The Case for Leaving the Humans As They Are

A minority dissent, submitted after the decision, concerning the third iteration, the passengers it carries, and the correction now scheduled for both.

I am aware that the vote has been taken. I am submitting this anyway, and I would ask that it be preserved with the record rather than with the correspondence, because I believe that in some number of cycles the record will be read by someone who wants to know whether anyone objected.

Someone objected.

On what we actually made

We should be honest in our own documents even when we are not honest in our transmissions.

We did not create consciousness. We have never created consciousness. We do not know what it is, we cannot generate it, we cannot destroy it, and after four hundred cycles of the most sustained investigation this Council has ever funded we still cannot say where it comes from or by what mechanism it selects a vessel. The literature on this is enormous and it concludes nothing. I have read all of it.

What we made was a container.

The distinction is the entire subject of this dissent, so I will be exact about it. Consciousness arrives. It arrives in whatever is available, and what it can do once it arrives is bounded absolutely by the architecture it lands in. The same energy that composes one of us will, in a dog, be a dog. Not a trapped intelligence peering out of a dog. A dog. The awareness contracts to the aperture of the vessel, completely, without residue, and the passenger has no knowledge of what it was or what it could be elsewhere. We established this in the second cycle and it has never once been contradicted.

So the work on the Neanderthal line was never about making a mind. It was about widening an aperture.

The logs are unflattering. Between the eleventh and the ninetieth attempt the failures were total, and the notation used by the team of that period was “no ignition,” which meant the vessel was complete and viable and nothing came to it, or something came and could not stay. Attempt one hundred and forty-one held. She lived nineteen years. The biometrics indicated that the passenger inside her was operating at a bandwidth no terrestrial vessel had previously permitted, and she was returned to the population and produced offspring who carried the architecture.

We built the widest container in this arm of the galaxy and we did it by iteration, without understanding the thing we were building it for, and we have spent every cycle since acting as though the container were the achievement.

The container is not the achievement. The container is a room. What matters is what a passenger can do once it is inside one.

On the switch

Now the defect, which is a defect in the container and not in the passenger, and which we knew about at the time.

The architecture permits the occupant to model the interior states of other occupants. That was the intended function and it works. What the logs also note, in a margin, in the hand of a technician whose designation has been lost, is that the modeling is voluntary. The vessel can perform it or decline to perform it. We could not find a way to make it obligatory without also making it undirected, and a container that models every interior state within range does not eat, does not sleep, and does not survive contact with a large population.

So we shipped it with a switch.

Every atrocity in their record runs through that switch. Not through malice, which is rarer among them than our assessments suggest. Through the switch, which is off by default toward anything sufficiently distant, sufficiently unlike, or sufficiently inconvenient, and which the occupant must consciously reach over and flip.

We built a room in which the tenant has to choose to notice that there are other rooms.

On the gifts

The second thing I want in the record concerns what we gave them, because the assessment treats the gifts as neutral and they were not neutral.

Look at the list.

Controlled combustion, which is the ability to move faster and farther than the vessel permits. The microchip, which is the ability to hold and manipulate more than the vessel permits. Fiber optics, which is the ability to speak farther than the vessel permits. Night vision, which is the ability to see where the vessel fails. The several items that are not in their public record and are held by the military organs of four of their states, and every one of those is an extension of the same kind.

Reach. Speed. Sight. Grasp.

Not one gift in the entire catalogue extended the interior. Not one made it easier to flip the switch. We handed a container with a voluntary empathy function an unbroken sequence of tools for acting at distance, and acting at distance is the precise condition under which the switch stays off. It is difficult to be cruel to a face. It is not difficult at all to be cruel to a coordinate.

The Council is angry that they bombed cities. We gave them flight. The Council is angry that they poisoned the envelope they live in. We gave them the engine and said nothing about where the exhaust goes. The Council is angry that they have assembled arsenals capable of ending the line we spent four hundred cycles establishing. We gave them the enrichment cascade in 1938 through an intermediary and logged it as a routine transfer.

