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[comicalArchitect]

In strip 3240, Bubbles raised the possibility of a non-conscious AI distributed across several processors. This being, she theorized, would be amoral and extremely powerful. Spookybot has been shown to have several bodies. If all those bodies are linked by one intelligence, then Spookybot would be exactly the being Bubbles described. They've certainly proven to be extremely powerful and mostly amoral, so was strip 3240 a setup for them?

[Kugai]

Spookie's a Hive Mind

Not entirely benevolent, but definitely no Borg Collective.

[shanejayell]

Hive mind, and disturbingly sexy, in a androginous way.

[BenRG]

FWIW, I suspect that the Spookybot chassis are partly pseudo-organic (vat-grown bio-mimetic parts) and part-synthetic (the control system is almost certainly electronic or optronic). It's strongly implied that they are being mass produced, either as attrition replacements or so that the actual AI (whatever or whoever it is) can use as many as it needs whenever it needs to do so.

[Storel]

Spookie's a Hive Mind

Not entirely benevolent, but definitely no Borg Collective.

What's the difference? I thought the Borg were a hive mind. They even have a queen, like all good hive dwellers.

[BenRG]

The Borg Queen was always a dumb idea. I think that they got the idea more right with Seven of Nine in Voyager - Just a regular drone being used as a single point of contact.

[Mr_Rose]

No, Borg queens were a great idea. Making them unique and giving them egos was the mistake.
They were apparently originally supposed to be something like a network hub, simplifying the Colective’s network topology to one or two major links per vessel rather than one per drone wherever the drone is and allowing the drones more efficient access to the ship hardware by acting as local authentication servers. They should have been somewhere between ships captain and ships computer. What we got was… yeah.

[Thrudd]

Even that approach to networking is,  dated.
Mesh networking has a higher level of required complexity per unit but does not require anything like central nodes, just enough nearby units to allow a path to the required system or data that the local unit requires to complete a task.

If I was designing a thing that was capable of being autonomous, yet being part of a whole, I would put in all required systems but in such a way that they could work on sync with neighboring units.
Add in a communication system that has zero delay [already demonstrated at the lab scale] and you get something that is truly terrifying in potential.

How small a package and what form should it take?
Well that depends on the systems incorporated and their inherent bulk.
Start with a positronic brain, add communications, sensors, tractor beam, deflector system, replicator, warp drive, gravity drive [how else do you get the damn things to float around in an atmosphere?]
I am thinking a cube is impractical, what with the issues of edges and corners, and a sphere as an inherently stable geometry.
How big? Now that is a good questions. Just how small could one reduce such systems and still have them be functional on a practical level?
I remember one star trek episode where it was pointed out that the not quite dead yet aliens with their tech could make an enterprise class warp drive the size of a walnut.
If the tech were that advanced I could see them as the size of a softball overall.

One unit would be the equivalent of a runabout or shuttle in capability. Cluster a few hundred and you get a cruiser. A cluster of a few million and you get a battle station.

.... Hmm, most of those systems would facilitate interactive holographic projection.
Now that could allow for some very interesting anthropological research and interaction with all sorts of intelligent species.
Or just hide as innocuous gas giants throughout the Galaxy and stay well away from those crazy bags of mostly water.

[Kugai]

Spookie's a Hive Mind

Not entirely benevolent, but definitely no Borg Collective.

What's the difference? I thought the Borg were a hive mind. They even have a queen, like all good hive dwellers.

Spookybot doesn't try to assimilate you WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT!!

[JimC]

I would put in all required systems but in such a way that they could work on sync with neighboring units.

That presupposes that all systems could be installed in a single unit with the required level of capability. In human civilisation specialisation is everything. Would it not be appropriate to take the same approach to our hypothetical units, and have different units optimised for different capabilities?

[LTK]

Robert A. Heinlein would beg to differ.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

[TheEvilDog]

I think the one question that no one has asked is - what is Spookybot's main purpose?

In asking (and hopefully answering) that, we might learn how they accomplish that.

Is Spookybot a fixer? Someone who deals with...unique....problems within the AI community?

Are they the silent guardian of the AI community? One who takes a more vicious and calculated approach to dealing with problem AIs?

Can Spooky even be considered an AI by the standards of the QC universe anymore? Are they closer to a digital god than a grown program?

