Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT 4176-4180 (13th - 17th, January 2020)
cybersmurf:
--- Quote from: Aenno on 16 Jan 2020, 14:20 ---Well, about "she didn't want to do any harm, she just is a thief", I'd like to mention that stealing is bad. She isn't really violent, that's true. Still, stealing is, generally, something that makes a person quite not a very good person, [snip]
--- End quote ---
You're absolutely right there. Guilty is guilty, and she got convicted for it.
The big question is: where do we draw the line? Who do we actually fight for, who deserves our help?
Sometimes it seems to me, most AIs we've seen have the moral capacity of an adolescent teenager. And are somewhat similarly naive.
Is it cold in here?:
Anecdotal, but an illustration of what human release conditions can be like, which we can guess may be parallel to May's parole terms.
The correct word here is "supervised release", since there is officially no parole in the Federal system. A sentence is often incarceration for a fixed term (minus good behavior time) followed by something run by the same officers who manage probationers. It's just like parole but never called parole.
The guy I'm thinking of, can't remember his name, wrote a packet sniffer for a friend. The friend used it for a massive credit card theft operation. A conspiracy conviction followed. I vaguely remember tens or hundreds of millions in restitution, but that could be wrong. What I'm sure of is that his release conditions forbade any use of a networked computer.
He got a retail job, but the cash registers were, you guessed it, on a network.
He could afford lawyers to convince a court that he should be allowed to make a living and was able to work as a cashier. May doesn't have that option.
notsocool:
To clarify my points:
I am not advocating that the state should continue to punish May. I am all for rehabilitative prison, and helping ex-convicts integrate into society. I am also all for reducing or eliminating discrimination against former offenders (except in highly specialized cases, like child molesters being barred from working in schools). And what is clear is that the robot prison is in serious need for reform, because May clearly demonstrates how punitive rather than rehabilitative it is. But I'm not talking about prison, I'm discussing chassis and parole.
What I am talking about is the comparison between May's acquisition of a chassis compared to a perfectly law-abiding AI.
--- Quote from: Potato Farmer on 16 Jan 2020, 07:14 ---Even more important! According to Roko (her again) May isn't just blocked from renting out processing time but from any and all forms of digital work during her probation period. I imagine that just makes being disembodied flat out impossible if she's also supposed to hold a job during her probation period.
--- End quote ---
In the conversation with the government employee, Roko learns that May's case is especially niche because lots (niche in fact implies it's the vast majority) of AI offenders who are not embodied before their crime continue to be disembodied after serving their sentences. This is clearly saying that being disembodied is an option for AI parolees. If work is a condition of such parole, it implies that there is work available to disembodied parolees (or perhaps they have less onerous work requirements).
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Now, I can totally appreciate May having a psychological need for a body (I am not sure if the comic actually says this). But a law-abiding AI with the exact same condition does not get a body handed to them by the state. Why should she get one?
Look, let's say I have a psychological need to have a car, and let's say my circumstances require me to have a car to work. It's not a real thing, but neither is an AI having a psychological need for a body, so work with me here. The state won't give me a car just because I have a need for one - American government doesn't even entitle a person to medicine. What the comic is advocating is giving me a car if, and only if, I first am a parolee.
Do you not see the inconsistency in this? If I was friend with an AI in serious financial difficulties with this condition, and they started giving out chassis to parolees, would I start advising my friend, "How do you feel committing a mild felony?"
And if, as the comic says, a body like Momo's costs thirty thousand, do you really think that's an appropriate gift for a parolee (let's me realistic, though - that's for a very high-end model. Perhaps a normal body is much cheaper)? And if I were a government or a charitable corporation looking for a tax writeoff, why would I give a new chassis to a parolee over a law-abiding AI with the same psychological condition?
As I mentioned eariler, if a fully functional human-sized chassis was a fundamental right of ALL AI citizens, and May was denied one on the basis of her status as an ex-convict, then this is fundamentally unfair and should be corrected. But right now what is being advocated is giving May a body specifically because she is a parolee. And in fact, they DO give her one, it just sucks terribly. But isn't this kind of looking a gift horse in the mouth? Sure, it sucks, but it's free!
Would it not be so much saner to look into other options? Perhaps a rent-to-own program for chassis for offenders (since they cannot get loans)? Charities specifically made for this sort of thing (there are lots of these for humans in real life)? Or, as suggested by one poster, perhaps a revision of her parole conditions? Isn't simply giving her a better body kind of the most expensive way of helping her?
