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[Aenno]

We don't have to worry about shrinking AIs into being humans because AIs don't exist. AIs are fantastical creatures, like trolls, space aliens, elves, or Morlocks.

And as fantastical creatures they are fulfilling some task. I mean, there is an answer about "why humans are X they are?". "It's realistic, people are X". You can make nearly anything as X. But if you put fantastical creature, it always for a propose.

That's the way the form has worked time out of mind. If you want a wide and realistic representation of human diversity, you go to short stories and novels, which offer much more detail and differentiation, but which are longer, slower, less vivid, and more bound to particular cultures.

...or the big part of QC, don't you think? That's actually what I liked so much - wide and realistic representation of human diversity.
I believe I should stand up for QC here. It's 3675 issues, with continuous plot, different intersecting plotlines and dozens of characters. And it is bound to particular culture. If some story don't fit to one plotline, Jeph makes four, five or ten. It's definitely not something I'd call minimalist form (not as I believe minimalist form is bad; QC just isn't it).
And when classical art used any thing like giants, sorcerers or cyclops, it was always about canonical depiction. Listeners knew that fair folk is X and they do Y. They weren't there for diversity, and actually wasn't even characters, they were plot devices.

[SpanielBear]

All good points. I think your point about AI's, at the end of the day, not being AI-like enough to distinguish themselves from the humans is a fair one. With the exception of Spookybot, there's no long examination of how AI's are different, only how they are in the end the same. I can fan-wank about how that's justified forever, but at the end of the day Bubbles is very recognisable, not an alien consciousness.

But the new question- "if that's the case, what are the AI in QC for, narratively speaking", is also a good one. If they are not there to be strange aliens in themselves, what purpose are they serving?

I think they are vampires.

Hear me out. In western literature, the use of vampires in gothic novels keeps coming back, not just because they are cool monsters but because of what they can represent. Dracula back in the 19th century got to be about sexuality and desire, the Anne Rice variety played with ideas of loneliness and being social outcasts, and the more recent Twilight lot about tribalism and loyalty. The point is the vampires themselves are a useful neutral slate. If Stoker started writing about the sexual desires of middle class Victorian women, he would have been in serious trouble. Stick the concepts onto a vampire, and there's an element of ablative armour. The symbolism is there if you want to see it, but if anyone complains hey, it's just a silly monster story, right?

AI lets Jeph write about relatively controversial things with a degree of safety. If he gets something very wrong, he's writing about fictional robots not people. It also allows him to take things to a further extreme if he wants than would be possible with a straight realistic fiction. By which I mean, if he wants to write about issues surrounding accessibility of healthcare, for example, making the characters involved be robots rather than people takes out some the sting (an exploding robo-butt is much easier to joke about than Faye's alcoholism) but also allows him to highlight specific elements- body-parts and health being treated as a commodity, for example. It gives him narrative options.

I also like the idea that robots represent an exploration of xenia. One of my favourite fantasy series is the Elderling Cycle, written by Robin Hobb. Without spoiling too much hopefully, one of the big questions explored througout the series of many books is that humans do not have equals in the world. They are the apex predators, the arch-exploiters, there is nothing else around that is like us. So what happens if that changes? Robin Hobb looks at it from a variety of angles, the need for humans to really take into account different points of view and moralities, to start sharing a world because dominating it is no longer possible. The conclusions she comes to are pretty ambiguous, and her characters are some of the best written out there. If you like high fantasy and haven't read her stuff, trust me, she's awesome.

Anyhow.

Jeph's exploration is much less full-throttle than Robin Hobb's, but nonetheless, there is an element of "Humanity is no longer alone" that get's explored. It's a small element in amongst the relationship drama, but the tensions raised by the singularity are an over-arching theme that would not be possble without the presence of AI characters. In this case, the fact that they act like humans isn't so much of a problem, it's the fact that their arrival is something that humans are having to adapt to. It's a nice background for the story, and one that Jeph can bring in and out of focus as he chooses.

[Aenno]

The point is the vampires themselves are a useful neutral slate. If Stoker started writing about the sexual desires of middle class Victorian women, he would have been in serious trouble. Stick the concepts onto a vampire, and there's an element of ablative armour.

