Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3376 - 3380 (19th to 23rd December 2016)

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Storel:
The trouble is, Bubbles is a softie. Whatever she has done while she was in the military, it's evident that she feels very troubled by her experiences and is doing her best to live a nonviolent life now. We've seen plenty of evidence of this ourselves, and so clearly Corpse Witch must have too, since she's had much longer to observe Bubbles than we have. Bubbles can't follow through on that threat, and CW knows her well enough to know that, so all she has to do is threaten to delete the key if Bubbles makes a single dent in her chassis. As long as Bubbles is (a) unwilling to give up those memories for good, and (b) unwilling or unable to kill CW, CW has control.

brasca:

--- Quote from: hedgie on 22 Dec 2016, 16:55 ---
--- Quote from: brasca on 22 Dec 2016, 16:17 ---I'm actually pleased that they can't just go to Hannelore for help.  It would be too easy a way to resolve this situation.

--- End quote ---

Hannerdad is not the parent they should be thinking of in the first place.  Now, the Bond-villain mother probably has ways of making even an AI comply with her whims.  That is, of course, assuming that Faye can remain on the wagon whilst feeding Ms. Chatham the required martinis.

--- End quote ---

That's still too easy and it also means dealing with someone who in my opinion is worse than Corpse Witch.  It may also put Hannelore in a spot where her mother will help in this matter, but then she'll want something from her.  Perhaps she thinks it's time for her to stop wasting her life working in a coffee shop and take her place within her empire.  Removing Corpse Witch from the picture is not worth it if they owe Beatrice Chatham a favor. 

HoneyBadger:
First off, I don't know that I agree that Bubbles is a softie. We already saw in the Volleyball contest that she likes to win. She might have been trying to live a non-violent life, but that does not imply that she is actually a softie. A reasonable alternative might be that she possibly has some sort of ethic. Given that she has some sort of ethic, in this situation she has been gravely wronged, and she has conclusive evidence pointing to the responsible party. Satisfaction of justice might easily justify some degree of violence which might be permitted within her ethical framework. Especially given that AI chassis' can be replaced. I think that there is a reasonable argument to be made that she is at least partly a giant badass.

But all of that is besides the point. The point is that even if Bubbles is a big softie, that point is ultimately irrelevant. Corpse Witch cannot know with 100% certainty that Bubbles is too soft to murder her, or make use of the secondary alternative that I've already pointed out. That is the only relevant fact here. Even if she strongly suspects that Bubbles would not do it, the difference in the magnitude of the stakes that each of them would be respectively gambling is so large that Bubbles never needs to have the intention to murder her. She only needs to create a sufficient level of uncertainty in Corpse Witch about whether she will survive the encounter or not, and the only rational thing for Corpse Witch to do will be to surrender the encryption key to try and secure her own survival and/or freedom. And in fact, if Corpse Witch really does believe that Bubbles is a softie, it becomes even more rational for her to surrender the encryption key, because doing so would, in the case that Bubbles was a softie, guarantee Corpse Witch's survival. A sufficiently badass individual might well continue crushing Corpse Witch even after the encryption key had been surrendered. I agree that Bubbles is probably not the sort of individual that would do that. But that point only increases the probable effectiveness of the tactic I have suggested.

ZoeB:
The CW effector might be a drone controlled by a remote Big Bad.

Ok, I'm paranoid. I've worked on military AIs. I've worked with the Australian Federal Police on their computer forensic systems. I've worked on secure diplomatic communications systems too. Also intel analysis, where intentions are of secondary importance compared to capabilities.

So it's not whether I'm paranoid, it's whether  I'm paranoid enough.

Jeph hasn't done any of this stuff as far as I know. But the ability of an entity to perform psychosurgery not just on COT civvie stuff but military grade, said entity's expressed phobia against H.Sap and psychopathy, seeing other persons regardless of implementation as things to be used, does not give me warm fuzzies. Hannibal Lector really is an accurate parallel rather than Scarface Al. .It's the power as well as the intent. What made HL such a threat was his psychological knowledge and stratospheric intelligence, not just the eating other people's livers with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

CW might be just an extraordinarily and inexplicably talented small time hood. Might be one of possibly many simultaneous parallel avatars of Something Nasty.

Morituri:
One thing that the US military insists on with all its AI projects is to maintain a record of every single thing it has ever done, and they really really want them to be able to explain why each decision was made.  It's all about accountability and who can/can't be blamed if something goes wrong.

It would astonish me if the same people who insist on minutely detailed records of everything their AIs do, and who are now installing helmet cams & mikes on some soldiers for realtime monitoring and after-action scraping for intel details that might not have been noticed the first time around, don't have a record of everything Bubbles saw/heard/did/said. 

It wouldn't be first-person memories (with recall of what she was thinking at the time or why she did what she did, etc), but every sensory impression in those memories is backed up on some kind of storage media somewhere.

if the army were to actually cooperate, track it down, and turn it over, Bubbles could have restoration of (most of) her memory without Corpse Witch's help.

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