Chapter 1059 — Taking Fire

From Pei Yun's attitude, Beiyila realized that the "synthetic brain" technology she had created seemed to matter more than she had anticipated—the "Outlander Wanderer," who always thought one step further than others, appeared to see in this technology some broader prospect for development, or perhaps... had already arranged some future application for it.

"May I ask?" After a moment's thought, she could not restrain her curiosity. "What do you intend to do with these 'brains'? Surely it is not merely to expand the ranks of the psionic singers and manufacture more mental-assist devices?"

Pei Yun looked at Beiyila in silence. After brief deliberation, he smiled and asked, "Have you ever visited those roaring factories?"

"Factories?" Beiyila paused, then nodded. "Of course—though I cannot move about now, the whole of the Solin region has many factories. I have seen the ones producing clothing and metal containers, and the ones treating wastewater and recycling slime monsters... Those machines are impressive."

"Yes, impressive—but perhaps they could be even more impressive," Pei Yun raised an eyebrow. "Those machines possess great power and high efficiency, yet compared with a deft craftsman, what they can do remains too little, too crude. As a Gondorian, you must know how the magical workshops of seven hundred years ago operated..."

"You intend to make the machines... learn to think?" Beiyila finally understood Pei Yun's meaning, and her eyes went wide. "Using those synthetic brains?"

"Not only that—we may even be able to make the factories themselves learn to think," Pei Yun nodded. "Picture this scene: our factory is a vast steel behemoth, and this behemoth has acquired a mind. At the factory's heart, in the thinking apparatus, a loyal wetware mainframe is immersed; its neural fibers spread along the pipes throughout the workshops; every machine is its terminus. All the gears and levers have now grown deft, performing fine work like a craftsman's fingers, while the workers and technicians need only issue commands and design ever more advanced workflows..."

For several seconds Beiyila said nothing. She thought that if she still had a heart, it might have skipped a beat. She admitted to herself that she was drawn in by the picture Pei Yun described, yet she also felt an inexplicable... vigilance. At last she shook her head and stared into the eyes of the Empire's Chief Druid. "How is it I never knew you had such exquisite command of language?"

"Because those words are His Majesty's, and I merely memorized them for recitation," Pei Yun admitted without a trace of concern. "He conceived an astonishing mode of production... But then again, he also stressed the unsettling aspects of this technology—whether these brains might slip out of control, whether they might develop 'thoughts' of their own, what role humans would play in the factories... You are a technician too, and you lived through the Gondorian era. You should understand what His Majesty is worried about."

"Indeed, I understand—and fortunately he is already worrying about these things. His worry actually sets my mind at ease," Beiyila said, and as she spoke she made a motion as though exhaling, much as a human would. "How should I put it... The future you just described even made me feel a touch of tension... and when I imagine those factories and machines actually beginning to think, the tension grows all the more."

Then she paused, as though deliberating, before continuing: "Still, it is just as well that we need not truly be so tense. At the present stage, the synthetic brain I created does not, by its physiological structure, possess the conditions for generating 'self-awareness.' It is an auxiliary computational organ; it can swiftly complete the induction and aggregation of vast data and take on some of the work of transmitting consciousness signals, but in essence its neural nodes cannot independently think through complex problems. So unless we redesign the entire structure of the synthetic brain, we need hardly fear that these brains will, at a single jolt of stimulation, suddenly develop self-awareness and run out of control.

"On the other hand, precisely because these brains can only perform computational tasks and carry out simple commands, if they truly are used to control machines, they can only do preset things, carrying out repetitive operations of no great complexity. So we need not worry that humans in the factories will all lose their jobs... though a reduction in positions is certain."

"What His Majesty worries about is in fact not merely human unemployment—in truth, that is not even an important problem," Pei Yun shook his head. "In fact, the greatest problem for factories everywhere is rather a shortage of workers. Even if more than half the machines were capable of running automatically in the future, the gap in positions would remain frighteningly large... But that is not what we are here to discuss today.

"In any case, since matters stand as you say, I for one am relieved."

Beiyila looked Pei Yun up and down. She was thinking, and she spoke as though pondering aloud: "Since we have come to this topic of 'making machines think,' I have a few views of my own..."

"Go on," Pei Yun nodded at once. "You are the expert in this field."

"It has nothing to do with expertise—I was merely reminded of certain things from the Gondorian era," Beiyila said, and behind her the winding vines and branches scraped against the floor with a rustling sound. "You must know that as early as the Gondorian period, humans had already created 'machines' capable of thought—we called them 'iron men' then, and modern golem and puppet techniques may all be counted as the remnants of that 'intelligent' technology. Of course, the mind-cores of the iron men and the arcane cores of puppets are fundamentally different things from the 'synthetic brain,' but they also share similarities—for instance... both carry the possibility of running out of control.

"And in the Gondorian era, to prevent the iron men from running wild, we once adopted a special method."

"A special method?" Pei Yun at once wore a look of curiosity. "What method?"

"I know only the broad outline—after all, in those days my brothers and I were merely minor nobles of the borderlands, and what I am about to describe was the most advanced technology of humanity at the time," Beiyila said slowly, recollecting as she went. "In those years, the Gondorian iron men were all incorporated into a system called the 'Iron Man Network.' This system was like a shared 'brain' for the iron men; they could act only under its control. And the upper nodes of this network... can you guess what they were?"

"Upper nodes?" Pei Yun frowned, but then at once he thought of a certain person, a Defiant as ancient as Kamaier. "Wait, I think I can guess..."

"Just as you surmise," Beiyila nodded. "They were the Gondorian royal house of that time—the Norton family.

"Every member of the Norton family would undergo neural modification during life, so that their brains could join the Iron Man Network just as the iron men did. Even after death, their consciousness would be preserved, continuing to operate within the Iron Man Network in some form. Generation after generation, the Norton royals in this way maintained absolute control over the 'iron men,' those highly intelligent mechanical soldiers... Though Gondor is gone now, to the very day the ancient empire fell, those iron man legions never once ran out of control."

Pei Yun opened his mouth, and only after a long while did he mutter, "This practice of preserving consciousness—why does it remind me of the Undying..."

"Yes, though they are different things, they share something in common," Beiyila said. "Many of the miraculous things we do today were in fact already done by the Gondorian Empire a thousand years ago."