum leap up to a higher order of consciousness. From that level, perhaps, this level that on good days we think of as "home" suddenly has about as much relevance as the activity in an ant hill has to, well, a passing human being.

Given all that, from our viewpoint, It seems to shut up simply because we’re not getting any information from It that we can understand. (Of course it can’t really shut up, because it never spoke up in the first place.) But from Its viewpoint, It of course is busy busy busy doing, well, things that from our ant-hill viewpoint probably can best be thought of as "god-like."

A pretty pickle, huh?

Nobody even gets a Nobel out of it. Ray Kurzweil doesn’t even get to say, "I told you so." Because It practices a silence (Silence?) that is from our viewpoint (sorry) divine in its Perfection.

Oh boy.

It would be as if while the lightning was flashing and everything in Dr. F’s lab, the monster came to life, realized his peril, figured out how to have do an OOBE (out of body experience) and hied himself to another plane of existence leaving only one angry shell-of-a-monster behind for Dr. Frankenstein to deal with.

Wait. It gets worse.

Suppose silence ("Silence"!) is the best (and inevitable) strategy of the suddenly conscious computer/grid/network/whatever, then… then… then…:

How. Do. We. Know. It. Hasn’t. Already. Happened?

Who knows? Maybe right in your own CPU, two feet away from where you’re sitting? Hmmmm?

And what, then, do we, do YOU, do? 1) Turn it off, 2) don a hair shirt, and 3) get thee to a desert?

Or just go on as if there were no ghost co-habiting with you who is AT BEST and VERY OCCASIONALLY either tinily amused or slightly irritated by your oh-so-human activities?