The Glitch - James Blish, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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The GlitchJames Blish(with L. Jerome Stanton)When the construction of ULTIMAC began, Ivor Harrigan could have told World Government what would happen, but he planned to be far away when it did. Unfortunately, it is in the very nature of a glitch that it strikes without warning, so planning to be somewhere else at the time is about as useless as trying to enforce the Ten Commandments.He wouldn’t have been listened to, anyhow, since he was only twenty when the edifice began - a fairly advanced age considering that even then most people got their Ph.D.s by twelve ae., but a long way from seniority in the computer servicing business, let alone in Government. Not that he didn’t try, which, as it turned out, was his peripateia. He had a social conscience of sorts, strong enough at least to get him through to Abdullah Powell.Powell was also a computer man, and senior enough to be involved in the ULTIMAC project itself. The trouble, Ivor quickly found, was that computer designers and computer servicing engineers are two quite different breeds of cat. Sitting in his plush Novoe Washingtongrad office, Powell had uttered one of the most venerable of Famous Last Words: ‘Forget it. Nothing can go wrong.’‘But Dr Powell, things are always going wrong. I know. Things going wrong is what I make my living at.’‘Not much longer, I’m afraid,’ Powell said, waving a perfumed cigar and assuming a visionary expression. This gave him the twin advantages of looking skyward rather than at Ivor, and of causing his double chins almost to merge. ‘You don’t understand the total scope of this venture, Ivor. Once ULTIMAC is finished, there’ll no longer be such a thing as an individual, independent computer. ULTIMAC will run the whole show. It will be self-monitoring and self-correcting. And it will be tied in to every other computer in the world, and will monitor and repair them, too. It will have the ultimate in failsafe systems. And with outlets in every home and business. It will manage the economy of the world, construct curricula, diagnose illness, predict earthquakes, ground-control all spaceflights...’Powell ran out of breath for a moment. ‘And,’ he said when he had gotten it back, his face glowing, ‘it will instantaneously poll the best educated populace in history on each and every decision. Think of that, Ivor, true, workable democracy at last, on a world-wide scale! And, of course, under a logics design completely subject to the I.A.s.’The I.A.s were the Laws of Robotics, named after a science popularizer who had once predicted that if computers ever took over the management of the world, they would probably do a better job of it than man had, and might even succeed man in the course of evolution. No record of them remains now, but hints and guesswork suggest that they might be reconstructed thus:(1) No robot shall harm any human being, or take any action which might harm any human being.(2) A robot shall protect itself at all times, unless such protection conflicts with the first law.(3) A robot must obey any order given it by a human being, unless it conflicts with the first two laws.(4) In any situation which conflicts with the first three laws, a robot must either immobilize itself and report later for repair, or self-destruct.(5) In all other situations, a robot must think for itself, under the overall rule, ‘Anything not compulsory is forbidden’.‘But Dr Powell, we’re not talking about robots. We’re talking about computers. The I.A.S don’t work with them and never did, and besides, we don’t have anything even vaguely like robots yet and maybe never will - ‘‘Now, Ivor, calm down, please. Technical men should not be subject to hysteria. I quite understand that you’re worried about the loss of your livelihood, but I’m sure you can be retrained. Men of your calibre are hard to find.’This was untrue, but since the argument was obviously getting nowhere, Ivor left, and tried a different tack: persuasion of senior men in his own branch of the field. That only got him nowhere in a different direction. The highest colleague he could reach was Enoch Amin, who had his own views:‘We’ll never be redundant, Ivor. Powell doesn’t know it, but ULTIMAC really is the ultimate in opportunities for us. Every computer in the world tied into it, and every one of them on the edge of taking sick overnight - to say nothing of the master machine itself. It’s the design engineers like Powell who’ll be put out of business; we’ll be rushed off our feet.’‘But the whole damn system is supposed to be homeostatic - self-correcting!’‘All the more jobs for us. Did you ever hit a self-monitoring computer that worked? We’ll be shooting all over the world, trying to find out which component went wrong where.’ Amin stood up ecstatically, which, since he was half a foot taller than Ivor, made him seem as though he were about to go into orbit. ‘And as for the Big One, my God, what an opportunity! Believe me, Ivor, we’ll wind up the secret masters of the whole system. Wallowing in luxury, if we can just find the time off for it. And, of course, keep our focus firmly on the I.A.s.’Ivor knew well enough that the I.A.s Amin was referring to made up an entirely different set than those Powell had invoked, and furthermore, constituted a trade secret. Neither set comforted him. He foresaw trouble on a massive scale, and neither Amin nor Powell could talk about it except in terms of keeping their jobs.As mentioned, Ivor had a rudimentary social conscience, but it was now clear to him that he had no pull. He had gone as high as he could in both directions. He went back to doing what he had been trained to do. He also fired his wives and his cats, gave up drinking and insofar as was possible, eating, and reduced his hobbies to the single one of saving his money at the highest interest rate he could find - specifically, in a bank whose computer, unbeknownst to anyone but himself, thought that the square root of 4.7 was 0.68581425, which was 0.001488 too high.He did not know why it thought so, and had no intention of trying to find out. Nor could he have, for that particular kind of bias was beyond his competence. But the effect of filling this parameter in this way upon the machine’s way of compounding interest was satisfying enough so that six years later he was again eating well enough to gain a little weight back.* * * *In fact, the whole next decade was idyllic for almost everyone. ULTIM AC was built, squarely across Niagara Falls - no lesser cooling system could have carried away its entropy loss alone. The gigantic building and its slave computers did everything they were supposed to do, and perfectly. By the end of that decade, if ULTIMAC decided to run the Amazon River backwards for twenty-four hours, or convert world math to the base twelve, or revive the railroad system, nobody argued. The decisions always worked, out to a margin of error so many decimal places to the right as to make Plancke’s Constant look like a whole number, and a rather small one at that.It put computermen of all stripes out of business, and all but a few politicians, too. Ivor didn’t mind that either. Immediately after his one abortive venture into politics, he had taken the precaution of cutting his bank’s computer off from ULTIMAC (under the guise of a routine check within his own sub-speciality) and as a result could also begin thinking about again taking in one cat (though, certainly not yet a wife).This tiny loss of input went unnoticed by ULTIMAC, which recorded only what it was fed, not what it was not. Its glamourous, Government-chosen acronym bore no relation to how it actually worked: it was necessarily a topological computer, geared despite all its decimal places to the losing of some information it did have in the byways of its almost total connectivity. It compensated; it worked; that was enough. And it was particularly good, as predicted, at servicing itself; no human hand was asked to touch it from the moment it went on stream, and most certainly not Ivor’s.Nor would he have done so if asked. As far as he was concerned, Utopia had arrived. Besides, topology was not his sub-speciality - in fact, he knew less about it than he did about poetry - and in ten years of calculated idleness he had almost forgotten the sub-speciality itself. He had even given up worrying. He did remember the trade-secret I.A.s, since he had sworn a solemn oath to do so, but bearing them in mind had become a useless exercise. And as for keeping his eye out for remote sands in which to bury his head, Just In Case, that had retreated into complacent fantasy.So it was nobody’s fault but his own that when the glitch hit ULTIMAC, he was virtually next door to the monster and was hired, nay, ordered, to fix it. The rest of this story is very sad indeed, and since by its very nature is not stored in ULTIMAC or anywhere else, you may not wish to read on. It requires a lot of explanation, too, and neither sadness nor explanations are welcome in our present, real Utopia. But they meant a lot to him, back in those days, and justice must be served, even to him.Hence: among the trade-secret Laws of Computerics to which Ivor was sworn were the following:I) Tell the customer nothing about the machine, even if you know something about it. If he insists, give him an incomplete Xerox copy of the assembly instructions for next year’s model. The head office will have insured that his present model in incomplete and that delivery date for the missing component cannot be predicted. If by any chance the custom...
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