In this passage, the main character reflects on his own experience with an A.I. just before a Third World War destroyed everything.
It fascinates me that our own experiences with advanced chatbots like ChatGPT are so similar to this.While he washed his face, he thought about the last time he had met one of the
legendary supercomputers. It had been only months before the war, when he was an
eighteen-year-old sophomore in college. All the talk had been about the new “intelligent”
machines just then being unveiled in a few locations.
It was a time of excitement. The media trumpeted the breakthrough as the end of
humanity’s long loneliness. Only instead of coming from outer space, the “other
intelligences” with whom man would share his world would be his own creations.
The neohippies and campus editors of New Renaissance Magazine held a grand
birthday party the day the University of Minnesota put one of the latest supercomps on
display. Balloons floated by, aerostat artists pedaled overhead, music filled the air while
people picnicked on the lawns.
In the midst of it all—inside a mammoth, metal-mesh Faraday cage suspended on a
cushion of air—they had sealed the helium-cooled cylinder containing Millichrome, Set
up this way, internally powered and shielded, there was no way anyone from the outside
could fake the mechanical brain’s responses.
He stood in line for hours that afternoon. When at last Gordon’s turn came to step
forward and face the narrow camera lens, he brought out a list of test questions, two
riddles, and a complicated play on words.
It was so very long ago, that bright day in the spring of hope, yet Gordon remembered
it as if it were yesterday . . . the low, mellifluous voice, the friendly, open laughter of the
machine. On that day Millichrome met all his challenges, and responded with an intricate
pun of its own.
It also chided him, gently, for not doing as well as expected on a recent history exam.
When his turn was over, Gordon had walked away feeling a great, heady joy that his
species had created such a wonder.
The Doomwar came soon thereafter. For seventeen awful years he had simply
assumed that all of the beautiful supercomps were dead, like the broken hopes of a nation
and a world. But here, by some wonder, one lived! Somehow, by pluck and ingenuity, the
Oregon State techs had managed to keep a machine going through all the bad years. He
couldn’t help feeling unworthy and presumptuous to have come posing among such men
and women.
