"Walter Jon Williams - Flatline" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

After finishing your four-hour shift at the underground Neurodyne facility--you supervise automated
machines that ship coolant to AIs--you head for the Club Danton. It's a job you've held for four years,
ever since the Providence Privateers let you go after two inglorious seasons. The team managers didn't
approve of the fact you didn't like pain. You hadn't been told you were supposed to.

As you drive past the octahedron, you observe that a Regressers cult, dressed in homespun, hair and
beards long, is using the building for shelter, setting cookfires in its shadow. Neurodyne doesn't care. The
cult can push and shove all it wants, and the octahedron still won't fall off its point.

You drive to the club and park under the bridge. Gustav (latest version) sits on his customary window
seat, and you wave hello. He signals you to join him.

Gustav is a dwarf. No one has to be a dwarf these days, not unless he wants to be, so Gustav is a dwarf
by way of making a statement. He has stunted his body as metaphor for what he believes society has
done to his soul. Gustav is a dedicated revolutionary, and wants to wean people away from their
technology.

Because he does things that are illegal, Gustav makes it hard for people to find him. He has no fixed
abode, and changes his appearance regularly. Little molecular machines beneath his skin alter the
structure of his face every few days.

Molecular machines are the principal technology that Gustav wants to wean people away from.
Dedicated revolutionaries, you suspect, learn to live with these sorts of contradictions.

You get out of the Buick and walk into the club. There are some truly repulsive people in here, many of
them having altered their appearance to include scales, fangs, multiple eyes, and devil horns. There are
giants, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, lunatics, killers. It's all stance, a form of protest. All a game, even though
sometimes the players die. Their lives don't mean much to them.

Everyone in the Club Danton is a flatliner. They're all just about as useful as the railroad bridge above
their heads, with its short rusting tracks leading from one precipice to another.

****

The curve that represents the capabilities of artificial intelligence, plotted against time, rises over the last
two decades to a near-vertical line, soaring right off the chart in the direction of infinity, a singularity
similar in form to those implied by the architecture of Fantasyland. If human potential were plotted on the
same graph, the resultant stuttering line would barely nudge upward. It's flat, as flat as the destinies of
most people on our sad and unstable planet.

Molecular machines radically increased production and efficiency. They think faster, conceptualize better,
learn from their mistakes, move data in the wink of an eye. They are perfectly efficient: no wasted
resources, no pollution, no harmful side effects. They were intended to liberate us from drudgery,
boredom, and even our mortality, to unleash hidden reserves of human potential.

For all but a few, the reserves of human potential remain hidden. A fraction of the population--maybe
two percent--possesses the imagination and ability to make use of the new technology, to use it to
express themselves, their ideals, to bring themselves to full flower.

The rest of us drowned in a sea of microscopic intelligence. We gorged on new consumer toys till we