One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.
This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of PrometDisturbometer 5 out of 10
One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.
This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of Prometheus, the Titan from ancient Greek mythology, who, as his punishment for giving fire to humans and thereby also giving them technology, was sentenced by Zeus to be tied (or nailed) to a mountain where a huge eagle (the emblem of Zeus) would come and eat his liver every day, which would regrow just to be eaten by the eagle again the next day, on and on into eternity. For the ancient Greeks, instead of the heart, the liver was the seat of human emotion, so yeah, interesting mode of torture.
My musing on Prometheus makes me wonder if Ellison didn’t perhaps take some inspiration from the story of Prometheus, and here, I am afraid, I will be adding some SPOILERS, so if you’re fanatical about spoilers, read the story quickly and come back. It’s really an extremely quick read, available on the internet in various places.
In any case, my ponderings about the story’s similarity to the story of Prometheus, are as follows:
1. Prometheus steals some fire from the gods, and gives it to the humans, thereby giving agency and power to the humans, also allowing them to war on one another.
1. Humans initially (in real life) developed computers to further science and commerce. Oops, there’s a huge sidenote coming up here:
In the story, a huge computer that had been built for the purposes of war, suddenly becomes sentient, and erm, I guess, since it was programmed to destroy, it destroys the entire human race, just like that, with "killing data", but keeps five humans alive, in order to have some evil fun torturing them into eternity. Apparently this computer can keep running into eternity, and he can also keep organic life such as these five humans alive indefinitely. The narrator, one of those humans, says: “And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he (the computer) had sought revenge.”
Wait..-what? So apparently machines are always terribly angry for having been created? That's rather strange logic. I wonder why, if a machine could be upset, why that anger would revolve around the fact of its creation? Ok, whatever, just go with it as a sort of "horror-story" premise. I guess in horror stories, machines are always rageful, evil, etc.
But in actual fact, computers have been around for many years. Abacus-like devices were used in Babylonia as far back as 2400 BC already. So, initially, “computers” were used for counting and arithmetic tasks. No records of angry counting machines have ever been found. Fast forward a bit from purely mechanical machines, to the 20th century.
During the first half of the 20th century, increasingly sophisticated non-programmable analog computers were built, to be used used for computation to aid in commerce, record-keeping and science. Fast-forward past the first mainframe computers which used punch-tape and punch cards in the 1940’s and 50’s, to the more powerful machines built after the Korean war - the computers of the late fifties and early sixties, which would be the computers that the author was familiar with. Keep in mind that in those days, the idea of having your own PC was quite inconceivable.
Since the story was written circa 1967, I reckon one would need to look at the machines of the time period to get an idea of where Ellison was coming from, because his idea of what a computer is and what it can do, is obviously quite fantastical – I mean, a computer can’t really swallow living things as the antagonist - the huge computer named AM, does in the story - it somehow internalizes the five people that it tortures, and computers can't really, as in the story, encompass the entire world, (in the 1995 game of the same name, the environment inside the computer consists of simulations, which makes more sense technologically speaking) unless, of course, it’s the internet, and perhaps Ellison’s sentient computer was composed a bit similar to the way that the internet is, since he does hint at "a linkage" when he says:
“ It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, ”
Now, to give you an idea of what the author is talking about – he is actually not really talking about the internet – when he says “They sank the first shafts and began building AM”, he means literally a humongous, enormous mainframe. The internet as we know it, in other words, computers being linked to one another remotely, was a project started as the "ARPANET" in 1966, basically at the time that the story was being written, and the first computer linkages only started in 1969, after the story was written and had received it's 1968 Hugo award. So at the time the story was written, the internet was still only ideas on a chalk board.
To give a bit more context on how people from an age gone by viewed computers, the big thing to remember is that computers, due to IT tech still being in its infancy, were large and expensive to build. The first mainframe computer was the Harvard Mark I. Developed starting in the 1930s, the machine was not ready for use until 1943. It weighed five tons, filled an entire room and cost about $200,000 to build – which is something like $3,070,500 in 2021 dollars. It weighed 5 tons! That’s ginormous! And guess what, that huge thing could practically speaking do less than one operation per second, and had no memory or storage in the sense that we think of it today.
So no wonder Ellison thought that a computer of huge dimensions would have to be built in order for it to attain artificial intelligence. We have not managed to build computers yet that are sentient and that has self-consciousness in the same way that humans have it, although AI has come amazingly far. And as for the concentration of computing power, a mid - to top range smartphone today could have launched and managed the first moon landing. As for a comparison of today’s supercomputers compared to the supercomputers available when Ellison wrote the story:
The world's current top supercomputer can perform 442 trillion (million million) operations per second and has a memory capacity of somewhere around 3PB (three million megabytes).
On the other hand, a high-performance computer of the mid-1960s, the IBM System/360, could perform 16 million operations per second and had a memory capacity of eight megabytes. There’s almost no comparison…
There was a 1995 game made of the same name for which the author of the story wrote the script- and I must say that to me (I played the game) the game was far better than the story, not just in the sense of its understanding of technology, but also because of the fact that in the game, AM "punishes" the characters by constructing metaphorical adventures based on each character's fatal flaws. So there the "punishments" make more sense, and the scenario is less nihilistic than in the short story of 1967.
So for me one of the big flaws of the story (vs the game), is that I can’t see why the machine should have been angry and vengeful for having been built – perhaps because this specific one – the supercomputer in the story’s name is AM – perhaps AM is angry because he had been built for the purpose of war? That’s almost like saying fire got angry because it was used for the purpose of war – but then fire couldn’t achieve sentience, and AM did. It was “the gods” who got angry in the Prometheus story, and it was the instrument of war that got angry in AM’s story.
Ok, perhaps my Prometheus comparison isn’t working so well, but there –is- a huge eagle in the story. However, it doesn’t eat any livers or hearts, so maybe not the same eagle, hmm?
I don’t know, I’m trying to make the story work on some level… I mean, the internet-like feel of when the three supercomputers link up is rather prescient. But the idea that “one day a computer can just wake up and have sentience” is not at all how machine learning works. As to the idea that computers can be taught to simulate emotions, that is possible, but WHY would you program a computer that had been built for a practical, logistical purpose to have emotions? Imagine they start selling us microwaves or cars that have emotions!… anyway, best to view this story as pure fantasy rather than anything else.
There were a few things other than the internal logic of the story that bothered me a bit, which is probably partially due to the culture of the time, for example:
I felt a bit disturbed that Ellison seems to think gay men must per se have small penises. What on earth does sexual orientation have to do with the size of your genitals? Imagine if when babies are born, you were to say: Hmm, this little boy has a small penis, so he’s onto the gay pile. Oooh, that baby has a huge one, he’s definitely straight! I suppose boys with medium penises are, by that logic, bi? ...more
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