"If I may ask Mr.
Melroy a question: I gather that these tests are given to all your
employees. Why do you demand such an extraordinary level of intelligence
from your employees, even common laborers?"
"Extraordinary?" Melroy echoed. "If the standards established by those
tests are extraordinary, then God help this country; we are becoming a
race of morons! I'll leave that statement to Dr. Rives for confirmation;
she's already pointed out that all that is required to pass those tests
is ordinary adult mental capacity.
"My company specializes in cybernetic-control systems," he continued.
"In spite of a lot of misleading colloquial jargon about 'thinking
machines' and 'giant brains', a cybernetic system doesn't really think.
It only does what it's been designed _and built_ to do, and if somebody
builds a mistake into it, it will automatically and infallibly repeat
that mistake in practice."
"He's right," Cronnin said. "The men that build a machine like that have
got to be as smart as the machine's supposed to be, or the machine'll be
as dumb as they are.
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