I'm thinking that the pre-sentient AI that spontaneously evolves into AI was probably mass-produced for a huge number of consumer, commercial and industrial functions before the scientists realised what was going on and hauled the 'emergency stop' lever as hard as they could.
Given that factories could easily have been turning AnthroPCs and MakeToastFun Toasters out at a level of thousands of units per day then, yes, there is likely a huge population out there. Probably several tens of millions, although most of them are likely concentrated in Europe, North America and Taiwan-Japan-Korea ('Americanised Asia', as I think of it sometimes).
many of them already living in homes around the world
As a programmer, QCs AIs dont really make any sense at all to me.
Its just that QC robots make no sense for people who actually know how computer work.Well, yeah. That's kind of the point.
QC robots are really just regular people, in artifical bodies.
QC robots are really just regular people, in artifical bodies.
Its just that QC robots make no sense for people who actually know how computer work.
QC robots are really just regular people, in artifical bodies.
It sounds like they make sense to you just fine.
I suspect this gets down to the definition of ``robot'' again
I suspect this gets down to the definition of ``robot'' again
What else would you call a metal person that was built instead of created through an organic process?
As in, a long-lived race in a D&D game like a dwarf or elf will have a perspective that humans simply can't get, like simply waiting for an enemy to die of old age if they don't pose an immediate threat.
The biggest stretch for the comic so far IMO, is that it was difficult for them to find a routine that can read PDFsI don't see any stretch here at all. I have one somewhere, and I'd probably sooner dig that one out from that rubble they call paperwork---that I should probably get sorted lest all copies of their originals are all garbled---than put yet another piece of software I'll forget to remove into my system. It's not that it's difficult to find or install one, but one must consider the full consequences of having one installed, including the possibilities of errors in it causing a malfunction, that might be exploitable, and---especially for a cybrid who cannot simply wipe-reinstall themself---removing it cleanly.
However, it has been shown before that they have desktops, and there seems to be a preference for not doing the paperwork in their head, so to speak - for one, I'll bet it makes it a lot easier to maintain something resembling a work-life balance. So, wipe-reinstall on their office machines would be possible.The biggest stretch for the comic so far IMO, is that it was difficult for them to find a routine that can read PDFsI don't see any stretch here at all. I have one somewhere, and I'd probably sooner dig that one out from that rubble they call paperwork---that I should probably get sorted lest all copies of their originals are all garbled---than put yet another piece of software I'll forget to remove into my system. It's not that it's difficult to find or install one, but one must consider the full consequences of having one installed, including the possibilities of errors in it causing a malfunction, that might be exploitable, and---especially for a cybrid who cannot simply wipe-reinstall themself---removing it cleanly.
Slightly off topic for this thread, but:It’s not a stretch because PDF is a terrible format and evidently someone in the QC-verse realised that much earlier and it never became a de facto standard, much less an actual standard.However, it has been shown before that they have desktops, and there seems to be a preference for not doing the paperwork in their head, so to speak - for one, I'll bet it makes it a lot easier to maintain something resembling a work-life balance. So, wipe-reinstall on their office machines would be possible.The biggest stretch for the comic so far IMO, is that it was difficult for them to find a routine that can read PDFsI don't see any stretch here at all. I have one somewhere, and I'd probably sooner dig that one out from that rubble they call paperwork---that I should probably get sorted lest all copies of their originals are all garbled---than put yet another piece of software I'll forget to remove into my system. It's not that it's difficult to find or install one, but one must consider the full consequences of having one installed, including the possibilities of errors in it causing a malfunction, that might be exploitable, and---especially for a cybrid who cannot simply wipe-reinstall themself---removing it cleanly.
To me, it really felt like a stretch, especially as it seems bureaucracy still works with paper files.
I'd argue the risk of installing a pdf-reader on an office machine is trivial. As do most organisations.Sure, maybe they do.. they shouldn't---I don't. Yes---on some systems---it's trivial to add all sorts of programmes, but the question is about safety: not trivial. There's a whole lot that a computer programme can do. The fact that it can display PDF documents properly, doesn't mean it doesn't do something else, too. Someone who's not savvy might find that difficult to discern. And---already mentioned---the programme might have errors, the errors might damage, the errors might be used by a malefactor to damage,, OK, sure, on some systems, there's good protections against bad programmes, but they make the systems more expensive: it's cheaper to occasionally incur the slight cost of digging out the machine that can do that, than constantly watching for the safe operation of all---even if that's only two---machines. To be clear, I'm not really talking about PDFs---that's just the example we're using right now, and the example is in the context of Questionable Content---the general case is, needing to do some rare task that the proven systems can't do.
I've recently been reading about a style of programming conducive to such lucidity: literate programming: the programmer becomes, first, documentarian---instructions, of course, being a necessary part thereof.
From IBM mainframes, IEFBR14 was an executable parallel to /dev/null. It was a program to do absolutely nothing.Hmmm........counting EG types would be difficult. The three immediate solutions I can think of would be to a) use decimals with the number after the decimal indicating the total number of nodes, b) some form of subscript or superscript that functions like option a, or c) borrow the way we count infinities; standard integers for standard AI and start with aleph-null for Yay and any other 'arcteuthus' level AIs.
Its change log featured multiple bug fixes.
Getting back to "how many?", we see synthetics as a substantial minority in street scenes and we have no idea how many are in appliances or server farms. Tens of millions at the very least seems plausible. In the case of multi-node AIs like Eminence Grise, it would be a challenge to figure out how to count them.