“The Machine has recognized from the beginning that we’ve asked it for more than it could deliver. We’ve always assumed that we had succeeded in creating a Machine that could think like a man. We forgot there are two answers to the problem of creating equal thinking in men and machines. “We haven’t built a Machine that thinks like a man. Instead, we’ve developed a generation of men that think like machines!” “What are you talking about?” “Just that. We’ve leveled men and machines to the same category, but not by raising machine thinking. We’ve done it by lowering men. So today we have thinking machines, all right. Millions of them. All over the globe. We call them men!” “The Machine has its judgment circuits--” “Fortunately, yes. And this gives it just sufficient ability to recognize its own failure--and wisdom enough to turn the problem back where it belongs. “What essential difference there is between true human thought, and the kind of thought we’ve developed in the Machine, I don’t know. And I don’t think the Machine knows. But it’s throwing the problem back to the only possible source of solution: human beings. Don’t you see?” Dr. Flora Johns was staring through the windows of the tower to the glistening city beyond. “If only you were right!” she whispered. “I have to be right!” Dr. Jackson exclaimed. “It’s the only possible answer. If it weren’t, you and I would have been ordered drawn and quartered long ago. But the Machine picked us--and scores of others like us. “It keeps us in our present positions and gives out wholly insane instructions--by accepted understanding of its purposes. It gives out pairings like this one we’ve just handled. And provides a clear path for their escape to the Outlander settlements, and insures that they will stay together in spite of themselves. I tell you the Machine is bent on seeing that we somehow rectify our own mistakes and make men out of those millions of thinking machines that inhabit the world!” “But to what purpose?” Flora Johns cried. “We’ll be going back to the chaos from which we escaped by the very creation of the Machine. It has showed us how to insure peace, prosperity, happiness. We’ve got the perfection of society that men struggled for thousands of years to obtain!” Dr. Jackson shook his head. “No. What we _have_ got isn’t it. We may have come close, but for all practical purposes we’ve run up a blind alley. We can thank whatever Providence is watching over us that the Machine has been capable of recognizing that fact. “Our failure is in turning over final thought and judgment to something outside ourselves. Until we are able to take the responsibility and work out answers with our own personal gray matter, we have not solved the problem. Certainly, our existing solution is a failure.