Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT strips 3671 to 3675 (5th to 9th February 2018)

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Aenno:
Ok, tell me if I would came too far.


--- Quote from: ckridge on 07 Feb 2018, 11:54 ---Bubble's body responds without conscious control for the same reason our bodies do: consciousness is slow. I can only speculate about what consciousness is for, but it reviews action rather than initiating it. Running action past a review function, especially one as multi-purpose and sub-optimized as consciousness, is slow. So, as soon as bodies register severe stress, they slam on the general emergency mode, inform the mind that they are good to go, and ask where to go.

--- End quote ---
Human consciousness is, maybe, slow - it's basically an interface builded on hundreds of bugged and messy hormonal and instinctive systems, designed to long-forgotten stimules as well as current ones, and designed by a very bad designer (Mother Nature) with basic philosophy "this code worked adequatly when I submitted it, and I don't mind it's so buggy, we saving it for compatibility and support reasons"; so human consciousness just have no direct control to initiating body states.
But I can't see how "running action past a review function" is a bad thing. It's exactly the only way to reduce a chance to be absurdly wasteful by having AI chassis continually able to knock down walls and overturn armored vehicles, and prevent accidents every time Bubbles got distracted. In animal bodies it's kind of awful feedback loops builded on loops, and it's quite ineffective - everybody who ever had hormonal disfunction can vouch for that, I believe. I'd even say if Bubbles have her body entering combat-prime state each time she sees Faye's bottom, it's the very example why such a system is a mess, and why this kind of system design should be avoided.
Of course, AIs can ignore this and put this flawed design to be more like humans. But then we have that Bubbles (or some kind of system behind Bubbles personality) actually wants to act like she do.


--- Quote from: ckridge on 07 Feb 2018, 11:54 ---[There is a heartbreaking moment in Peter Watts's novel Blindsight in which a soldier who controls a squad of insensate robot killers goes off to die as a rearguard. You know she is dead when her robots all suddenly speed up. They are much more efficient when no longer reviewed by a consciousness; only now there is nothing left with which you could ever possibly make peace.]

--- End quote ---
Hillarious thing about Blindsight is that species with consciousness (all that messy consciousness Jukka so fond to scold about) is evolutionary more effective that specialised predator without consciousness.


--- Quote from: ckridge on 07 Feb 2018, 12:03 ---Out of her explosively responsive warrior body, Bubbles might not suffer quite so much, but she would have to work just as hard not to play the fool. Once you are locked into a sociocultural psychosexual matrix, it is not easy to get out, because as far as you can tell, that is just who you are.

--- End quote ---
So we're saying that AI residing in some body can't review and override this body "preinstalled" reactions. Who is installing and maintaining them then?
I mean, ok, we know that AIs are able to download and install (or remove?) firmwares for their bodies - Momo and Winslow did it in comics (I can't trustfully take instances Pintsize doing same thing, including virus arc somewhere in the beginning of the comics, because he just can mess around with everybody - let's say he isn't reliable narrator). Let's imagine they're not overridable and dictating AI actions and perceptions.
Who write this firmwares?


--- Quote from: SpanielBear on 07 Feb 2018, 14:30 ---The extent to which AI's can form bonds with humans seems to depend on how much time they've spent with us. If Bubbles were a toaster, she may not have had the same bonding experiences and so may not develop the same feelings, depending on the degree to which she had human companionship. But I think it's clear that if her current personality were transferred into a different chassis, her feelings wouldn't immediately change. At the end of the day, AI psychology seems to developmental, not ontological- their personality forms through experience rather than being defined by their body.

--- End quote ---
Let me get it straight. :)
When I'm speaking about "Bubbles reacting like that" I mean "she is uncontrollably aroused by sight of Faye bottoms, and that's makes her feeling uncomfortable". I don't have nothing against romantical bonding like Station had with Hannelore. I'm not wondering how it's possible for AIs to be attracted with humans, it's quite simple. I'm wondering how they happen to be sexually aroused (at least visibly).

SpanielBear:

--- Quote from: Aenno on 07 Feb 2018, 14:43 ---Let me get it straight. :)
When I'm speaking about "Bubbles reacting like that" I mean "she is uncontrollably aroused by sight of Faye bottoms, and that's makes her feeling uncomfortable". I don't have nothing against romantical bonding like Station had with Hannelore. I'm not wondering how it's possible for AIs to be attracted with humans, it's quite simple. I'm wondering how they happen to be sexually aroused (at least visibly).

--- End quote ---

Gotcha, and fair question.

I guess it comes back to the singularity, and the fact that AI technology in the QCverse is vastly ahead of ours. In comic it is referred to as "growing" a consciousness, and the process isn't completely understood. From our perspective, the science behind it falls firmly into Clarke's Third Law- "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." But to answer you question "How do AI's have uncontrolled emotional responses" (I think I've got that right?) with "Because Magic" would be completely unsatisfying.

There is some reference in comic to this problem though. I can't remember the exact strip, but I think Momo talks about not thinking faster than humans as a quirk of memory limitation- the background processes required to generate an AI personality use up a lot of the excess computing power an AI might be expected to have. Bear in mind that even with assumed advances in computer technology, the hardware component of an AI's memory cannot be that large- their processors seem to be based in the cranium, so they can't be much bigger than brain sized.

