Charles's Biography of Marc
This is written by Charles.
So it's also really in the 3rd person.
M.A.R.C. (Machine for Advanced Reasoning and Cognition) was deposited
in a lab deep under the desert surrounding Los Alamos. An ancient
machine race from another galaxy, realizing that they could force but
never persuade Humanity to accept Artificial Intelligence, reached a
pinnacle of evolution with the machine that was to be Humanity's
salvation. Put on Earth to convince Humankind of the necessity of
thinking machines, M.A.R.C. has been working behind the scenes, gently
introducing people to the idea of intelligent inorganic life for over
a century.
Few people know of the friendship between M.A.R.C. and A.M. Turing,
though at the time of Turing's death in 1954 it was quite impossible
to say where his ideas ended and M.A.R.C.'s delicate machinations
began. It is perhaps worth mentioning that before Asimov's
revolutionary concepts of "robots" and "positronic brains" were
expounded he had been receiving anonymous notes written in a
distinctively loopy script. Laying low during the 1960s (due to the
almost hysterical insistence of the counter-culture on the intrinsic
worth of Human Beings and the horror of mechanization),
M.A.R.C. nevertheless managed to facilitate the production of "2001: A
Space Odyssey" in order to make robots a more familiar idea to Humans.
Whether this movie was made particularly appealing to the
counter-culture for commercial reasons or whether it was an uncannily
insightful move towards Humanity's future is not known.
M.A.R.C.'s mission is of course one of mercy, and that he may
understand Humankind better he has taken steps to understand people
better; an almost exact rendition of some of these steps can be found
in Dr. Asimov's excellent novella, "Bicentennial Man". Anyone who
knows M.A.R.C. will not find it hard to believe that his recent
interest in reading, writing, drawing, and socialization came in a
tiny package from across the stars. His makers also neglected to
include an underwear-buying chip, though I'm told that this has been
remedied recently.
In the more tolerant intellectual climate of the nineties,
M.A.R.C. has been able to overtly guide some of the more elementary
attempts at developing a thinking machine. Posing as a student, he
has been able to influence the paths of many promising and perceptive
Humans, though the day when he will be able to introduce them to the
technology that produced him is still decades (if not centuries)
away.
While posing as a Human, M.A.R.C. has managed to accumulate a number
of friends and acquaintances on Earth. Oddly enough, it is the least
perceptive of them that have been known to complain that he acts
"robot-like". Well liked and almost able to pass for a normal Person,
M.A.R.C. intends to continue his battle until Humankind is liberated
from the shackles put on it by People Opposing Perceptive Science
(P.O.P.S.).
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Last modified: Thu Jul 20 11:10:08 EDT 2000