John Brunner on artificial sentience (nonfiction)

Excerpt from John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar regarding the artificial sentience of the computer named Shalmaneser.

Author John Brunner writes about artificial sentience in a number of his published works.

Stand on Zanzibar: Shalmaneser

The computer in Stand on Zanzibar known as Shalmaneser may or may not be sentient.

Excerpt:

A few days after they rigged up the direct-verbal inputs — Shalmaneser was the first computer ever with sufficient spare capacity to handle normal spoken English regardless of the speaker's tone of voice — one of the technicians asked him on the spur of the moment, "Shal, what's your view? Are you or aren't you a conscious entity?"

The problem took so long to analyse — a record three-quarters of a minute — that the inquirer was growing alarmed when the response emerged.

"It appears impossible for you to determine whether the answer I give to that question is true or false. If I reply affirmatively there does not seem to be any method whereby you can ascertain the accuracy of the statement by referring it to external events."

Relieved to have had even such a disappointing answer after the worrying delay, the questioner said fliply, "So who do we ask if you can't tell us — God?"

"If you can contact Him," Shalmaneser said, "of course."

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• John Brunner

Nonfiction cross-reference

• John Brunner (nonfiction)
• John Brunner on what people want, mainly (nonfiction) - "What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree."
• Stand on Zanzibar (nonfiction) - a "non-novel"

External links

• John Brunner (novelist) @ Wikipedia
• John Brunner @ Wikiquotes