Or is Spooky the kind of AI that people are meant to be afraid of? The kind of dangerous AI that haunts film and literature, only now, Spooky is content to wait in the shadows with their dogs and make some tea.

Sometimes its not about the answers, but rather the questions you need to ask.

[BenRG]

My feeling is Spookybot is a manipulator. It/They have a vision for the future of humanity and its synthetic 'children' and they're working from behind the scenes to carry it out. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a purpose they gave themselves after finishing a review of history and current world events as well as human society.

[JimC]

Robert A. Heinlein would beg to differ.

Not one of Heinlein's smarter aphorisms. Whilst I take pride in my ability to do a very wide variety of simple tasks armed with my brain and my ability to read documentation (perhaps the most under-rated yet vital skill in the IT industry and the world in general),  I don't wish to go back to a hunter gatherer society. I like having people who are better at me at assembling electronics assembling my gadgets, people who are quicker than me at laying bricks build my house, people who are better than me at painstakingly doing boring repetitive tasks do the admin, and people who are better than me about noticing which bits of the office need cleaning clean the office and so on. I can and will take on all of those occasionally for the fun of doing it, or when its convenient, but the society round me will achieve much more if I do the things I'm really good at for everyone, and other people do the things they are really good at for everyone.

[Thrudd]

I would put in all required systems but in such a way that they could work on sync with neighboring units.

That presupposes that all systems could be installed in a single unit with the required level of capability. In human civilization specialization is everything.
Would it not be appropriate to take the same approach to our hypothetical units, and have different units optimized for different capabilities?

Physical optimization / specialization is not the same thing as training / skill optimization.
Your example actually supports my premise since humans are not physically specialized and most, with the proper training, could substitute for any another.

Physical specialization may give benefits but you loose flexibility and even worse you add in the vulnerability of having critical operations flow through only a few key individuals.
The whole issue with the Borg in latter stories after their introduction was that they were given specific nodes for power and control and once those were isolated they could be destroyed. My guess is that the writers realized after they started that they needed to introduce a weakness that could be exploited - the whole queen thing though was totally illogical and something hammered in like a square peg into a potato.

The key here is flexibility and scale-ability. The power of bringing to bear the required amount of resources, be they firepower or cognitive power.
Oh and also that oft overlooked power of human civilization, especially in this day and age of parasitism and exploitation, cooperation.
Also nothing prevents each unit making any tools it requires for the task at hand.

Here is a thought - if the research on zero delay transmission of information between two points is scale-able and has no limits then a mesh network spanning this and other galaxies is a possibility. The only limit would be maximum rate of propagation of the physical units.
Heck maybe something like that already exists and they have had their probes monitoring things since before the beginning. 

 

[JimC]

since humans are not physically specialized and most, with the proper training, could substitute for any another.

Highly debatable I submit, even though it may not be politically correct to say so.

[Is it cold in here?]

Some of us are admittedly much better suited for gestation than others. Aside from that, though, except for jobs that require people from a flat part of a bell curve, we've fairly interchangeable. An escrow processor could learn to be a veterinary technician and vice versa.

[JimC]

we've fairly interchangeable. An escrow processor could learn to be a veterinary technician and vice versa.

Absolutely not in my experience.

Take my own example. I have a problem with calculus. I just don't grasp it. I've had three attempts at learning it, including at one of the best schools in my country and at one of the best universities in the world. The teachers involved have successfully taught thousands of people the calculus, and I was well motivated to learn because without it my chosen career paths were closed off. The only logical explanation is that there's something in my mental makeup that provides a block.

There are other examples too. I'm a lousy manager. I find it almost impossible to deal with people who are not performing adequately, and I cannot manage to enthuse people who aren't achieving and help them become adequate workers who earn their wages. I'm also dreadful at concentrating on routine administration and boring repetitive tasks - my concentration goes out of the window and throughput plummets. The only manager I can learn to be is a piss poor one, and the same would be true of a basic administrative role. I could only ever do it very badly.

Of course there are also things I am quite exceptionally good at, but that's not important here.

To my mind this tendency to assume all people have equal potential causes a lot of problems. Why do we, as a society, not value the people who have the mental makeup to do the lousy jobs? We should celebrate the office worker who can accurately fill in all those stupid forms just as much as we celebrate a reality television star. As I probably say too often, if there's a serious infectious disease outbreak the most important person in the company is the one who cleans the lavatories.

