Chapter 1561: A Hundred-Year-Old Experiment
“Hey, can a robot have real feelings?”
Hearing the sudden inquiry from Chairman Li Guangya, Wu Shuhua, who was standing next to the desk, was slightly taken aback and frowned.
“Do robots have feelings? What are you talking about?”
“It’s nothing, just feels a bit interesting. This is indeed a question worth thinking about.” Looking at the report in his hand, Li Guangya tapped his index finger gently on the desk twice and said in a chatting tone, “Remember the previous robot that was naturally awakened?”
“You mean… Tail?”
Li Guangya: “It seems to be her name. If I remember correctly, she should be a naturally awakened robot, and at the same time, she published her core code on the world’s largest academic forum?”
“I remember this.” Wu Shuhua nodded and continued, “Why are you bringing up this matter?”
“Because of those 1,024 data people… Their bodies have been destroyed, but their consciousness has been uploaded to the hardware by those robots. We now have two choices. One is to treat them as legally dead and delete all information about them. The other is to give each of them a robot body, allowing them to continue to live with another ident.i.ty.”
Regarding this sensitive question, Wu Shuhua didn’t make any comments. Instead, she asked, “What do you think?”
Li Guangya: “I’ll just say it straight. For humanitarian reasons, they are victims of the war. We should give them bodies to reunite them with their families. But logic tells me that this choice is full of risks.”
Wu Shuhua: “Actually, I don’t quite understand. That pioneer… that is, David Lawrence, why did he do this?”
“Maybe for some experiment, maybe just out of boredom. No one knows except himself…” Li Guangya said thoughtfully, leaning back on the office chair, “Unfortunately, he is dead. B*stard got lucky.”
This was not just a problem he faced.
It could even be said that this was a test for the entire society of Pan-Asian Cooperation.
If they were to give up on those people, they would get an extremely “pure” society. If they were to choose to accept, they might usher in a diversified society.
“Speaking of which, is Academician Lu still in North America?”
“Yes.”
Hearing Secretary Wu’s answer, Li Guangya sighed.
“It would be nice if he could come back soon. I still have a lot of things to talk to him.”
Wu Shuhua: “You seem to trust him very much.”
Li Guangya: “He is indeed a trustworthy person. This is proved by actions. Is there any problem?”
Wu Shuhua: “I don’t deny this, but I didn’t expect that you would actually rely on others.”
“Trust is not equal to dependence. I have my own judgment, but wouldn’t it be better to refer to the opinions of experts before that?” Li Guangya smiled lightly and said, “At the very least, we’ll run into less trouble.”
…
Church in Princeton.
White tombstones stood on the lawn behind the church.
As Lu Zhou’s index finger traced the small line of epitaphs on the tombstone, he gently read it out.
“Great scholar, great professor.”
[—Pierre Deligne]
He was a respectable teacher, not only because of his achievements in mathematics, but also because his wisdom had inspired many souls with potential.
“I didn’t expect to meet you in this fas.h.i.+on… I originally wanted to commemorate you in my own way, but the management here told me that I can’t.”
He gently put the flower in his hand onto the tombstone.
Lu Zhou didn’t stay here for much longer. He then turned around and walked away.
Lu Zhou did not leave Princeton immediately. Instead, he studied the “autobiography” about David Lawrence that he borrowed from the Firestone Library.
It was very interesting that this autobiography was not written for him by others, but by himself, or at least by his dictation.
Before Lawrence graduated from Princeton, his dream was to become a historian. However, because of sudden changes, he had to abandon his academic path and go back to inherit the family business of the Lawrence family.
As the wealthiest and most powerful family in the Boston Financial Group, he ama.s.sed a terrifying wealth in his early thirties.
Although in the technology industry, he always stood opposite his old friend Lu Zhou, but compared to the huge family business left to him by his parents, this loss was nothing at all.
[… Illness, aging, natural and man-made calamities, and weak flesh and blood will decay one day. Only by engraving the mind onto the circuit board can we achieve real eternity.
[I started to fund those scholars and dreamers that I was optimistic about and to invest in future industries, hoping that in my lifetime, I could upload my consciousness to the Internet. At that time, I will try my best to create an omnipotent body and the smartest brain in the world. In the form of numbers, I will obtain a superhuman body and immortality that the princes and n.o.bles of the Middle Ages could only wish for.
[However, the road to pursuing the truth is always uneven. Just like how not everyone is worth investing in, not every investment ultimately brings me its due return. Some studies have to be fundamentally thrown out in the end. Some are stuck in a bottleneck. There is no way out.
[In the year of my fortieth birthday, I gradually began to feel desperate. That was until a piece of amazing news came from China. Another flame was lit in my heart.
[Destiny is so wonderful. Although my old friend has defeated the companies I supported more than once, this time, the neural interface device he developed had inspired me.
[I chose to continue to bet on Elon Musk, and there were many scientists who were engaged in the research of neural interface devices. I built a research inst.i.tute in Boston to study the derivative technology of neural access devices, namely, uploading the consciousness.
[In fact, this technology was not that difficult. After the bottleneck of the direct connection between the nervous system and the computer was solved, we, who have been researching in this field for many years, quickly grasped the key to solving this problem.
[However, I knew that this wasn’t enough. Fake programs couldn’t replace my consciousness. The person on the screen could only be regarded as a copy of me. At this time, my researcher told me that if I wanted to gain immortality in digital form, the program written into the hardware must be alive. In other words, it must have a high level of intelligence to be able to become a real person.
[My plan fell into a hole again, until one night at the end of 2022. I was so drunk with my sorrows that I put on a virtual reality helmet and prepared to hide in the virtual world. However, I was a bit drunk. An unknown force told me to pull into a dark s.p.a.ce. In fact, I thought it was a bug in the program, until I saw another me inside.
[“Want to live in the data sea forever like me? Then pa.s.s my test.” My other copy said to me and downloaded a 5MB program to my terminal.
[When I woke up and found the program on the terminal, I couldn’t use words to describe the surprise in my heart. It was like a thing that came from nothingness, saving me, who was about to fall into darkness. I opened it like it was a treasure and discovered the secret of evolution in it…
[It was a comprehensive proposition that mixed sociology and informatics. Even though it was only 5MB in size, it was still not easy to solve it. As the calculation continued, I continued to provide experiments for it. With materials and observable objects, the scale of the program grew exponentially. Later, I had to buy a supercomputing center and even open up a planet to satisfy its appet.i.te.
[Although its appet.i.te got bigger and bigger, I was still full of confidence for the future. The end of evolution is right in front of me, and I will be able to achieve immortality soon, I will share the secrets of evolution with everyone, as I am selfless.]
After reading David Lawrence’s autobiography, Lu Zhou took a deep breath, closed the book, and cast his eyes on the deep night outside the window.
The timeline was right, and his guess was correct.
The night at the end of 2022 was the day when the ILHCRC launched a high-energy physics experiment on anomalous energy regions. It was also on that day that human civilization looked up to the world in the n+1 dimension for the first time—that was, The Observer civilization’s Void.
And the program on Ceres came from there!
“When you are staring at the Void, the Void is staring back at you.”
After thinking about this sentence repeatedly, Lu Zhou sighed slightly.
“Just a quick glance in the Void let out such terrible trouble.”
100 years.
If I weren’t still alive, the truth would probably be buried in the dust of history forever.