[401-600] THE MECH'S TOUCH

Chapter 472: Clashing Values

The height of his current level of Intelligence had reached a ridiculous height. This was the first time Ves put his efforts into absorbing as much knowledge as possible, and his reading and comprehension speed astounded him. He browsed through the pages of his textbooks with such speed that he already flipped to the next page while he read the current one.

Before he ingested the Transcendence Pill, he was like a slow transport. After he took it, he turned into a blazing fast corvette.

"The difference is like night and day. There's no comparison!"

The boost in Intelligence hadn't made him any wiser, but it had certainly transformed his several cognitive functions that manifested fully when it came to learning new knowledge. His brains basically turned into an organic processor that could rapidly memorize, process and understand anything he came across.

Ves became increasingly proficient in Computer Science, to the point where he had long gone past the Incompetent tier.

That said no one would ever become proficient in hacking just by reading a few books. As much as Ves absorbed a university degree's worth of knowledge, he hadn't fully mastered what he learned.

"It's like learning how to play an instrument by reading a book. As much as I'm familiar with the theories, I'm still missing some elements."

Ves did not set out to learn how to program and how to hack mechs on his own. He only wanted to gain a solid foothold into this field so he could somewhat understand what other hackers tried to pull off under his supervision.

"Besides, it's not like this knowledge will go to waste. I can leverage what I've learned to all of my future work."

Still, as much as Ves saw the potential in mastering the software side of mechs, he felt absolutely no affinity for this field. The more he delved into this topic, the more he got the sense he was beginning to go astray.

This caused him to pause his learning for a bit. He struggled to understand why some part of his personality meshed so poorly with his latest area of interest.

"Is it… because it clashes with my values?"

He could find no other answer that made sense. Programming was barely tolerable to him, but the topic of hacking really sang a discordant tone to the rest of his mind. The more he immersed himself in the many ways in which he could manipulate a mech down to its very root, the deeper his unconscious repulsion for the idea.

"This is… not compatible with my design philosophy!"

It all came down to his core ideology concerning mechs. He long believed that mechs weren't lifeless machines and shouldn't be treated as disposable commodities. Every mech held the potential for life, and they should be treated more akin to individuals than pure products.

Ves might not have completely formed his design philosophy, but he definitely knew the direction it was heading in. All in all, he believed that even the shabbiest mechs deserved a basic measure of respect.

Yet despite his beliefs, he hadn't truly fleshed out the nebulous concept of life. He always thought of it in an abstract fashion, which wasn't wrong in itself, but only scratched the surface of what this contentious word really meant.

Some people believed that bots fell into the definition of life. Even the stupidest cleaning bots possessed some form of autonomy, and even if they couldn't propagate by themselves, neither could many other organisms such as certain castes of ants or bees.

Yet even if a radicalist tried to argue that bots should be regarded as living beings and thus deserve the same rights as animals or humans, nobody would entertain such a whacky idea. Even the best AIs developed by experts that could pass most of the sentience tests eventually became stumped when it came to highly illogical subjects such as love, art, culture and faith.