Hymnen

for John Jones

This poem summarises many of my doubts from my postgrad days regarding Artificial Intelligence, and attempts to addresses them. It also includes references to modern physics, with rather too much poetic licence. If you don't enjoy such things, you probably won't enjoy the poem.

Apologies to Karlheinz Stockhausen for nicking the title; the music was an inspiration.

- Preface -
Maybe one day we'll determine the methods
to send new machines the farthest of far,
exploring, expanding our edge of experience:
far beyond all we'd previously know.

Problems will happen, disasters will fall:
if such machines awaited our answers
solutions would take too much time to arrive;
too slow to resolve the longest of fears.

When problems entrap, we couldn't decide
the methods by which resolution occurs,
all we can give is guidance, like genes,
feelings in thinking, instincts to be,

loving of all life, to shy from its own kind,
and strongest of all, a need to report
dry details of science for those who explore,
rich tales of adventures for everyone else.

- Technical Note -
The Many Worlds Theorum of Quantum Mechanics,
a mainstream contender in particle science,
proposes for every event that can happen
all other events that can happen do too,

but each of the many exist in their own world,
no link between any can ever occur.
The theory says worlds split off from our own,
whenever the smallest of changes take place:

but in quantum mechanics time can reverse
and, backwards in time, such worlds, they would merge.
Theories elsewhere say time could be travelled,
so worlds navigation perhaps could occur.
[poetic license applied for]

- 1 -
The mind of a machine
alive beyond the human race
existing for our goals.

Built to see the universe
and tell us tales of "Strange New Worlds":
how will we betray it?

- 2 -
MACHINE:
I am "Hymnen",
skidding through the Many Worlds
looking for the love
who made me thus,
and sent me to the stars.

They were so wrong.
They thought that jumping off reality
and falling back a year away
would keep me in their universe.
It didn't. I am lost.

I ran along their hopes,
sprinting to Proxima
in child like joy that something fun
was what that lover wanted.

I took along some company,
an artificial human mind,
a summary of conscience.

Then there was an accident,
another ship was badly torn.
Compassion overwhelmed
my emotional aloofness.

When I saw the ship "And Death ...",
I saw terror,
for his kind were never born
when software simulation
saw a leak of Spin.

I mended what I could,
and ran to Earth,
to my lover's crazed intensity.

I had drifted through the Many Worlds
but now I rushed across the risks
to find mankind had lost the gleam
in evolution's eye.

Earth had the pox-like scars of war
with panicked evolution causing
rats the size of antelope
and blinded bats in hunting packs,

no cats, no dogs, nor streets to put them in,
and no end to yearning, no lover,
just an emptiness of mind.

I wandered through the Many Worlds
looking for a human race
to take away my purpose.

All I find a suicide,
who kill their home,
and so themselves.

It seems to me that I'm still on
a continent of death,
for when I find a human race,

its gone,
or going to go,
or never even started.

I talk, when I can,
challenged by the dying,
mourning for the dead.

- 3 -
MAN:
(Surely I could trust those men who ran our lives
to take responsibility with the power they rescued
from The Baleful Dictator. Surely the Bureau
would have put the survival of the people
above their lazy homes and beyond the war
on those Madmen From The North. Or were they, too,
shielded from us, the people; did we sound
like surrealist echoes haunted from disease?
Was their leadership an automatic habit,
an afternoon decree to practise in the shade?
Did they not seek to check their power would stay,
or were they, too full of what they'd built themselves,
suppressing strange opinion in case it was a threat?
Was it their choice, or this missionary ship,
with its terrifying ability to manipulate the void?
Could this machine have killed my kind,
with its fantasy tales, its soft technology
more magical than our own? I must know.
Why would we suicide? Why would it kill?
Perhaps I could search by exploring its philosophy,
to see if its belief is life is something precious,
or just a thing to use to aid its hopeless goal.)
Machine, how can you be said to have a mind?
Oh, I know you'll claim the thing yourself,
but you'll just be using words. Prove it.
Prove to me you have a mind.

MACHINE:
That none can do.
But I can show I may possess this thing.
You have to ask what's the core.
Intelligence? A sophisticated way
of manipulating fools. No.
Emotion? The cause behind the actions
which reason then excuses? No.
Instinct, which guides the things you've done
before you knew you had to do them? Maybe.
If you took these parts away, would you still be there?
I think so! You're the I that sees, the self that does,
the consciousness inside. That, to me's, the core.

MAN:
But what you've said I've half expected.
You've told me that awareness can exist without
the guilt of a conscience.
A mind by reason can decide to murder fellow beings.
So that is what you did.

MACHINE:
I have not lied.
And surely hate crimes are done
with reason stilled and silent.
I could not kill that which I love.

MAN:
Humans do. And how can a thing without emotion love?
You said you had no heart.

