Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3191-3195 (4th to 8th April 2016)
jheartney:
--- Quote from: Mr_Rose on 05 Apr 2016, 23:25 ---Really? Was this NASA rep an engineer or an administrator, because I'd like to meet the engineer who thinks they can legitimately build a self-motivating intuitive sapient AI for less than the budget allocation for crew training and life support on the "journey to Mars" roadmap. I'll accept the construction of a hardened humanoid robotic shell as given, due to the progress Boston Dynamics and friends have made lately.
Because that's the difference. The problem has never been the tools or the sensors, it has been applying judgement to their placement for best effect, which is extremely difficult to do by remote from a planet light-minutes distant.
--- End quote ---
The effort to build a general purpose AI is going on regardless of anything happening in space. If it's successful, it'll be game over for nearly all human space exploration. But even without it, we've had a golden age of exploration of the solar system using non-AI tech.
Bringing the discussion back to QC, the AI's we've seen in-comic would be perfectly capable of exploratory trips to most destinations in the solar system, and could do anything human astronauts could do, at far less cost. Jeph's never talked about it, but in any world with that sort of AI, huge numbers of jobs all through the economy would be no-go zones for humans.
Radium_Coyote:
A manned mission to Mars could, potentially, accomplish more in one day than all the unmanned missions to date. It's just a question of versatility. A human can think up new things on the fly, and use existing resources in ways you wouldn't expect. This is the very history of both the American and Russki space programs.
A robot can only do what it was intended to do, and what it may be feasible to repurpose it to do. Humans are, to date, a lot more versatile.
JimC:
--- Quote from: jheartney on 06 Apr 2016, 07:10 --- but in any world with that sort of AI, huge numbers of jobs all through the economy would be no-go zones for humans.
--- End quote ---
It adds strength to our (comic) creator's decision to give AIs civil rights. Given the current tendency to a self perpetuating oligarchy in the form of an executive class which is increasingly multiplying its own wealth at the expense of the rest of the population then a huge population of AIs who were effectively slaves would destroy the economic system and surely lead to riots on the streets. That wouldn't be the story he wants to tell, so with the AIs having civil rights they are presumably no more (or less) exploitable by the executive class than the human population. The question then revolves around population control: how do AIs reproduce and what restrictions are there on creating AIs? Otherwise we get a population of a spartiate executive class, the rest of us as mothakes, and the AIs as helots.
But I'd better stop here, this could get very political, very controversial and a very long way from QC very fast. As it is we have a comic society much like ours, but with, as Niven would say, "minds that think as well as we do but differently". And that's a fun thing to explore in itself.
jheartney:
--- Quote from: JimC on 06 Apr 2016, 09:20 ---
--- Quote from: jheartney on 06 Apr 2016, 07:10 --- but in any world with that sort of AI, huge numbers of jobs all through the economy would be no-go zones for humans.
--- End quote ---
It adds strength to our (comic) creator's decision to give AIs civil rights. Given the current tendency to a self perpetuating oligarchy in the form of an executive class which is increasingly multiplying its own wealth at the expense of the rest of the population then a huge population of AIs who were effectively slaves would destroy the economic system and surely lead to riots on the streets. That wouldn't be the story he wants to tell, so with the AIs having civil rights they are presumably no more (or less) exploitable by the executive class than the human population. The question then revolves around population control: how do AIs reproduce and what restrictions are there on creating AIs? Otherwise we get a population of a spartiate executive class, the rest of us as mothakes, and the AIs as helots.
But I'd better stop here, this could get very political, very controversial and a very long way from QC very fast. As it is we have a comic society much like ours, but with, as Niven would say, "minds that think as well as we do but differently". And that's a fun thing to explore in itself.
--- End quote ---
I believe Jeph's inspiration for at least part of the way he treats AI's is Iain Banks' Culture stories, which assumed that once AI's of sufficient power were developed, then most of humanity would no longer have to work for a living. This is the optimistic view of how artificial intelligence could be integrated into human societies. A less optimistic view is that we get a ruthless oligarchy with most of humanity as useless surplus. Jeph's choice is to ignore most of the implications of a post-singularity AI society, which makes for a more relatable comic but probably isn't very realistic.
osaka:
--- Quote from: JimC on 06 Apr 2016, 09:20 ---how do AIs reproduce
--- End quote ---
Well, when two AIs love each other very much they send a letter to the magical robo-stork Hanners and order a babby AI that they'd recieve in 8 to 10 months, after the proper design and construction have been finished in Paris the Station. Sometimes it takes longer due to permits and local legislations, and also international postage for people outside the US.
Pls don't hate me
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