Human machines, p.1
Human-Machines, page 1
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A VINTAGE ORIGINAL, November 1975
First Edition
Copyright © 1975 by Thomas N. Scortia and George Zebrowski
All rights reserved under International and Pan-Ameri-
can Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simul-
taneously in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Main entry under title: Human machines.
Bibliography: p.
CONTENTS: Scortia, T. N. and Zebrowski, G.
Introduction: “Unholy marriage”.—Endore, G. Men
of iron.—Dann, J. I’m with you in Rockland, [etc.]
1. Science fiction, American. I. Scortia,
Thomas N., 1926-II. Zebrowski, George, 1945——
PZ1.H883 [PS648.S3] 813’.076 75-13382
ISBN 0-394-71607-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“Men of Iron” by Guy Endore. Copyright © 1940 by The Black and White Press. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Barthold Fles.
“I’m with You in Rockland” by Jack Dann. Copyright © 1972 by Random House. Reprinted from Strange Bedfellows by permission of the author.
“Masks” by Damon Knight, Copyright © 1958 by Playboy. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P, Mills, Ltd. Afterword to “Masks” appeared as part of “An Annotated Masks” by Damon Knight, Copyright © 1973 by Robin Scott Wilson, and originally published in Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader, NAL (Mentor Books). Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent.
“No Woman Born” by C. L. Moore. Copyright © 1944 by Street & Smith Publications. Copyright renewed 1974. Reprinted by permission of the author and her agent, Harold Matson Company, Inc.
“Fortitude” by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., first appeared in Playboy. Copyright © 1968 by Raymond Wagner Productions, Inc., and Si Litvinoff Productions, Inc. Reprinted from the book, Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., with permission of Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence.
“Camouflage” by Henry Kuttner. Copyright © 1945 by Street and Smith Publications. Copyright renewed 1973. Reprinted from Astounding Science Fiction with permission of Harold Matson Company, Inc.
“Crucifixus Etiam” by Walter M. Miller, Jr. Copyright © 1953 by Street and Smith Publications. Reprinted by permission of Harold Matson Company, Inc.
“Period Piece” by J.J. Coupling. Copyright © 1948 by Street and Smith Publications. Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“Solar Plexus” by James Blish. Copyright © 1941 by Fictioneers, Inc. Originally appeared in Astonishing. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“Sea Change” by Thomas N. Scortia. Copyright © 1956 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Curtis-Brown Ltd.
“Starcrossed” by George Zebrowski. Copyright © 1973 by Joseph Elder, editor of Eros in Orbit, Trident Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
We would like to thank the following
for their aid and advice:
Janet Kafka
Pamela Sargent
Frank M. Robinson
Gail Winston
Ron J. Julin
For Robert Heirdein,
who taught us both.
Human-Machines
(book cover)
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Thanks
Dedication
Introduction
Men of Iron - Guy Endore
I’m with You in Rockland - Jack Dann
Masks - Damon Knight
Fortitude - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
No Woman Born - C.L. Moore
Camouflage - Henry Kuttner
Crucifixus Etiam - Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Period Piece - J.J. Coupling
Solar Plexus - James Blish
Sea Change - Thomas N. Scorti
Starcrossed - George Zebrowski
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Recommended Reading
(back cover)
INTRODUCTION
“Unholy Marriage”:
The Cyborg in Science Fiction
Machines have always fascinated people. Indeed, men and women of the twentieth century have developed a relationship with their machines that approaches the proportions of a love affair. It is not uncommon for the driver to love his automobile, or for that matter, the writer to love his typewriter. From their primary purpose as an extension of man’s limited muscular and intellectual capability, machines have become in our society symbols of power and virility, often assuming sexual symbolism in the minds of men. (See Jack Dann’s disquieting “I’m with You in Rockland” later in this book.) Who can doubt the sexual nature of the motorcycle between the cyclist’s legs, man or woman? Detroit in its search for new buyer motivations in years past has acknowledged this sexual overtone to the point of designing Buick bumpers with mounded chromium buffers that were known in the trade—rightly enough—as “breasts.” Rarely does the operator of a complex machine, be it a bulldozer or a computer, refer to his charge as an “it.” More often than not, the machine is a “she,” implying the capricious nature of machines in the eyes of male operators.
Behind all of this sexist symbolism and anthropomorphism is the tacit belief that machines have personalities, even souls, and that the man-machine combination is more than a purely physical interaction. At times the biological word “symbiosis”—a joining together of two organisms to make a greater whole—seems appropriate to describe the emotional nature of this union. As more and more sophisticated machines are built with feedback devices allowing the operator to adjust the performance of the machine dynamically in midtask, the resemblance to a true symbiosis becomes clearer. After all, the quest for greater efficiency dictates that the man-machine combination should be as intimate as possible, that the characteristics of the union should approach those of a single organism.
