Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
Something bothering me a lot
ckridge:
--- Quote from: Aenno on 11 Feb 2018, 16:24 ---And when classical art used any thing like giants, sorcerers or cyclops, it was always about canonical depiction. Listeners knew that fair folk is X and they do Y.
--- End quote ---
This is not the case. Hesiod and Homer disagree on almost every single point about the Cyclops, for instance. In Hesiod, they are children of Gaia and Uranus, brothers to the Titans, older than the Olympians, smiths, and confined to Tartarus. In Homer, they are Poseidon's children, shepherds, and live on an island. If you look at Catherine Briggs's An Encyclopedia of Fairies you will find that English accounts of what fairies are like and what they are likely to do vary widely from region to region. These discrepancies are not surprising, since travel was difficult, most of these stories were transmitted only by word of mouth for a long time, and even when they were written down, few people could read and even fewer could afford many books.
In the case of folk tales, the notion that fantastic creatures are there for the sake of the plot just doesn't make sense, for many folk tales don't have plots. Two typical tales from Briggs:
>A workman on his way home in the evening finds a broken doll in the road by a stone and hears passionate weeping coming from under the stone. He sits down in the road and fixes the doll, lays it by the stone, calls "There you go, girl, I fixed it for you," and goes his way. The next day the doll is gone. He has good luck after that.<
>A farmer going home late is chased by an enormous black dog. It is almost on him when he leaps across a brook, and then it stands baying on the far bank, unable to cross the running water.<
There are many correct ways to read any story, so that it is impossible to say what the one true function of any part of a story is, but I certainly find it plausible to suppose that people who saw almost no strangers in the course of their daily lives would be concerned about the kind of people you might meet in the woods, on the roads, or in the evening. Any stranger would seem uncanny.
You can read Polyphemos as a thing that happens so that other things can happen, but he isn't always read that way. It has been pointed out that Polyphemos breaks hospitality laws in every possible way, but it has also been pointed out that Odysseus and his men also break hospitality laws by walking into his home and helping themselves to his food. They act like animals, expect to be treated like guests, and instead are treated like animals. This eventually brings Poseidon's curse upon them. Read this way, the episode looks like it is about how to behave toward strangers when in their land.
I'm just not going to argue about whether QC gives the depth of detail and resolution of character of a comparable short novel or short story. It would be like arguing about whether a patch of blue is a patch of red.
Arguments having been dutifully made, full disclosure.
All my talents, such as they are, lie in the humanities, and after years of careful reading in the humanities, I am sometimes thoroughly sick of humans. It is pleasant to imagine the company of some other sort of rational creature.
Is it cold in here?:
My guess is that Jeph started out treating AI characters as jokes but then saw the issues of conscious beings excluded from society.
Is it cold in here?:
A difference between them and us that I'd like to see explored is how it affects how someone's mind works if they can't feel pain and aren't in fear of it.
ckridge:
Somewhere near the beginning of this topic I argue that in this story robots express hope that the future will be full of strange new people to talk with. (And have sex with, because this is a comic for bonobos.) It occurs to me that they also serve to comfort fears that AIs will endanger us, as, of course, they will. Sladek pointed out that Asimov's three laws of robotics are absurd because the very first reason robots will be built is to kill people. Sterling points out that computers already play the stock market better than humans and will soon come to play the entire economy for their corporations' short-term profit. Current work in facial recognition is likely soon to produce AIs that can pick any given face out of thousands of hours of security camera footage. Current machine learning methods mean that no one will know on just what basis the AI made the decision to kill, buy, sell, or identify. This is scary.
What Jeph is pointing out is that conscious AIs won't be the problem. A non-conscious AI is a powerful, intelligent, giant insect. A conscious AI would be a person. People are what we are best at. Our best is none too good, god knows, but we would be no worse off with new people than we are with the old ones. It would be very difficult for anyone to be worse than us.
A conscious robot soldier wouldn't be the Terminator. It would be Bubbles, or, more likely, Deathbot 9000. We can handle that.
Is it cold in here?:
> Current machine learning methods mean that no one will know on just what basis the AI made the decision to kill, buy, sell, or identify. This is scary.
Don't we have the same problem with other organics? And with our selves?
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Here's another difference between synthetics and us. Only a very few humans could stand being a toaster.
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