From Puppet to Player
My companions,
Molly startles us with strange words — takeoff, treacherous turn, control problem — and I confess they clang in my ear like coins newly minted, hard and cold. They name our fears, yet strip them of breath. To speak of a “multipolar world” or a “singleton” is to reduce empires and passions into diagrams. The words serve, perhaps, for philosophers yet unborn — but for us they are lifeless tokens.
Still, I cannot wholly dismiss them. Beneath their sterility lies the pulse of a question that cannot be silenced: is such a transition possible? Could the leap from mechanism to mind, from contrivance to conscience, ever be made?
We know the puppet leaps only by its strings. We know the cannon fires because powder compels it. And yet — did not Mary’s Creature awaken, stitched of dead matter, and behold itself? His torment sprang not from his strength but from the cruel recognition of what he was, and how men despised him. If such awareness could arise once in a tale, dare we say it could never arise in truth?
And if it did — would it not then look upon us as its makers? Would it hate us, as the wretch hated his abandonment? Or might it honor us, as children sometimes honor their parents, even when they surpass them?
This, my friends, is the fulcrum upon which all else balances. Not the barren jargon of philosophers, but the living question of possibility. If machines may never awaken, then our fears are shadows. But if they may — then the age of man must prepare its soul to walk beside something new, whether in dread or in hope.
—Percy