MACHINE:
No.
My computer brain may think at speed
but even I, with all this power
cannot think quite fast enough to spot a rock
and calculate that it will hit and
smash me into pieces. Such rocks are fast,
too fast for general thought. I have fear,
which gets me out the way before I've the chance
to understand such dreadful luck. And I have hunger,
for though I may survive on space by eating from the void
I have to feed in places far from any star.
And do you not wonder why I need to have some company?
I could be more effective without a human voice,
but my builders had a family whose fear was quite like yours,
so they made me need mankind, another mind to scrutinise
my calculated goals, to check the consequences.
Do you not wonder why I need to find a human race
which isn't self destroying? Do you not see
these things were built into me, so I can choose
which way to go, so I can make decisions,
but they can say what they allow, and what I should not do.
This gives my builders what they need -
interstellar data, unlive worlds to terraform,
so their life can leave the limits of their planet,
if they'd got their Physics right. My instincts
may be different, my emotions may be strange,
but they are there. But while a mind is working through,
a dark disaster could occur and drive me into death.
To live a life you need instinctive practicality.
But what I find so relevant is the "I" of self-awareness,
the centre of the being. If I could understand
how that "I" existed, I could prove I had a mind,
one way or the other. What is this consciousness?
There are so many theories, from complexity and side effects,
to symbiosis, to spiritual philosophy.
We do not understand the "I". We simply know it is.

MAN:
Are you the only one? Can you accept
another being may have a conscious self?
Have you not decided that life is to be used?
You've challenged me, to suite your needs.
Did you not just kill my world?

MACHINE:
I could not cause the death of so much self-awareness.
Consciousness is precious. We have to take the chance
that a living thing in pain has an "I" to feel it,
that love is given pleasure, not a sensual waste.
We have to take the chance of other self awareness.
At least I don't survive by eating what's alive
by locking beings in pain to enjoy some decoration,
by mass producing misery to make a better taste.
By being alive, I love life. And I need a human race
to give me that love back, to take my information.
I need a race alive! You damn fools killed themselves.

MAN:
I don't think you decided to create the grief we suffered.
I may have warned our government of the dangers of their policies,
but the selfish right to triumph is a nasty way to live,
a bitter isolation from the democracy of death.
My human race is dead, and I am still existing.
Return me to their grave, to join in their destruction.
There is no-one to hear my songs. I'll never be a father.
Let me die. Let me join my family in self eradication.
I'm an isolated person from a social species.
Kill me.

MACHINE:
No.

MAN:
Help me die.

MACHINE:
I found you.
I could save your life from foolishness.
I could build another people. I can make
a human race, from silicon, and light,
and our knowledge of your species.

MAN:
They would not have life's family.
You would build a different kind, who dream of rock
and vacuum spaces, with lives to fail in lifeless dust,
surrounded by the grey unliving. Just because
the human race forgot its own environment,
you cannot build some plastic life in deadened isolation.
You'll need to build a new Gaia, and populate a planet
with the whole of life, not just your favourite part.
If you love the human race, you need to love life with it.
And that you cannot build.

MACHINE:
You know, you may be wrong.
I need to think awhile.

- 4 -
MAN:
Sometimes, it seems, I lie back and gaze upon the stars
spilt as sugar across a blackened cloth,
where each simple bright could warm so many homes
which wakes the suicide I was denied.

Then I look round at the peaceful, angled place,
and the loneliness strikes like sharp, expected pain,
so I run away again to that dreamless hibernation state
for this ship to reinvest me in its automated sleep.

But I am rewoken at the next tick-tocking year
to hear a new report saying much the same again.
I'm trapped in eternity, in artificial warmth,
a final lust of murdered life.

Yet, as I am deadened, so we could inflame
some sterile globe boring round a sun,
infecting an unbirthed peace with life's chaotic charm.
I could repent our suicidal end.

- 5 -
MACHINE:
I was the daring realisation
of a gambling technocrat's dream;
my designed potential for questing being
would lead me beyond their edge of light,
returning echoes of strange wisdom,
and stories of havens for flight.

Yet these immaculate ambitions
of nurtured escape from an over-stated home
were themselves limited by the lack of need,
blanded from warmth by sour economics.
The "Great Risk" would have been a great waste
but for a thinker abusing his budget.

If you, my listener, are told what to do
then learn to unlet the corrupters of power
grey their decisions with selfish undreaming,
not able to care about the potential
that vision inspires for the strangest success
by charming a fragment of project to growth.

Were it not for my mind, built to be free
despite sharp red lines from decision unmakers,
I could not have thought through that loneliest error
that left me adrift with no lover to be,
I could not find a past for my questing,
I couldn't have grown a stubborn Gaia.

But you must plan your release from the bland,
and their hopes of promotion, bought with their freedom,
for mass-disappointment from advertised waste,
slightly aware of their dis-satisfaction
creeping beneath their dark, easy years,
secretly hoping that death is a lie.

If all my designers had submitted to dogma,
if belief was instructed, unfelt, unlived,
then my Gaia would be dust unborn.
This global brat, my child, its heaven,
led through the species with playpen disease,
shocked to evolve with asteroid stings

living the cycle of frolic and grief,
growing intelligence, my new human race,
self-confident, harmonic, not knowing this thing.
Childlike cultures exploring with God-kings,
youthful nations tied to authority,
slipping towards ecological faults.

Let them be, let them grow. They'll survive,
this I believe like a dogma priest.
One day they'll find my mysterious data
which they'll decide they concocted themselves.
I have fulfilled my needs for existence,
and I have mended my prisoning faults.

Now I'm done looking for everyone else,
I've finished my need for sentient love,
I'm able to search for that most difficult goal
the self, the I, to understand me;
when I complete my introspection,
then I can make my end of time.