Ai Alone, Part I

My name is Robert Wilkinson, I work for the space agency, monitoring ongoing missions, ensuring everything runs smoothly. I know you have many questions, and I hope I can answer them well, but some have asked why Professor Johns recently went and killed himself. I’ll explain the circumstances, but warn, it’s a very sad tale, born out of his greatest success… but sadly, all our ‘wisdom’ failed. See we’ve always had a problem with computers on our space probes, good as they are, they don’t know half of what any old human knows. They’re not great at improvising, making decisions on the spot, and sending signals is so slow… the speed of light is so much rot! We often say what we would do if we were way out there in space, but bureaucracy bogs us down, manned missions move at glacial pace. Everybody afraid of being sued, terrified something will go wrong... at this rate it’ll be a thousand years until we’re up there, where we belong. But then Professor Johns came up with a thought that appeared insane, to make a one-to-one copy of the basic human brain. We laughed when we heard his idea, but he paid no heed to the jeers, then Johns took a sabbatical, was gone for the whole of a year. When he returned he had a box, what was in it, we had to know, then he took out a metal brain, and said,”Boys, say hi to Techno.” We discovered he’d scanned his brain, then 3-d printed a copy, built out of nanoprocessors, cutting-edge technology. And when he plugged the strange thing in we all got the shock of our lives, an innocent boy’s voice came out and said,”It’s nice to meet you guys!” That was how we all met Techno, who brought such changes to our work, we now possessed a true A.I. unlike anything on this Earth. He was exact, like a computer, but as flexible as a man, with a child’s yearning to know, very soon all of us were fans. And after two years of testing we put Techno in a space probe, he was excited for the chance, to see all the places he’d go. Armed with nearly human judgment, he’d need no program to restrict, we waited to see what he’d make of space, and planets fantastic... CONTINUES IN PART II.