War of Intelligent Machines

Chapter 7: The Forbidden Fruit Project

Chapter 7: The Forbidden Fruit Project

A year later, a large spacecraft delivered a cylindrical device to the base, about three meters in diameter and two meters high.

This device was the small nuclear fusion reactor, essentially built according to Jiang Yu's design plan.

The base allocated a machine room on the lowest floor for the reactor, steam turbine, and generator. From then on, the power for both the large and small bases would be supplied by this system. The solar power system that Jiang Hui had previously maintained was still kept as a backup power source.

Most people at the base didn’t know that this nuclear fusion reactor had been designed by a twelve-year-old girl.

Later, Jiang Yu went on to create several groundbreaking inventions, such as electrostatic muscles for robots, miniature superpower batteries for robots, and ultra-flexible graphene solar cells.

Among all these inventions, the electrostatic muscle was widely regarded as the greatest innovation of the era. This invention brought a qualitative leap to the global robot manufacturing industry.

Previously, robots used servo motors to drive reducers or direct-drive motors as the power for their joints.

This driving method was not only difficult to control but also expensive and had a high failure rate.

Jiang Yu’s electrostatic muscles, however, worked based on the principle of using electrostatic energy to cause the repulsion between insulated fibers. By charging high-voltage electricity into a bundle of high-strength insulating fibers, the electrostatic force made the fibers repel each other, causing the bundle to expand laterally and contract longitudinally.

The higher the voltage applied to the fiber bundle, the greater the lateral expansion and the larger and stronger the longitudinal contraction. Just like animal muscles, the force and range of contraction of the electrostatic muscles depended on the applied voltage.

If a larger bundle of electrostatic muscles was divided into several smaller bundles and controlled separately, the effect would be even more ideal.

With electrostatic muscles, the movement of robots began to resemble that of higher animals, appearing smooth and coordinated. Before this invention, robots’ movements often looked stiff and uncoordinated, like puppets, unable to perform complex tasks like humans could.

Because of Jiang Yu’s extraordinary talents and outstanding contributions, when she turned fifteen, the Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Qianxuesen Research Base, decided to expand the research institute under Jiang Yu’s direction and added five more researchers who would work remotely from Earth.

At the same time, there was another new development on the moon: the first private company’s lunar base, the Bayadi Company’s lunar sanatorium, named the Guanghan Palace Sanatorium, was built near the Qianxuesen Research Base. This sanatorium specialized in treating wealthy patients with heart and lung diseases.

Medical experts had already proven through experiments that many chronic diseases, including heart and lung diseases, could be effectively treated in the low-gravity environment of the lunar base.

Time flew by, and when Jiang Yu turned eighteen, she was assigned a very special task by the Academy of Sciences, titled "Research on Robot Self-Awareness."

The background of this project was quite interesting. When the military and police began using robots in missions, they discovered that robot warriors generally lacked autonomy and were overly reliant on pre-set programming. As a result, they often fell into enemy traps or robot ambushes.

For example, if the enemy used a low-powered laser gun to sweep back and forth, it could suppress all charging robots because the robots were programmed to dodge when they detected a laser beam.

If the programmer had instead set the robots to ignore the laser and continue charging forward, the robots would blindly charge into battle without trying to take cover, making them easy targets for the enemy, causing unnecessary losses.

Humans, on the other hand, would assess the danger and make judgments.

The standard for this assessment is the importance of the mission, personal values, experience, and environmental constraints.

A person first weighs the risk to themselves against the importance of the mission. If the mission is deemed more important than personal risk, a responsible soldier might choose to take the risk and even sacrifice their life.

Thus, a soldier who values the mission would make a different decision from one who prioritizes their own life, even when faced with the same danger.

In order for robots to be like humans—able to independently assess whether to risk completing a mission or to take cover for their own safety—they must be able to make value judgments.

However, once robots are capable of value judgments, they may develop personal desires, potentially leading to conflicts with humans.

The challenge of this project was how to give robots both value judgment ability and loyalty to humans. This was one of the reasons the project was so difficult.

This was a top-secret research project. If leaked and used by the wrong people, the consequences could be disastrous for all of humanity.

The Academy of Sciences assigned this task to Jiang Yu because of her exceptional intelligence and abilities, but also for confidentiality reasons and to avoid legal issues. After all, maintaining secrecy on the moon was far less costly. Furthermore, there was still debate on whether Earth’s laws applied on the moon.

Before taking on this task, Jiang Yu had already been researching robots for four or five years. She had developed group combat control and mutual support functions for robot police, so she understood the difficulty of this new project.

Her first feeling was that this was an immensely vast project—one that might never be finished in her lifetime. If successful, robot intelligence would gradually become closer to human levels, making robots intimate assistants and companions for humans. But if the research went awry, all the effort could be in vain. If a human-antagonistic organization obtained the technology to give robots personalities before the government did, humanity could face a catastrophic disaster.

To avoid unnecessary detours, Jiang Yu decided to conduct thorough and cautious preliminary research.

She gathered her team in the secure room to discuss the technical roadmap for the project.

Everyone showed great interest in the new topic, discussing it excitedly, sometimes debating so passionately that others couldn’t even interject. Finally, Jiang Yu summarized everyone’s ideas and formed the basic concept of robot personality development:

In order to give robots value systems, they needed to have desires and emotions, as these are the foundations for value judgments. The most basic desires could be divided into two pairs of parameters:

Glory and shame;

Courage and fear.

The basic emotions could be divided into six pairs of parameters:

Danger and safety;

Satisfaction and dissatisfaction;

Pain and pleasure;

Anger and joy;

Longing and boredom;

Irritation and calm.

They reached a preliminary consensus, believing that if robots could perceive and process these two desire parameters and six emotion parameters, they would have a basic value system and self-awareness, or at least a level of self-awareness comparable to higher animals.

One researcher even gave the project a cute nickname: the “Forbidden Fruit Project.” The idea was that after giving robots these codes and sensors, they would acquire desires and emotions, much like Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit, thereby gaining sin, so the project was named the Forbidden Fruit Project.

"Early simulations of robots’ desires and emotions are rather crude, and require continuous accumulation of experience for improvement."