"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

on-chip PCR lab, then all they need to do is set up a crude operon controlled
chromosomal machine and bingoтАФyet another route through to a hard take-off AI
singularity. Say what you will, the buggers are persistent."

"Like lemmings." We were rolling through the north London suburbs now, past
sleeping tank farms and floodlit orange washout streets. I took a good look at them:
it was the last time I'd be able to. "There are just too many routes to a catastrophic
breakthrough, once they begin thinking in terms of algorithmic complexity and how
to reduce it. And once their spooks get into computational cryptanalysis or
ubiquitous automated surveillance, it's too tempting. Maybe we need a world full of
idiot savants who have VLSI and nanotechnology but never had the idea of general
purpose computing devices in the first place."
"If we'd killed Turing a couple of years earlier; or broken in and burned that draft
paper on O-machinesтАФ"

I waved to the waiter. "Single malt please. And one for my friend here." He went
away. "Too late. The Church-Turing thesis was implicit in Hilbert's formulation of
the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of whether an automated theorem prover
was possible in principle. And that dredged up the idea of the universal machine.
Hell, Hilbert's problem was implicit in Whitehead and Russell's work. Principia
Mathematica. Suicide by the numbers." A glass appeared by my right hand. "Way I
see it, we've been fighting a losing battle here. Maybe if we hadn't put a spike in
Babbage's gears he'd have developed computing technology on an ad-hoc basis and
we might have been able to finesse the mathematicians into ignoring it as being
beneath themтАФbrute engineeringтАФbut I'm not optimistic. Immunizing a civilization
against developing strong AI is one of those difficult problems that no algorithm
exists to solve. The way I see it, once a civilization develops the theory of the
general purpose computer, and once someone comes up with the goal of artificial
intelligence, the foundations are rotten and the dam is leaking. You might as well take
off and drop crowbars on them from orbit; it can't do any more damage."

"You remind me of the story of the little Dutch boy." She raised a glass. "Here's to
little Dutch boys everywhere, sticking their fingers in the cracks in the dam."

"I'll drank to that. Which reminds me. When's our lifeboat due? I really want to go
home; this universe has passed its sell-by date."

****

EdinburghтАФin this time-line it was neither an active volcano, a cloud of feral
nanobots, nor the capital of the Viking Empire тАФ had a couple of railway stations.
This one, the larger of the two, was located below ground level. Yawning and trying
not to scratch my inflamed neck and cheeks, I shambled down the long platform and
hunted around for the newsagent store. It was just barely open. Eve, by prior
arrangement, was pretending not to accompany me; we'd meet up later in the day,
after another change of hairstyle and clothing. Visualize it: a couple gets on the train
in London, him with a beard, herself with long hair and wearing a suit. Two
individuals get off in different stationsтАФwith entirely separate CCTV networksтАФthe
man clean-shaven, the woman with short hair and dressed like a hill-walking tourist.
It wouldn't fool a human detective or a mature deity, but it might confuse an