--- Quote ---This storyline is as much about Roko as it is about May. Characters in stories tend to play a specific role or embody specific concepts. That doesn't mean that they're one-dimensional but it does mean that storylines in which they play a significant role tend to include that role or that concept. In the case of Roko her concept appears to be the meaning of justice, including when justice stops being justice and becomes unwarranted cruelty. There's also the thing about her having difficulty adjusting to her new body but it's shown that when her own issues aren't hindering her she'll immediately charge back into trying to help bring some proper justice into the world.
--- End quote ---
Okay, if we are going into the storytelling aspect of this, then I have other comments. In this, the story removes agency from May in favor of Roko. I get this concept, and it's fair enough in real life, where underprivileged people may not have the power to change their situation. But from a storytelling perspective, it robs May of the agency to change her situation on her own (IE May is the damsel, while Roko is the hero). I would love in a way for Roko to continue failing, because that would kind of represent the horrible nature of society to think the worst of criminals and dehumanise them, doubly relevant in the fact that May is an AI.
Is it cold in here?:
--- Quote from: notsocool ---Perhaps a rent-to-own program for chassis for offenders (since they cannot get loans)?
--- End quote ---
That would satisfy my ideas of fairness and would completely address the practicality of getting her into the workplace. But Jeph said once that Ais are the legal owners of the body they are in, which would rule out renting unless there are exceptions.
--- Quote from: Captain Kirk ---Gentlemen, we're debating in a vacuum.
--- End quote ---
We're going on guesses about a lot of key points. It is possible that other parolees can work from server farms and May cannot because she has particular conditions imposed for having committed a network-related crime.
I notice nobody's acknowledged one of your points, which is that May did get herself into this. There's compassion, there's the practicality of rehabilitating someone, but I do understand distaste at the idea of trying to prevent cause and effect from working in the case of someone who needed a much clearer picture of them.
immortalfrieza:
--- Quote from: notsocool on 15 Jan 2020, 22:13 ---New to this forum, but am I the only person that thinks May really isn't entitled to a better body?
--- End quote ---
I'll just quote this, because pretty much everything else you've posted works very well and demonstrates your point very effectively.
May's situation is being used by Jeph as an attempt to comment on the Penal system with Parolees in particular by trying to parallel it with AIs like May. However, like nearly all similar attempts to comment on something in fiction it fails because of the method being used. If May was human, even a human in a vastly different world from ours it would work just fine. However, May is an AI, which pretty effectively kills the message and commentary as a result.
Writers of fiction often attempt to comment on things in today's society by taking some fantastic, like aliens or fantasy, and using it to parallel something happening in real life right now or in the recent past. Such as a Wizard destroying the environment by using evil magic to comment on pollution, or a psychic using mind control to comment on Dictatorship, or whatever. Such attempts almost always ending up falling flat on their face because the beings used and the world they operate in is so fundamentally different from our own that the message turns out nonsensical or worse, ends up turning the viewers against the ones the writers want us to defend.
The damage the Wizard is doing ends up being reversed in the space of 5 minutes at the end of the episode by a Holy Mage, which ruins the environmental message by being so easily fixable when ours isn't. The general population turns out to be so unruly and murderous that a psychic mind controlling dictator actually makes the world a much better place, and by stopping them in the name of freedom the "heroes" revert the world back to a free for all garbage dump. Thus the heroes look like the actual bad guys even if the dictator wasn't perfect.
In this case, May and paroled AIs like her have the option to go to much cheaper chassis with much less maintenance costs as demonstrated by nearly every other AI in the comic or to become disembodied for a time until they can work to pay for a better body. May and AIs like her are in a completely self inflicted situation that is aside from being both the result of parole is entirely different from how a human, convict or not, thinks, feels, and overall functions as a being. If AIs needed bodies to live, to be healthy mentally and physically, and thought like a human being does it might work, but they don't, even the way they think is an experience very different (I doubt any given human has an internet connection that can access all the porn inside their own head just for one) even if functionally they speak and act in ways humans understand.
One might be able to sympathize with May on some level, but it's not something any of us can really experience and thus understand. The message loses the teeth if not rendered nonsensical outright than it would have been if May had been a human Ex-con facing the exact problems the real world is actually experiencing because of this.
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