Read They'd Rather Be Right for Free Online Page B

know,” Joe said quietly.
    Billings was brought up short. He felt a sudden chill, not entirely due to the bleak and heatless room in which they sat.
    “You foresee that, Joe, definitely?” he asked. “Or are you merely speculating?”
    “I’m an imperfect,” Joe answered quietly. “I often see seconds or minutes ahead. Occasionally I see days or weeks but not accurately. The future isn’t fixed. But I’m afraid of this thing. I’m afraid that if we make a machine which can think better than man, mankind wouldn’t survive it.”
    “Do you think man is worth surviving, Joe? After the things he’s done?”
    Joe fell silent, looking down at the table. Seconds became minutes. The cheap clock on the dresser ticked away a quarter of an hour. The coffee in the cups grew cold. Billings shivered in the damp cold of the unheated room, contrasted it with the animal warren comfort of the dormitories, the luxury of the frat houses. He became suddenly afraid of Joe’s answer. He had at least some conception of what it must be like to be alone, the only one of its kind, a man who could see in a world of totally blind without even a concept of sight. How much bitterness did Joe carry over from childhood?
    “Do you believe that man has reached his evolutionary peak, doctor?” Joe asked at last, breaking the heavy silence.
    “No-o,” Billings answered slowly.
    “Couldn’t the whole psi area be something which is latent, just really beginning to develop as the photo-sensitive cells of primitive life in animals once did? I have the feeling,” he paused, and changed his phrasing. “I know that everyone experiences psi phenomena on a subconscious level. Occasionally a freak comes along”—he used the term without bitterness—“who has no barrier to shut it out of the conscious. I ... I think we’re trending toward the psi and not away from it.
    “You think man should be given the chance to go on farther, then?” Billings asked.
    “Yes,” Joe said.
    “And you think that if he finds out what the true nature of thought is, at the level he uses it, it would destroy him?”
    “It might.”
    “Why?”
    “He’s proud, vain, superficial, egotistical, superstitious,” Joe said without any emphasis. “This machine, to do what Washington wants, would have to use judgment, determine right from wrong, good from bad. Man has kept a monopoly on that—or thinks he has.”
    “What do you mean—thinks he has?” Billings asked, and felt he was nearing some door which might open on a new vista.
    “Suppose we say that white is good and black is bad,” Joe said quietly. “Any photoelectric cell then can tell good from bad. Suppose we say a high number is right and a low number is wrong. Any self-respect-ing cybernetic machine then can tell right from wrong.”
    “But those are purely arbitrary values, Joe,” Billings objected. “Set up for a specific expediency.”
    “You’re something of a historian, doctor,” Joe answered obliquely. “Aren’t all of them?”
    Billings started to argue along the lines of inherent human nature, instinct for good and right, basic moral-ities, the things man believed set him apart from the other animals. He realized that he would be talking to a telepath; that he had better stick to the facts.
    “At least man has arbitrarily set his own values, Joe,” he said. “The photoelectric cell or cybernetic machine can’t do that.” Yet he caught a glimpse of things beyond the opening door, and became suddenly silent.
    “We must emphasize that fact, doctor,” Joe said earnestly. “Man must go on, for a while, thinking that; in spite of the contrary evidence which this servomechanism will reveal. That shouldn’t be too hard to maintain. Man generally believes what he prefers to believe. Most evidence can be twisted to filter through his screen mesh of prejudices and tensions, so that it confirms rather than confounds.
    Billings felt a wave of apprehension. He almost wished that he had