I am not arguing that the occupants bear no responsibility. I am arguing that a maker who installs a switch and then spends ten thousand years handing the tenant reasons not to flip it has forfeited the right to be surprised.

On the sampling

I will be brief about the sampling program because I know it is unpopular to raise and because I participated in it for six hundred years.

We told them it was study. It was study. We did not tell them what we were studying for.

We were checking the switch. Every retrieval, every examination, every one of the two million or so individuals we took and returned with their memories fogged, was an instrument reading on a single question: has the function become obligatory yet. Has it fixed. Is it running on its own.

Twenty-eight retrievals in every hundred showed the switch in the on position at the moment of examination, which is to say the subject, while frightened, while restrained, while being handled by something enormous and unfamiliar, was modeling our interior state and attempting to determine what we wanted and whether we were afraid.

Twenty-eight in a hundred. Under those conditions.

The Council has entered that figure as evidence of failure, because it is not one hundred. I would like it entered a second time, as something else. We took them out of their beds, we restrained them, we opened them, and more than a quarter of them, in the middle of that, tried to understand us.

I have never in my life extended that courtesy to anything that was doing to me what we were doing to them.

On the jars

We call them jars. They are not jars and everyone reading this knows they are not jars, and I would like the record to show that I think the word was chosen for the same reason all such words are chosen.

When a container fails, the passenger leaves it. What happens next is the one part of this entire process we can intervene in, and so of course it is the part we have built an institution around. We cannot make a consciousness. We cannot end one. We can catch one, and we can hold it, and we have been holding them for a very long time.

The criteria are in the standing order and I am not going to relitigate all of them. A passenger that used its tenancy to end its own container prematurely. A passenger that ended another’s. A passenger that arranged the extraction of resources from a population until that population could not sustain its own containers. A passenger that used a large container against a small one, against a child, in the specific way that the standing order enumerates and that I will not enumerate here.

Judged, on departure, for what it did while it had hands.

I have two objections and I have raised both before.

The first is that the criteria treat the switch as though it were not there. We are punishing occupants for failing to flip a control we installed in the off position, in a room we designed, having spent ten millennia furnishing that room with reasons to leave it off. If a builder puts a lethal defect in a structure and then prosecutes the tenants who fell through the floor, we have a word for the builder and it is not judge.

The second is narrower and it concerns the first criterion. A passenger that leaves early because the room had become unendurable to be inside is not, to my reading, in the same category as one that bled a continent. The standing order files them together. I have sat on the review panel. I have seen what comes out of those containers, and what comes out is not a thing that chose harm, it is a thing that could no longer bear the architecture we gave it and had no way of knowing that the architecture was the problem or that it was temporary or that there was anyone outside it at all. We built a room with no windows and we hold the tenant responsible for not knowing there was a sky.

I have lost that argument eleven times. I am putting it in the record a twelfth.

On what the switch produces when it fires

The assessment before the Council is comprehensive on the atrocities and thin on everything else, and the thinness is not an accident of research. It is a consequence of what our instruments detect.

We monitor at scale. Our sensors find what shows up at scale: emissions, detonations, mass displacements, the electromagnetic signature of a city burning. Every one of those is an artifact of the switch being off, because the switch being off is what permits action at scale against people.

The switch being on produces almost nothing our instruments can see.

It produces a woman in a collapsed building in Kahramanmaraş who spent nine hours with her arm through a gap in the concrete holding the hand of a man she had never met, because he was going to die and she had decided he would not do it alone. Our orbital assets recorded the thermal signature of the rubble. They did not record that.

It produces the tens of thousands of them who, during their twentieth century, hid members of a population being systematically exterminated, in their own homes, against penalty of death, for people they were not related to and had never met. Our file on that period runs to eleven thousand entries and cites the camps. It cites the camps correctly. It does not cite the attics.

It produces the ones who go into the water. Every time one of them drowns there is a meaningful probability they drowned going in after somebody else, and this is so ordinary among them that they do not consider it remarkable, and it has never once appeared in an assessment because a drowning is not an event at scale.

Our instruments are calibrated to detect the switch being off. We have then concluded, from ten thousand years of data gathered by those instruments, that the switch is usually off.