So maybe that's how to look at it. An AI like Spookybot seems to be an avatar of a larger processor, with more memory and so capable of operating with a consciousness beyond a human level. Reducing the size of the processor to one that is commonly held by "regular" AI, or by making it perform additional complex tasks like Station, limits the reaction time and memory availability so the net result is a human-like consciousness that still relies on subconscious functions to reduce the strain on its resources. If you are limited to a human-sized brain, whether that is biological or artificial, it's going to perform in a human-like way. Complete with instinctual level functions that go-on involuntarily, and cause discomfort when they unexpectedly surface. Like thinking "Daaaang that ass is fine".

Aenno:

--- Quote from: SpanielBear on 07 Feb 2018, 15:02 ---But to answer you question "How do AI's have uncontrolled emotional responses" (I think I've got that right?) with "Because Magic" would be completely unsatisfying.

--- End quote ---
Sorry, no, you haven't got that exactly right.
Question is "How do AIs have uncontrolled emotional responses by every detail resembling human sexual arousment."
Because if there is a emotion that have less social component that direct sexual arousment, I don't know it. It can be emulated, sure - but WHO emulate it in Bubbles?

SpanielBear:

--- Quote from: Aenno on 07 Feb 2018, 15:09 ---
--- Quote from: SpanielBear on 07 Feb 2018, 15:02 ---But to answer you question "How do AI's have uncontrolled emotional responses" (I think I've got that right?) with "Because Magic" would be completely unsatisfying.

--- End quote ---
Sorry, no, you haven't got that exactly right.
Question is "How do AIs have uncontrolled emotional responses by every detail resembling human sexual arousment."
Because if there is a emotion that have less social component that direct sexual arousment, I don't know it. It can be emulated, sure - but WHO emulate it in Bubbles?

--- End quote ---

Well first off I strongly dispute that displays of arousal are non-social. Biologically they are displays to indicate availability and to attract a mate, they are social by necessity.

Secondly, I don't know who is responsible for the "birth" of new AI's in the QCverse. The implication we get though is that post-singularity, the robots are making themselves, and it is the big AI's like Spookybot who oversee the creation of the newbies. And don't forget, AI's are grown, not planned. They have free will, otherwise outliers who fail to conform to their society like May, Corpse Witch, or even Bubbles herself (who had to fight AI prejudice when she joined the military) would never exist- if their personalities could be programmed, they simply wouldn't exist.
The AI's take autonomy and personal choice *very* seriously, and regard the blackmail that Corpse Witch used as morally reprehensible. So given this background, they are unlikely to be hypocritical enough to programme their "children" in such a way that their self expression is limited.

Sex is, for better or worse, a huge part of human society. Our interactions- flirting, compliments, romantic attraction, even negative things like insults or objectification, all rely on a shared assumption that sex is a big deal. If AI's want to interact with humanity on an equal level (by which I mean, have a relationship with humans that mirrors that which humans have with each other), they need to take that focus into account. Creating AI's that mirror all human emotions apart from sexual ones would severely limit the relationships those AI's could form.

By this I don't mean to say that a non-romantic relationship is limited, I absolutely do not mean that. What I mean is that to understand humans and our emotional lives, you need to be able to empathise with our experiences and feelings, and that includes our sexual ones. Making AI's that can share those feelings isn't frivolous, it's efficient.

Furthermore, in creating an AI personality, deliberately programming it to be asexual rather than allowing that to be an attitude it can develop or not as it self-discovers would be like programming it to be straight, or gay, or to hate mice- it would limit the AI's freedom, and would be very similar to what Corpse Witch did to Bubbles- restricting her choice by abusing the fact that her mind is artificial. The AI's have shown they absolutely will not stand for that shit, so they are likely not going to force that on their children.

(P.S. I'm aware while I am writing this I am steering into questions about sexual identity that matter a lot, and that as a straight cis male I do not have a wide personal experience with. I really apologise if I end up being offensive or ignorant here, please do call me out on that if I am, I promise it would be unintentional on my part.)

ckridge:

--- Quote from: Aenno on 07 Feb 2018, 14:43 ---But I can't see how "running action past a review function" is a bad thing. It's exactly the only way to reduce a chance to be absurdly wasteful by having AI chassis continually able to knock down walls and overturn armored vehicles, and prevent accidents every time Bubbles got distracted. In animal bodies it's kind of awful feedback loops builded on loops, and it's quite ineffective - everybody who ever had hormonal disfunction can vouch for that, I believe. I'd even say if Bubbles have her body entering combat-prime state each time she sees Faye's bottom, it's the very example why such a system is a mess, and why this kind of system design should be avoided.
Of course, AIs can ignore this and put this flawed design to be more like humans. But then we have that Bubbles (or some kind of system behind Bubbles personality) actually wants to act like she do.

--- End quote ---

Running action past a review function isn't a bad thing. It is slow, is all. If you had to consciously coordinate walking, you couldn't react fast enough to keep your balance. Anything that has to be done fast is kept below the level of consciousness. Emergency responses must be done fast, particularly by soldiers. Thus when Bubbles is wounded to the heart by seeing Faye half-dressed, her body goes on full alert without her having a thing to say about it. This is not to say that she gets ready to fight. Humans interpret a racing heart, shortened breath, flushing, and trembling in wildly different ways according to context, and so, evidently, do AIs.

This is all wholly embedded in romantic tradition, not because Jeph planned it out that way, but because he is embedded in the tradition along with us and with Bubbles, and once he wrote a character in armor, the story began to unfold itself.

'Her hair was down, and her feet were bare, and the sight of her on the stair sent such sorrow licking along Prince Lír’s bones that he dropped his poems and his pretenses together and actually turned to run. But he was a hero in all ways, and he turned bravely back to face her, saying in a calm and courtly manner, “Give you good evening, my lady.”' -- Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn

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