Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

Is Spookybot a zombie?

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LTK:
Robert A. Heinlein would beg to differ.


--- Quote ---A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
--- End quote ---

TheEvilDog:
I think the one question that no one has asked is - what is Spookybot's main purpose?

In asking (and hopefully answering) that, we might learn how they accomplish that.

Is Spookybot a fixer? Someone who deals with...unique....problems within the AI community?

Are they the silent guardian of the AI community? One who takes a more vicious and calculated approach to dealing with problem AIs?

Can Spooky even be considered an AI by the standards of the QC universe anymore? Are they closer to a digital god than a grown program?

Or is Spooky the kind of AI that people are meant to be afraid of? The kind of dangerous AI that haunts film and literature, only now, Spooky is content to wait in the shadows with their dogs and make some tea.

Sometimes its not about the answers, but rather the questions you need to ask.

BenRG:
My feeling is Spookybot is a manipulator. It/They have a vision for the future of humanity and its synthetic 'children' and they're working from behind the scenes to carry it out. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a purpose they gave themselves after finishing a review of history and current world events as well as human society.

JimC:

--- Quote from: LTK on 02 Aug 2017, 17:19 ---Robert A. Heinlein would beg to differ.
--- End quote ---
Not one of Heinlein's smarter aphorisms. Whilst I take pride in my ability to do a very wide variety of simple tasks armed with my brain and my ability to read documentation (perhaps the most under-rated yet vital skill in the IT industry and the world in general),  I don't wish to go back to a hunter gatherer society. I like having people who are better at me at assembling electronics assembling my gadgets, people who are quicker than me at laying bricks build my house, people who are better than me at painstakingly doing boring repetitive tasks do the admin, and people who are better than me about noticing which bits of the office need cleaning clean the office and so on. I can and will take on all of those occasionally for the fun of doing it, or when its convenient, but the society round me will achieve much more if I do the things I'm really good at for everyone, and other people do the things they are really good at for everyone.

Thrudd:

--- Quote from: JimC on 02 Aug 2017, 10:25 ---
--- Quote from: Thrudd on 01 Aug 2017, 07:49 --- I would put in all required systems but in such a way that they could work on sync with neighboring units.
--- End quote ---
That presupposes that all systems could be installed in a single unit with the required level of capability. In human civilization specialization is everything.
Would it not be appropriate to take the same approach to our hypothetical units, and have different units optimized for different capabilities?

--- End quote ---
Physical optimization / specialization is not the same thing as training / skill optimization.
Your example actually supports my premise since humans are not physically specialized and most, with the proper training, could substitute for any another.

Physical specialization may give benefits but you loose flexibility and even worse you add in the vulnerability of having critical operations flow through only a few key individuals.
The whole issue with the Borg in latter stories after their introduction was that they were given specific nodes for power and control and once those were isolated they could be destroyed. My guess is that the writers realized after they started that they needed to introduce a weakness that could be exploited - the whole queen thing though was totally illogical and something hammered in like a square peg into a potato.

The key here is flexibility and scale-ability. The power of bringing to bear the required amount of resources, be they firepower or cognitive power.
Oh and also that oft overlooked power of human civilization, especially in this day and age of parasitism and exploitation, cooperation.
Also nothing prevents each unit making any tools it requires for the task at hand.

Here is a thought - if the research on zero delay transmission of information between two points is scale-able and has no limits then a mesh network spanning this and other galaxies is a possibility. The only limit would be maximum rate of propagation of the physical units.
Heck maybe something like that already exists and they have had their probes monitoring things since before the beginning.  :psyduck:

 :-D

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