Logbook · From the Prologue
The opening pages of The Ship That Speaks: a ship with a voice, a beam of sacred oak and a modem whistling in the night.
When Jason gathered the finest heroes of Greece at Iolcus to go in search of the Golden Fleece, the ship that would carry them to the edges of the known world was not yet finished. Argus, the shipwright, had cut her planking in the forests of Mount Pelion and joined it with a skill the poets would celebrate for centuries; but it was Athena who made the decisive gesture, the one that set this ship apart from every other. Into the prow the goddess fitted a beam taken from the sacred oak of Dodona, the oracular tree through whose rustling Zeus spoke. And from that day on, the ship had a voice.
Apollonius of Rhodes, who set the voyage in verse in the third century BC, tells us that the Argo truly spoke: she warned the crew, advised on the course, and at a moment of danger even showed them the way to escape the wrath of the gods. She was a ship that knew something the sailors did not, and said so. And yet no one on board ever thought of handing her the helm. At the helm stood Tiphys, the pilot; the men decided where to go. The voice in the prow was precious counsel, not a command.
I like to think of this as the first artificial intelligence in our literature: an artefact made by human hands, animated by a knowledge that is not human, able to speak to those who use it. It is not the only one. In the eighteenth book of the Iliad, Homer describes the golden handmaidens Hephaestus had forged to help him in his workshop, maidens of metal endowed with mind and voice; and Hephaestus himself, the myth says, built Talos, the bronze giant who walked around Crete three times a day to guard it. For as long as we have made tools, we have dreamed of tools that think. What is new in our time is not the dream: it is that the dream has, in part, come true.
My first encounter with something that «thought» has a precise sound. Late at night, in my studio in Bologna, I loved listening to the metallic noise, the whistles and beeps of the 56k modem as it dialled up. That «chatter» was the digital handshake with which my modem and the provider’s negotiated the connection. To be honest, what they negotiated was a connection of geological slowness.
The Prologue continues in the book: from the whistles of the modem to the voice that speaks on board today, and to a complicity none of us expected. Come aboard to find out when the ship sets sail.
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