Human Sister

were permitted to ask questions of the system but were otherwise veiled from it—into believing it was human.
    “I take it from your demeanor that First Brother failed,” Grandma said.
    “Of course, he did! I told Karl we shouldn’t participate in such foolishness. Given our current state of knowledge, it should be obvious that only a human can pass the test, unless, of course, the examiners are incompetent. Not a single person on that panel could convince a dog examiner that he or she is a dog, if dogs could give and respond to such tests. And what would that tell us? That humans don’t have the intelligence of a dog?”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Well, for example, a human testee—he’s the one we suppose is trying to deceive a dog examiner into thinking that he, the human, is really a dog—might be smart enough to feign that he finds the smell of anuses intriguing, but when the dog examiner asks, ‘Oh? How so?’ the human would be left speechless, whereas any dog capable of communicating could write a book on the subject.”
    “Grandpa!” Grandma scolded.
    “Do you have a better explanation? No, I didn’t think so.”
    There was a fleeting look of shock and displeasure on Grandma’s face; then she looked at me and her mouth silently formed the word “grumpy.”
    “Anyway,” Grandpa continued, “humans don’t have canine intelligence, and canines don’t have human intelligence. So it is with androids. They think faster than we do, so they see patterns we don’t, unless we do a lot of analysis. They’re not as attuned to emotional, especially sexual, nuance. They don’t have sex, for heaven’s sake, so why should they be? Thus, they don’t laugh at the same jokes, they’re not offended by the same things, and so on. To report that an intelligent system has failed to pass the Turing test is to report nothing more than that the intelligence isn’t human.”
    He gulped down the remainder of the glass of wine and scowled.
    “You didn’t care for the wine?” Grandma asked. “It’s last year’s Chardonnay.”
    “It’s fine, fine.” Grandpa rolled his eyes. “In fact, I’d like another glass. What’s troubling me is Second Brother’s response to a question Professor Scripps posed after the test. I’m sure Scripps and others will make hay out of Second Brother’s rash answer.”
    “What’d he say that upset Professor Scripps?” Grandma asked.
    “I didn’t say Scripps was upset. He undoubtedly was happy to get an answer he can use to further his agenda to ban all experiments on nonhuman conscious intelligences. Second Brother was obviously hostile to the test and to the interpretation given it by some of the panel members. Smelling blood—the one thing that old shark can still do with some competence—Scripps directed the following question to Second Brother: ‘What do you think of the idea that it is wrong to kill humans?’”
    “And?” Grandma asked.
    Grandpa gulped down some more wine.
    “And Second Brother said that a parasite that unrestrainedly kills its host ultimately destroys itself. As long as the only host for ideas was human brains, the idea that it is good to kill humans was at an evolutionary disadvantage to the idea that it is bad to kill humans. Needless to say, all hell broke loose. Scripps and Senator Kephart made national news by 1600. I got a call from Senator Franklin at 1607. He said we’d just ensured the election of at least forty more members of Congress and at least five more senators for the ERP.”
    At the time, all this was a bit of an uphill slog for me. But what definitely caught my attention—actually, I was somewhat pleased to hear it—was that First Brother had failed a test, a test that I (presumably) would have been able to pass.
    “What didn’t First Brother know?” I asked, trying to appear appropriately concerned.
    “I wouldn’t say he didn’t know. It was that the answers he gave led the panel to conclude he wasn’t human.”
    “What did they ask? What did he say? How could they tell he wasn’t human?”
    “Sara, honey,” Grandma said. “I think Grandpa’s had a tiring day. Maybe we should—”
    “Tell me! Tell me! I want to know! I want to know what makes First Brother different.”
    Grandpa smiled. He liked that I wanted to know. “There were ten professors. Each was allowed to ask a battery of questions. I can’t begin to remember them all. The point is that at the end of the examination, one