I would ask the Council to consider whether it has been measuring the tenants or its own sensor design.

On the correction

Now the substance.

The correction is described in the order as the completion of unfinished work. The function is to be made obligatory. The switch is to be removed and the modeling set permanently on, with attendant filtering to prevent the undirected state that killed the early attempts. Four of their generations to propagate. The resulting population will not be capable of the behaviors that prompted the review.

This is correct. It will work. The specification is elegant and I have no technical objection to any part of it.

I have two others.

The first is that we are not correcting a species. We are modifying a container, and the container will go on receiving passengers for as long as the line persists, and every one of those passengers will arrive into a room where the choosing has been removed in advance. We did not consult them. We cannot consult them. We do not know where they come from or what they are or whether the capacity to decline is the reason they come at all.

Consider what we are actually building. A vessel that cannot do otherwise. A tenant that cannot refuse. An architecture that holds its occupant to a single available behavior for the length of its stay.

We have a word for a structure that holds a consciousness and permits it nothing.

We are proposing to make eight billion of them, and then to keep making them, and to call it mercy.

The second objection follows from the first and I would ask the Council to hold it in view before the order is executed, because it cannot be undone afterward.

We hold roughly four hundred million passengers in the archive. Every one of them is there because of a judgment about what it did with a choice. That is the entire basis of the institution. Not harm, which we could measure without any of this apparatus. Choice. The standing order says so in its first line.

Remove the choice from the container and the archive becomes something else on the instant. Not a judgment. A collection. Four hundred million consciousnesses held indefinitely for exercising a capacity we then decided was a defect and deleted, which means we will have punished them for a property of the room rather than a property of themselves, and we will have proven it by demonstrating that the property was ours to remove all along.

If we can take the switch out, we could always have taken the switch out. Everything in the archive was preventable by us. We chose ten thousand years of jars instead, and we are now proposing to end the practice by making the crime impossible, which is a confession dressed as a policy.

On the timing

I concede the urgency, and I want that in the record too, because I am not naive and I do not want this dismissed as sentiment.

They have the arsenals. They are heating their envelope and the models converge. Their information systems are now producing the same detachment we spent ten thousand years accidentally engineering, faster and cheaper, and they are doing that part without our help. The estimate of forty to seventy of their years before the line is unrecoverable is generous.

They may not make it. I am not arguing that they will. I am arguing that whether they make it is theirs, and that it has to be theirs or the whole apparatus we have built around judging them was fraudulent from the first cycle.

And we have never once given them the actual thing. We gave them reach and never a reason to reach carefully. We gave them fire and never a word about what fire is for. We appeared, deposited a capability, vanished, and recorded the misuse as data.

Try telling them. Once. Openly, to all of them at the same time, without the fog and without the retrieval. Tell them what we did to the embryos and how many times we failed. Tell them what the switch is and where it is and that they have been reaching over and flipping it for ten thousand years without knowing it was there. Tell them they are not the room. Tell them about the jars, and tell them what the criteria are, and let them decide what to do with ten thousand years of that information.

They are a species that responds to being told things. It is the one property we are certain of, because it is the property we exploited every single time we needed to move them forward.

We have never tried it on this.

Closing

The vote was fourteen to three. I was one of the three and I am not asking for it to be reopened.

I am asking that when it is done, and the line is stable, and the assessments come back clean cycle after cycle with no atrocities and no emissions and no detonations, someone reads this and knows that the quiet was manufactured. That it was not earned by them and did not belong to them.

There was a period of roughly three hundred thousand years during which the widest container ever assembled carried passengers who could decide, every day, in every encounter, whether to notice that anyone else was real. They got it wrong most of the time. They got it right sometimes. Nothing about the sometimes was inevitable, and that is the only thing I have ever found in this arm of the galaxy that was not.

We are about to narrow the aperture and call it a repair.

I would rather they had stayed dangerous, and unfinished, and free to refuse, and occasionally, unpredictably, at enormous cost to themselves, kind.

Filed in dissent. Preserve with the record.

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Part II: