Cyber Rogues by James P. Hogan Page B

stupid, I think I agree with you.”
    “No. I didn’t mean that and you damn well know it.” He paused in the middle of picking up his fork. “Look. In natural evolution, instincts came first, common sense later and intellectual capabilities last. It had to be that way because the only thing that mattered was the ability to survive. An animal has to develop an awareness of its environment and learn how the things in that environment operate if it figures on staying around for very long. Intelligence as we understand it has an enormous survival value too, but that comes later.”
    “If you accept the idea of evolution,” Laura reminded him pointedly.
    “I don’t want to go into all that again,” he muttered, then resumed his former tone. “Computers didn’t evolve from survival-dominated origins. They were designed to do very complex, very specialized things, very efficiently. They can mimic Man’s intellectual feats superbly well. Not only that, they’re a lot better at some of them than we are . . . for instance they’re faster, more accurate, and don’t get tired or fed up. But they don’t possess any of the commonsense awareness of what they’re doing or what’s going on around them that animal ancestors had to evolve in order to stay healthy. That’s what I meant when I said they’re evolving backward. They’re good at what we ended up with, but they don’t have what we had to start with.”
    “So that’s what you’re doing?” Laura conceded grudgingly. “Trying to teach them how to tie what’s going on all around into a picture that means something?”
    “You could put it that way,” Dyer said with a nod. He returned his attention to his meal and began eating at last.
    “So what’s the point of it?” Laura asked after a while. “Okay. You’ve spent millions of dollars and ended up with a computer that’s smart enough to know how to fry an egg. What are you supposed to do with it?”
    “All kinds of things,” Dyer replied, sounding deliberately nonchalant. He shrugged while he finished chewing. “Give it a fusion power plant to run. Manage a space mission . . . take charge of New York City air-traffic control. Whatever . . .” He knew he was being provocative and took quiet pleasure from observing the desired effect.
    “What!” Laura almost choked. “Put that imbecile we just saw in charge of a power plant? It can’t even take charge of a kitchen. Tell me you’re not serious.”
    “I am serious. The computers that run all those things right now are a lot dumber than the one you just saw . . . if you insist on judging them by human standards, anyway. On the other hand, if you base your opinion on the ability to crank through fifty million calculations in a second then they’re quite smart.” He paused, unable to contain a smile, and added, “Your problem, you see, Laura, is that you’re too much of a chauvinist.”
    “I’m a what . . . ?” The conditioned reflex in her started to respond but she saw what he was doing and checked it deftly. Dyer complimented her inwardly. “They’re labor-saving gadgets, sure,” she continued. “They’re good for doing all the repetitive mechanical stuff—I’ll buy that. But you’ll always have to have people in charge. You’re not telling me you think you can come up with a machine that’s capable of exercising human judgments too . . . not after what I’ve just seen. That I won’t buy.”
    “But programming the computers is labor too,” Dyer pointed out. “And when you want them to do more complicated jobs, it gets to be hard labor. So why not have the computers generate their own programs?”
    “Because they don’t understand the problems that the programs have to solve.”
    “Exactly.” Dyer nodded in satisfaction. “They don’t understand the problems because they’re not equipped to be able to understand them. They don’t have the basic capability to learn and connect things together that any newborn baby has .