‘Yes,’ said Rowe. ‘Yes.’

‘At any rate in the early stages. On the same principle you might also programme machines to go through the initial conversational moves two people make when they first meet. They’re always standardised, like chess openings. You could select your gambit, then go away and make the tea while the machine played it, and come back and pick up the conversation when it started to become interesting.’

‘Yes,’ said Rowe.

‘It breaks my heart to see that wing going empty when there’s so much to be done. I mean, let’s accept – and I owe this suggestion to my good friend Goldwasser – that all ethical systems are ossified, in which case all operations within an ethical system can be performed by computer. I should be designing circuits to demonstrate what happens when one ossified system, say a Christian one, comes into contact with another ossified system, say a liberal agnostic one. And what happens when two computers with incompatible systems try to programme a third between them.

‘Ah, Rowe, Rowe, Rowe! Doesn’t it move you to contemplate the great areas of life which have ossified, where activity has been reduced to the manipulation of a finite range of variables? The pity and the terror of it, Rowe! These vast petrified forests are our rightful domain. They are waiting helplessly to be brought under the efficient, benevolent rule of the kindly computer.

‘Take the field of religious devotions. What computer man can survey devotional practice without lifting up his heart and thanking God for sending him such a prize? When we are called in to write a programme for automated devotion – as we shall be in five or ten years’ time – we shall of course recommend performing all the religious services in the country from one central computer, which would also write its own sermons, logically developing any given topic along the lines laid down by the Thirty-Nine Articles or the Holy Office without fear of heterodoxy. But in fifteen or twenty years’ time we shall be writing programmes for praying. The subjects and sentiments tend to come in a fairly limited range.’

‘Ah,’ said Rowe, ‘there’s a difference between a man and a machine when it comes to praying.’

‘Aye. The machine would do it better. It wouldn’t pray for things it oughtn’t to pray for, and its thoughts wouldn’t wander.’

‘Y-e-e-s. But the computer saying the words wouldn’t be the same . . .’

‘Oh, I don’t know. If the words “O Lord, bless the Queen and her Ministers” are going to produce any tangible effects on the Government it can’t matter who or what says them, can it?’

‘Y-e-es, I see that. But if a man says the words he means them.’

‘So does the computer. Or at any rate, it would take a damned complicated computer to say the words without meaning them. I mean, what do we mean by “mean”? If we want to know whether a man or a computer means “O Lord, bless the Queen and her Ministers,” we look to see whether it’s grinning insincerely or ironically as it says the words. We try to find out whether it belongs to the Communist Party. We observe whether it simultaneously passes notes about lunch or fornication. If it passes all the tests of this sort, what other tests are there for telling if it means what it says? All the computers in my department, at any rate, would pray with great sincerity and single-mindedness. They’re devout wee things, computers.’