The Invincible by Stanislav Lem is one of the finest ‘hard’ sci-fi novellas I know, absolutely as good as his other much better-known story, Solaris. It was written in the 1960s, and is a detective story concerning the mysterious loss of a spaceship and all its crew on a deserted planet. It’s told from the perspective of the commanders of a second space ship, called the Invincible, similar to the first, which is sent to investigate the disappearance. It reads mostly as halfway between a scientific report and a regular novel, very characteristic of one of Lem’s many different writing styles – sober, concerned primarily with factual occurrences, though also recording emotions in so far as these indicate the strangeness of the circumstances – the style of The Invincible is almost identical to that of Solaris, and to most of his Pirx the Pilot stories – Lem was after all a trained and sophisticated scientist.
As the story unfolds Lem gradually introduces the amazing idea of a process of competitive machine evolution carrying on for millions of years, with no human or other sentient involvement whatsoever, proposing that if the initial conditions are right, then the outcome of that evolutionary struggle would be the simplest and smallest kind of modular ‘device’, powered by the most widely available source of energy (solar power), but having the capability to join together with millions of identical others to form enormous ensembles, able to generate gigantic magnetic field gradients which enable them to ‘fly’ and to attack and disable other machines, which it detects through their electrical activity. Over time the remnants of their original programming become a kind of radically simplified group memory, including how to disable different types of potential competitor – and this includes sentient beings too – there are no animals or plants on the land areas of the planet, but there are in the sea, though these flee quickly if they detect any movement on land. The crew’s investigations lead to some of them being completely disabled by being subjected to massive magnetic field gradients, which wipe their consciousness, effectively reducing them to the state of babies, behaving completely anarchically and unable to look after themselves – and this is what has befallen the previous crew. Lem’s idea is that this form of ‘device’ might have evolved through millions of years of struggle for resources and power between different types of machines left behind on the planet by sentient beings, the key thing being that in this struggle and in the conditions pertaining on this planet, it wasn’t superior consciousness that won out, but simplicity, small size and flexibility. And he keeps reminding us that this process could take place in the complete absence of what the singularity merchants would call ‘consciousness’. The original machines that started the process were programmed to find resources and to protect themselves, whatever their other functions, and if necessary by competing with other machines: this programming was the driver for the evolutionary process the human scientists on the Invincible eventually hypothesise, before leaving the planet having recognised that the only way to ‘manage’ the situation would be to destroy all, or nearly all the tiny ‘machines’, which would effectively mean destroying the planet. Very interesting in the context of discussions and debates about the future direction of AI in the real world.
It’s impressive how absolutely topical the theme of this story is, written over half a century ago, but how in one respect at least it is of its time and its specific place in Iron-Curtain Europe – there are no women in the story, and no women are even mentioned. At least the US film version of Solaris made some of the crew women, and one of them black. Furthermore, Lem’s space ‘workers’ –always hyper-professional and who always proceed according to agreed protocols as far as they can – are Eastern-block explorer-scientists, apparently culturally neutral, egalitarian and non-competitive compared to their western counterparts, but as far as I can remember (I’ve been reading and collecting his stuff ever since seeing the Russian film of Solaris (directed by Andrei Tarkovski) while I was at university in the early 70s), absolutely always male….
I wrote this having forgotten about my earlier post on it, which is similar but not exactly the same.
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