Free Abolition Of Intelligence by Peter James West Page B

to drugs, how it would react to new situations, it gathered experience and used it to make decisions - but that didn't matter. Animals weren't intelligent. That's why we chopped them up, experimented on them, and used them as a fun snack for our laughing children. Animals were not real - not like people. An animal had no soul or feelings. They were like machines, just responding to stimulus without thought. That was why machines could simulate them, they said. Men in white coats, with government clearance, came up with more comforting theories and arm waving exercises, explaining away that awful feeling that you get when a dog looks you in the eye. Your subconscious tells you that the animal is like a human child, trying to understand you, wanting to be your friend, but your society-conditioned mind tells you that it is an illusion, that we would never eat any intelligent being. How different from a dog is a cow or a sheep?
    Through the decades, the media machine kept on washing away our concerns - supplying us with a constant stream of distracting convenience. It provided us with a hundred ways to free ourselves from the need to think. Machines would never replace people, they said. People are unique. A special one-and-only race of intelligent beings, created by God.
    When the Turing test was passed for the first time by a machine called OP-12 they said it was a fluke. A mistake due to poor test set-up or laboratory control. They re-tested over and over, and it never passed again. People breathed a sigh of relief, life went on. OT-5 passed 40% of the time. The statisticians flew into a frenzy of research trying to prove that it meant everything and nothing. The philosophers wandered the shores of great oceans, rubbing their chins in contemplation. Psychologists tested it over and over, forever tightening the stringent tests with ever-more anal controls. OT-5 got better. It evolved to a state where nobody could tell what it was anymore. It wasn't alive - they all agreed on that. That was all that mattered. OT-5 had no soul. It was made of liquid and some strange quantum soup. People were special - the unique intelligent race. Turing's theories were thrown out as inconvenient, out-dated, unpleasant.
    When the men in white lab coats first modified the voice box and brains of great apes, they didn't expect them to learn human languages. It was just an experiment, a crazy scheme like so many others, but they did learn. The men with shiny heads stepped away from the spot lights. The press twitched and pressed the delete key, governments gave reassuring statements. 'It never happened,' they said. If something didn't happen, you didn't have to deal with the consequences.
    Everyone had forgotten about robot butlers and maids. Nobody noticed that burgers were now being flipped by something that made no sound, and didn't have a face. Everyone took it for granted that when they bought something, they would deal with a slot in the wall, talk to a reassuring voice that came from nowhere - a voice that humoured them with a local accent, especially chosen to enhance their shopping experience. It didn't seem odd that whole manufacturing buildings did not have toilets, or canteens, or windows. These were buildings where no people would ever be needed.
    Governments quickly clamped down on the riots - the mounting civil unrest that came about when people realised that their jobs no longer existed. The public never got to sit on the promised beach, drinking martini's with their laughing children. The robot butlers were no where to be seen. The buildings that ran themselves, worked for corporations - not for families. The people stood on street corners, wondering what to do now that they had no way to make a living. Those who did not work in laboratories, or monitor screens full of data, were no longer of use to society. Vehicles drove themselves, machines designed and made more machines, often recycling the old ones. Technology evolved by