In the quest for a condition transcending humanity, it was logical that people should conceive the idea of becoming a part of their machines. It was inevitable in the latter part of the twentieth century—with its pacemakers, artificial heart valves and mechanical sense expanders—that the concept of the cyborg be born. Cyborg, a portmanteau word compounded of cybernetic and organism, was coined in 1960 by Manfred Clynes who, with Nathan S. Kline, wrote: “self-regulating man-machine systems . . . need(s) to function without the benefit of consciousness in order to cooperate with the body’s own autonomous homeostatic controls. For the artificially extended homeostatic control system, functioning unconsciously . . . [Manfred Clynes] has coined the term Cyborg.”[1]
The basis for the cyborg idea is not new to man, who has been modifying himself for centuries with peg legs, hand hooks and glasses. Even animals on occasion modify themselves and extend their operational capabilities with external materials. The North American crayfish (otherwise known as the crawdad), lacking a natural balance organ, orients itself by the pressure of a minute grain of sand on the nerves in a pit in the head, sealed by a membrane grown after the bit of sand has been introduced. (A favorite high school laboratory trick is to rear the crayfish in an environment where only iron filings are available and then disorienting the mature crustacean by holding a magnet above the animal; the poor creature, convinced that “up” is now “down,” invariably turns on its back.)
“Crocodiles have been found,” writes D. S. Halacey, Jr., “with a considerable weight of stones in their stomachs . . . ballast to permit the amphibians to cruise lower in the water and thus not be as vulnerable.”[2] In the same manner many birds ingest small stones and gravel, but for a completely different purpose: to assist in the grinding of food grains in the stomach.
What is new in the cyborg concept is the idea of unconscious feedback and self-regulation. The key word in Clynes’s definition is “homeostatic,” implying a symbiosis that operates and is self-regulating without the conscious control of the human partner. It also implies a degree of feedback between man and machine in both directions so subtle that the distinctions between flesh and metal in the resulting organism is, for practical purposes, lost. Such a concept must inevitably pose many unsettling philosophical questions, the very center of which is the age-old one: “What is human?” The classical view of evolution changes dramatically as humanity learns how to alter itself at will and is able to communicate that knowledge to subsequent generations. With the advent of the cyborg, man will have come full circle. Having learned feedback control from biological systems and having applied the concept to his technology, he will have returned to a philosophy of whole systems in which there is no functional distinction between flesh and the machine. One can only speculate on what will be the intellectual impact of such an idea in the future. The psychological impact on the individual in such a symbiosis is the subject of a number of stories in this collection. Two outstanding ones, “Masks” and “No Woman Born,” present two
A few writers (including the two editors) have dealt with two fundamental problems in the acclimatization of the brain to a cyborg existence. The adult human has become adjusted to the myriad somesthetic signals of his body—the awareness of limbs, of joints articulating; the sensations of wetness and temperature in the gastrointestinal tract; the minute pulsations of the viscera-all of the tiny signals of pressure and pain that tell us we are living in a self-repairing and self-monitoring organic body. So automatic is our subconscious awareness of these signals that in their absence the brain manufactures bogus impulses. In medicine the phenomenon of the “phantom limb” is well known. Amputees sense the existence of the lost limb for months, and in many instances this awareness of a nonexistent member never disappears. How much more traumatic must it then be to the disembodied (and functionally specialized) brain to be constantly aware of sensations from a phantom body?
A second and even more profound change in the cyborg existence stems from the absence of the human endocrine system. While the mind has from childhood learned appropriate emotional responses that echo endocrine secretions in response to stimuli, this conditioning in itself is not autonomous. There is ample evidence of this in endocrine pathology, where emotional responses and even the whole subtle fabric of personality may become distorted through endocrine imbalance or the withdrawal of a vital secretion. The loss of primary androgen secretions from the testes in the male, for example, results in depressed libido and sexual response. (It is probable that these functions would disappear completely, were it not for the androgen secretions of the adrenals.) Depressed adrenal secretions, as a second example, produce a placidity and a depressed physical and emotional response to emergency situations. Profound personality changes have been clinically observed in both of the above situations as well as in instances where other ductless glands have increased or decreased their activities.
The biochemistry of the brain is not yet well understood. Many psychiatric dysfunctions, especially schizophrenia, now appear to result in part from disturbances in the biochemistry of the central nervous system. (Phenylpyruvic oligophrenia, or phenylketonuria, a psychopathological condition characterized by the atypical secretion of phenyl pyruvic acid in the urine, has been known for years.) Such basic biochemical functions as the maintenance of the sodium-potassium electrolyte balance in blood and interstitial fluids, or the maintenance of acid-carbon dioxide balances, undoubtedly affect the functioning of the central nervous system and consequently, this ephemeral thing we call personality.
