Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 4111-4115 (October 14th-18th, 2019)
Wingy:
--- Quote from: Carl-E on 14 Oct 2019, 00:56 ---I dunno, their eminence seems to be pretty much in character here.
--- End quote ---
They may be in character, but notice that they haven't really helped the situation much, if at all. Roko still has to figure out how to recover from these episodes on her own somehow. Yay, by dumping all Roko's processes, hasn't really done that, just halted the beginnings of the current freakout.
I suppose one can argue that Roko's processor is off in the weeds at this point and the ability to reboot herself to a place where she can safely shut down is suspect. Yay's action if this were the case could be interpreted as helpful, but then why does Roko have the ability to move and respond rationally to questions? Of course, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a former assembler software developer used to working closely with the hardware designers as the hardware settles down; not an AI psychologist used to working with multi-tiered entities. :-(
Wingy:
--- Quote from: Perfectly Reasonable on 13 Oct 2019, 20:33 ---I am surprised that no one has commented on Melon's new hairdo.
--- End quote ---
Having 3 nieces, a wife, and a horde of theatre friends, I've learned to keep my yap shut about female hair. But you just triggered something:
* Stylable wig hair is either human or special plastic fibers that can stand repeated heating for a few cycles.
* May grumbled at someone about missing up her hair - it was designed to look like it looks, not to be styled regularly.
* Roko's new chassis has hair that needs to be washed, and one presumes subsequently styled, implying her old chassis didn't have stylable hair.
* I assume Melons chassis is older than Roko's new chassis and of similar design-age to May's, even if it's in better condition, and so Melon would have non-stylable hair like May.Given all those points, why does Melon have this kind of hair? Is this supposed to make her look like Mantis (Marvel GTG 2 movie)? If yes, maybe Melon is due for a Yay-sponsored spelunk somewhere...
Gyrre:
I'm through all of this whilst listening to Theophany's Oath to Order arrangement, and.....just dang, guys.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlYJYNJDHVc
Case:
--- Quote from: Castlerook on 14 Oct 2019, 04:42 ---
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 13 Oct 2019, 22:31 ---Spookybot's ethics intrigue me. Changing someone's mind is apparently an absolute limit to them, even with informed consent which makes medical procedures up to risky and irreversible surgery considered ethical.
--- End quote ---
Considering that AI bodies, while necessary for their interaction with the real world, aren't the be all and end all for them that it would be for a human. Their minds would be the key part. Therefore, Spooky's ethical limits might be seen as something similar to the Hippocratic Oath, specifically "First, do no harm."
--- End quote ---
Makes sense to me - however, if we follow this thought further, then Yay Spookybutt is encountering a situation that her ethics may be ill-equipped to deal with, as Rokko's problem is precisely that while the specific body she inhabits shouldn't matter that much - especially given the similarity between the new and the old one - it still does. A very human problem.
I don't know where Jeph plans to go with this - could be he's taking on trauma (apparently, dissociation is associated with trauma), and having an AI character experience it is sort of a 'Verfremdungseffect': Forcing people to consciously re-evaluate something familiar by 'making it strange'.
Or maybe he's up to exploring some more philosophical themes - our contemporary conceptions of mind and body are heavily influenced by information technology, and we tend imagine them as hardware and software, maybe also because it fits nicely into Christian conceptions of the (transient) body and an (immortal) soul (Then again, Masamune Shirow comes from a culture that is neither European nor Christian ...). But what if that paradigm is as crude and inadequate as the mechanistic metaphors that previous generations used for mental processes? ('Letting off steam' - not hard to guess what epoch spawned that one).
I wouldn't mind if Jeph again used AI characters to explore the (or 'a') human condition, but I also wouldn't be unhappy if we get some heavy-duty SF-philosophizing.
Mr_Rose:
--- Quote from: Wingy on 14 Oct 2019, 05:49 ---
--- Quote from: Perfectly Reasonable on 13 Oct 2019, 20:33 ---I am surprised that no one has commented on Melon's new hairdo.
--- End quote ---
Having 3 nieces, a wife, and a horde of theatre friends, I've learned to keep my yap shut about female hair. But you just triggered something:
* Stylable wig hair is either human or special plastic fibers that can stand repeated heating for a few cycles.
* May grumbled at someone about missing up her hair - it was designed to look like it looks, not to be styled regularly.
* Roko's new chassis has hair that needs to be washed, and one presumes subsequently styled, implying her old chassis didn't have stylable hair.
* I assume Melons chassis is older than Roko's new chassis and of similar design-age to May's, even if it's in better condition, and so Melon would have non-stylable hair like May.Given all those points, why does Melon have this kind of hair? Is this supposed to make her look like Mantis (Marvel GTG 2 movie)? If yes, maybe Melon is due for a Yay-sponsored spelunk somewhere...
--- End quote ---
Assuming you are correct about May’s and Melon’s chassis being of similar eras, you don’t need a fancy backstory to explain it; May’s chassis is already known to be scraping-the-bottom-of-the-market cheap, like those janky dumbphones you can get for free with a purchase of some airtime, so it probably simply didn’t include that feature. I can also see a bunch of mid-range chassis not bothering with it simply because there are some AIs (and some humans choosing a chassis for their companion) that just don’t want to deal with the hassle.
Also remember that Bubbles is older than both of them (possibly put together) and she has stylable, growable hair, much like Momo’s. Possibly she had a prototype system but it was evidently commercialised nearly intact so that puts a lower bound on how ‘new’ the hair tech can be.
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