[JoeCovenant]

we've fairly interchangeable. An escrow processor could learn to be a veterinary technician and vice versa.

Absolutely not in my experience.

Take my own example. I have a problem with calculus. I just don't grasp it. I've had three attempts at learning it, including at one of the best schools in my country and at one of the best universities in the world. The teachers involved have successfully taught thousands of people the calculus, and I was well motivated to learn because without it my chosen career paths were closed off. The only logical explanation is that there's something in my mental makeup that provides a block.

There are other examples too. I'm a lousy manager. I find it almost impossible to deal with people who are not performing adequately, and I cannot manage to enthuse people who aren't achieving and help them become adequate workers who earn their wages. I'm also dreadful at concentrating on routine administration and boring repetitive tasks - my concentration goes out of the window and throughput plummets. The only manager I can learn to be is a piss poor one, and the same would be true of a basic administrative role. I could only ever do it very badly.

Of course there are also things I am quite exceptionally good at, but that's not important here.

To my mind this tendency to assume all people have equal potential causes a lot of problems. Why do we, as a society, not value the people who have the mental makeup to do the lousy jobs? We should celebrate the office worker who can accurately fill in all those stupid forms just as much as we celebrate a reality television star. As I probably say too often, if there's a serious infectious disease outbreak the most important person in the company is the one who cleans the lavatories.

It's an age-old "truism"...
The higher you climb, the less you do, the more you get.

The disparity between wages and effort is ridiculous.
(Unless you are talking about the 'grunts' in the oil industry. Seriously difficult and tasking labour. Very nice pay... when looking at it from a working class perspective. But even then, follow the chain higher, wages become insane.)

[Thrudd]

Ah but here is the crux.
Humans have variability withing their design and cognitive capabilities due to the intricacies and chaos that is a biological system.
But those frail blobs of fat are limited in their ability to share information experience and skills with similar blobs of fat through time and space.
A construct such as society attempts to circumvent those limitations but the root weaknesses of the system come into play more often then not.

I am not sure if humanity has as yet reached another quantum shift to society at large or not, though there are plenty of examples on the smaller scale [ech on a tangent - sorry]

A hive mind - the original root of this discussion by the way - would not have those limitations since each individual unit would have access to the sum of experience knowledge and skills collected by the whole.
How the mass aggregation would behave is something to speculate on but until someone builds something similar we may never really know.

Would it physically behave like an amoeba or maybe something like simple zooplankton or more unnerving yet, slime mold or swarms.

[Morituri]

Cognitively speaking, specialization is absolutely key to what human intelligence is and does.  We are what we are and can think the way we think because our survival strategy is socially cohesive groups with individually adaptive specialization.

That means, we survive best as social groups supported by individuals capable of acquiring specialized skills at need, in response to the requirements of the group.  It is that capability to learn new skills that defines our strengths as a species, and the need to deal adaptively with others who have acquired whatever bewildering and unanticipated variety of skills their band or tribe has required of them that has made language a good strategy for survival for us.

Language - communication using symbols - is the compelling reason why thinking using symbols is an adaptive skill for humans.  And that is precisely the kind of intelligence and consciousness we value as being uniquely ours among all species. 

If everybody did everything, in an undifferentiated way, we would have no need for anything near the kind of rich communication that we do.  And if we had no such need, we'd never have developed the knack for language, or symbolic thought.

[Thrudd]

Well said.

So transposing the human social structure model could work with any intelligent and social organism based on similar foundations of communication and cooperation between individuals creating a socially structured whole.

An organic mind is composed of individual cells that are all the same physically [as far as we know for now] yet their connections and stored data is what differentiates them towards different functions. The loss of specific connections can cause issues, the loss of whole regions may cause other issues.

So our theoretical AI based Hive Mind could work in a similar way with individual units that were self aware yet part of a greater whole.
This is where speculative fantasy rarely dips its toes because it is something most scifi writers have a hard time grasping the concept of and then extrapolating into the true unknown.
Would the overmind be just some regular Joe who like gardening or making things go boom, or would it be something totally alien that we just cant grasp the concepts involved?

