Free Abolition Of Intelligence by Peter James West

Abolition Of Intelligence
    'I n the future, people will live a life of luxury. No more ironing, no more cooking, no more work. Machines will provide us with a life of leisure,' said the smiling lady in the ankle length dress. 'Imagine every home having a butler, a gardener, and yes, even a cook!'
    The television showed images of cardboard men and women with silver faces doing all the chores while a happy family sat on the beach drinking martini's. The children played in the background, supervised by a smiling robot nanny.
    This was how machines would one day become our slaves. In a few years, we would never need to work again. War and disease would be over - replaced by shiny metallic smiles and automatic washing machines. It was a dream that no one questioned. The men in lab coats with well-polished teeth pointed to their charts, explaining it all with a wave of their hands as pictures of cogs and wheels flashed around them. No one doubted what they were saying.
    Years came and years went. The revolution didn't come, but still nobody doubted it. In just a few years all our lives would be different. The men in white lab coats showed us clanking silver arms, clumsily spilling coffee and breaking eggs. These were just prototypes, they said, the beginning of the sweeping changes would surely come to all our lives. There were still some problems to resolve, but they were small problems and they would soon be solved by expensive ongoing research. Soon robots would be able to see, smell and hear. They would walk the streets, exercising our dogs and giving tourists directions to the nearest train station. All these things were just five years away, the adverts assured us. Men with shiny heads accepted awards. Science raced to our rescue at an incredible pace.
    In the meantime, people went on living their lives. They chopped liver, hung out washing, painted the spare bedroom. Technology followed in its own time. Occasionally something new was announced with hushed expectancy. A microwave oven - 'The plate never gets hot!'. Compact disks - 'You can smear marmalade on them and they will still play!' - 'No need to rewind tape ever again!' The men in white lab coats smiled and nodded. The leagues of metal butlers were just around the corner. The robot eyes and ears were just months away. Men with spectacles had made a human brain out of a computer. The years came and went, and still the butlers and maids with human proportions failed to materialise. Nobody complained. People were too busy watching television adverts that promised cheap holidays, free finance and new friends waiting to meet on the phone.
    Many years passed. The idea of metal robots six feet tall with arms and legs seemed more preposterous than ever. The men in white lab coats showed us videos of two hundred kilo-grams of retarded metal mounted an artificially uniform staircase, and the press celebrated its own recycled stories of success.
    Chess masters battled against rooms full of wires and valves, then cabinets full of LED's and fans, and finally shoe-boxes full of liquid nitrogen and integrated polymers. They never seemed to be worried about being beaten. People said that machines would never beat a human player, because humans were intelligent, and machines were not. Only biological systems could be intelligent, they argued. Psychologists, philosophers, and busy-bodies the world over argued about what intelligence actually meant. Some claimed that a television was intelligent because it turned itself on when you pressed the remote button. 'Stimulus, response,' they said, 'just like a frog catching flies.' Others argued that there could be no intelligence without thought.
    The biological organism supporters said that even if God was a machine, it still couldn't be intelligent, simply because it was not made of living cells. This angered many across the world and caused a small war in Turkey.
    Reductionists said that all biological cells were made of proteins,