In many stories in this collection the authors are not concerned with the total transplantation of a human nervous system into a mechanical environment. Rather they are concerned with the consequences of less far-reaching couplings of human and machine. The harbingers of such matings exist today in such devices as pacemakers and experimental strength-augmenters, but more subtle techniques are needed to replace the crude galvanic muscle responses upon which these devices are based. If true cyborgs come into being, they will result from sophisticated myoelectric techniques: the direct mating of electrical stimulus and nerve impulse.
This step seems rather simple to most laymen who hold a common misconception: that nerve impulses and electric currents are identical. This misconception leads the uninformed to believe that the mating of electrical systems with nervous systems is a relatively simple matter. Actually electrical currents are very rapid flows of free electrons through a metal conductor (or more properly, the rapid exchange between metallic atoms of loosely bound outer valence shell electrons), while nerve impulses, proceeding at a speed two orders of magnitude slower, involve electron-exchange oxidation-reduction reactions within the fluid of the cell and at its dendrite-neuron plate conjunction with the next cell. Because nerve impulses are chemical in nature, initiated between cells by a constantly regenerated material called acetylcholine, the mating of electrical and nervous systems requires unexpected subtleties. Until a number of formidable technical problems have been solved, effective myoelectric techniques and fully integrated cyborgs cannot be developed.
The cyborg may well display an unexpected synergism wherein the resulting organism has capabilities greater than the sum of the separate capabilities. Halacey writes: “For wooden leg, substitute an artificial limb of plastic and metal, powered with electronic muscles and controlled by the wearer’s own nerve signals, amplified by miniature transistorized equipment. For iron lung substitute implanted artificial heart or other internal organ . . . For steam shovel operator substitute military technician who operates weapons of war simply by ‘thinking about them’ ”[3] In the same way that billions of brain cells produce the complexity giving rise to consciousness and the sensation of a subjective interior in human beings, so the cyborg will become a different kind of human being, with enhanced perceptions and even satisfactions different from our own. Potential for fulfillment will be greater, environmental adaptability better and quicker. Access to stored learning through direct computer hook-ups will give a broader command of the whole body of human knowledge.
The development of cyborgs will be speeded by new developments in medical research and by the miniaturization techniques from the space program. Cyborg techniques in turn will certainly affect the development of medicine and the progress of space technology. (See Scortia’s “Sea Change.”) Some cyborgs will be specialized; others will be designed to amplify generally existing human abilities. In every instance man will consciously change in some fashion. Clynes and Kline[4] have termed this ability of man to change himself “participant evolution.”
Paralleling this development of man-machine symbiotes will be the extension of present computer technology to develop machines capable of inductive reasoning and, more importantly, possessing feedback systems of sufficient subtlety that self-repair and ego-awareness are possible. The fusing of such machine intelligences and quasi-intelligences with human intelligence in a cyborg union might yield a quantum jump in capability. One may well postulate a whole new race of cyborg geniuses. Certainly the crude machine model of the cyborg that has historically dominated our thinking would become meaningless. Self-modification and a new form of evolution might be possible, leading to dramatic changes in the nature of the human race.
We might postulate an even more daring development in this long evolution. The pairing of human and machine intelligences could come about only through a thorough mechanistic understanding of the functioning of the human brain and a thorough mechanistic description of that function we call personality and ego awareness. Such a mechanistic description places within grasp the duplication of such functions in a machine, and leads, of course, to the development of true machine intelligence.
If we are willing to admit a purely mechanistic basis for personality and ego awareness (a disconcerting metaphysical concept to many), we may speculate that the human personality could be duplicated in a machine. While organic systems, even in a cyborg union, would have a finite mortality, the personality (one might use the word “ego” or even “soul” with equal facility here) duplicated in the machine might live forever. Such a duplicated personality would be identical to the organic personality with all of the memories and conditionings of the latter. Each personality, organic and mechanical, would probably be convinced of its own uniqueness as an individual.
This is the ultimate development of the cyborg concept, where even the organic member of the partnership has been supplanted by a machine duplicate. Such a machine duplication poses many vexing philosophical and religious questions (as in J. J. Coupling’s “Period Piece”), not to mention a bewildering array of purely legal questions. If both the organic intelligence and the machine duplicate exist side by side, which is the true “John Doe”? Since each is identical to the other, the pragmatic answer is that both are the true “John Doe.” (From this point, of course, each will change as each separately undergoes different experiences to evolve along separate lines.)
If the organic John Doe dies and the mechanical duplicate lives on, are we justified in saying that John Doe is dead? The mechanical entity is aware of being John Doe, and except for the accident of materials in which the John Doe personality is lodged, that awareness is completely justified. Do John Doe’s social and legal commitments, normally voided with his death, continue in force? Can we speak of a “soul” as distinct from a personality, a soul that departed with the death of the organic John Doe? If so, may we now speak of the mechanical John Doe as having a “soul”?