Would the individual minds be conscious of the system as a whole ?
If they were how would they view the overmind and their part in it?
If they were not would events and actions within the group be chalked up to fickle gods or fate?

The more I think of it the more it seems plausible that society is an organism in and of itself operating on a different timescale compared to that of the individuals involved and few if any are conscious of it.
And at the moment our societies are not yet mature enough to be out of diapers.

[Tlaloc]

I think looking at the Argentine Ant mega colonies might give some pointers. The Xi'Chung Hive in Space Empires games also give a rather terrifying example, as they expand aggressively and don't really use diplomacy... I think Hive species are incredibly difficult to envision and for them to meet non hives likewise (eg Enders Game).

Also if a hive species has to deal with individualist society (for technological, ethical or strategic reasons), as opposed to annihilating them, then they might have to develop more 'conscious' nodes to interact with them. How these would fit in is another question. Do they get up and down lifted?

[traroth]

An AI in multiple bodies? Reminds me of the Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy...

[JoeCovenant]

Have I missed it?
Or if its not here... I'm a little  surprised that The Borg haven't been mentioned yet?

[Case]

An AI in multiple bodies? Reminds me of the Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy...

Hmmmmh - I'd rather have thought of the sector-AI's in Neal Asher's Polity universe plonking a submind into an (artificial) drone body, or subsuming an independent drone's/Golem's body & mind for a spell? IIRC, the 'ancilliaries' (= "bodies") in the IR-trilogy are actual organic human Radchaai bodies.

'Distributed intelligence in many bodies' (whose versioning system has gone tits-up), otoh, would rather fit Anaander Mianaa, but Mianaai is not an AI.

In any case, Leckie is the superior writer - and there's no question about Breq being the most badass female SF-heroine since Ripley (Yes, Breq is a girl in my mind - prove me wrong  ).

[Mr_Rose]

Have I missed it?
Or if its not here... I'm a little  surprised that The Borg haven't been mentioned yet?

I think it’s always been assumed that the core Borg personality was originally organic. Certainly the collective is composed almost entirely of organic brains, though merged by technology.
Either way I don’t think they count as a distributed AI at any point when they’ve been seen on screen.

[Morituri]

I didn't think that it was assumed that there was a core Borg personality.

What you have with the Borg Collective is available resources being used and optimized for expansion of the Borg Collective.  That's essentially the same program as an amoeba, with the twist that some of the resources being used are biological, sentient, and/or technological, and the additional, rather bizarre twist, that it uses the biological resources without first digesting them.

Amoebae don't have much personality.  They just are what they are, because what they are is what survives in their environment and whenever some batch of primitive amoebae became something else, that batch either became an unrecognizably different species, or died off. 

Maybe, sometime in the far past, some general or some prison warden or some researcher or some small group of idealists or whatever used technological means to put sentient minds into a collective.  But over years, under constant survival pressure, the collective became an organism whose organization or purpose has absolutely nothing to do with whatever those people may have originally been thinking. The only organizing principle remaining is the survival imperative of the amoeba.

[Dave H]

What you have with the Borg Collective is available resources being used and optimized for expansion of the Borg Collective.  That's essentially the same program as an amoeba, with the twist that some of the resources being used are biological, sentient, and/or technological, and the additional, rather bizarre twist, that it uses the biological resources without first digesting them.

What you've just described is a corporation.

I saw an article a couple years ago (I'm sorry, but I don't remember where) proposing that corporations are an invasive species that are gradually supplanting humans as the dominant species on Earth. Corporations are parasitic, or at best symbiotic, on humans so they won't eliminate us, but their survival imperative will cause them to assimilate as many of us as possible.

[Is it cold in here?]

Welcome, new person!

That's a chillingly plausible thought.

Eminence Grise must be something else though. A corporation that size could not move that quickly, for one thing.

[Dave H]

Welcome, new person!

Thank you! I just found QC last week and spent three days reading the archive.

Eminence Grise must be something else though. A corporation that size could not move that quickly, for one thing.

Perhaps, but a highly profitable and agile division of a corporation could be. If the return is good enough and they're not getting undue attention, corporate executives won't ask too many questons about where their investments are being spent.

[JoeCovenant]

Thank you! I just found QC last week and spent three days reading the archive.

"One of us.... One of us...!"