I do fully agree. As far as I know, Stoker actually is very puritan vampire literature, there was a lot of more obvious works of fiction about vampires before him.
But point is, truth to be said, I didn't thought about AIs being substitute for "touchy" positions of LGBT. Of course, it's simple for me to say it, but I do believe it's not making stories better. I mean, it's simpler to joke about exploded roboass then about alcoholism exactly because alcoholism is big problem, known to a lot of people around, which you can't wave out and just take fun. That's it, giving people a way to wave out such things is something that, I believe, art shouldn't do. Just in case, I don't mean it should be, as it said here, "spoke about bestially seriously". If I want to joke about LGBT, I always can do it. If I can't it's unhealthy. It can be offensive, and better not to offend people if you wan't to be nice guy, sure - but looks like Jeph managed to do it before without being offensive?.. (Just to reference, when I study modern American literature, I was really touched by one story about Hunter Thompson, who wrote a book about Hell's Angels in his unrepeatable style; well, as far as I know, Hell's Angels aren't the most meek guys, but they weren't offended, because Thompson didn't try to invent something.)
And also there is another problem which I already pointed once or twice. When you're mixing "realistic" and "fantastic" problems, "fantastic" are inherently more bleak. They just work worse, exactly because they're fictional. That's why you'll need to heat their problems up, not cool it down. Dracula isn't just sexy guy, he is supernaturally alluring and charming. So to highlight human problems, AIs problems should be more severe than human ones in same setting. I can't see it's the case here. It's looks like it simpler to be robot in QC then to be nuclear transperson or lesbian from Georgia.

I also like the idea that robots represent an exploration of xenia.

So do I.
Really, I love xenia. That's what I love about western sci-fi and fantasy so much - you see, the most prominent point of soviet sci-fi is that xenia is impossible. You can't and never would be able to understand another mind, every try of Contact (until it's humans you're trying to contact) is doomed. Look into Lem or Strugatskie. So when I had my hands on Uplift Saga I was charmed.
But the very point of xenia is that Others are, well, Others. If they are not... well, then AIs are not characters themselves, but a point to humans (again, it's not bad as it is), and no character in QC, truth to be said, maybe but Hannelore and Emily, are in place to show human reaction on changing their world so much. Marten, Dora or Faye aren't in position to really work around such things.

[SpanielBear]

I've always thought the robots on QC explored more issues around minorities and race than LGBT, but that's just my interpretation. I think they tie in a lot to current debates around immigration and integration as well. And I didn't really mean protection in terms of "Because someone will get offended", I'm not accusing Jeph of authorial cowardice. I meant it more in terms of "I am not intimately familiar with this issue, so there's a risk I'll get things wrong. That'll matter slightly less if I'm talking about robots."

I also don't think that QC AI was really set up with that point in mind. It feels like Jeph had kooky AI's running around, and as more of them turned up and the universe became more fully realised, the robots were just there. So Jeph started playing around with them and tropes because he found it interesting. Their status as outsiders and the narrative vehicle they became is a bit messy, because their role wasn't clearly defined in the beginning. I don't feel that the story suffers for it myself, but again, that's a matter of personal taste.

I also think that the Dora/Marten/Faye perspective of xenia, as people who are just normal people for whom this change is just an aspect of day-to-day life, is also kind of interesting. Yes maybe it's quite idealistic, but given that most of these stories are about the big thinkers, or the ones who make the powerful decisions, to see it from the bottom up is pretty cool. I agree that the one time a real alien consciousness got involved, Spookybot, was a bit of a let-down. That felt rushed and deus-ex machinery. But the main narrative drive behind QC AI seems mainly to say "there is more that unites us than divides us", which would be hard to maintain if the AI were completely unrelatable.

[Aenno]

And I didn't really mean protection in terms of "Because someone will get offended", I'm not accusing Jeph of authorial cowardice. I meant it more in terms of "I am not intimately familiar with this issue, so there's a risk I'll get things wrong. That'll matter slightly less if I'm talking about robots."

Well, I never contacted Jeph in person, but by posts and around I had a feeling he is just a type of person who don't want to offend people around. But, well. Personally I'd prefer to see his opinions as they are.

I also don't think that QC AI was really set up with that point in mind. It feels like Jeph had kooky AI's running around, and as more of them turned up and the universe became more fully realised, the robots were just there. So Jeph started playing around with them and tropes because he found it interesting. Their status as outsiders and the narrative vehicle they became is a bit messy, because their role wasn't clearly defined in the beginning.

Maybe. And I hadn't a problem here until robots didn't happen to be arc main players.
I mean, I was ok with Pintsize, or with earlier Momo, or with Station. They're nice, even if humans were more interesting for me personaly.

I also think that the Dora/Marten/Faye perspective of xenia, as people who are just normal people for whom this change is just an aspect of day-to-day life, is also kind of interesting.

That's true - but thing is, I can't really imagine Dora, Marten or Faye just taking sides here if some weird coincidence wouldn't put them on the fence and thereto making them decision persons. I mean, well, they already have a position, and it's kind of "ok, they're robots, they're here, some of them are nice, some of them smug assholes" *undoubtedly* They haven't "change happens" aptitude, and it was actually addressed in some issues, I believe.

[ckridge]

And when classical art used any thing like giants, sorcerers or cyclops, it was always about canonical depiction. Listeners knew that fair folk is X and they do Y.

This is not the case. Hesiod and Homer disagree on almost every single point about the Cyclops, for instance. In Hesiod, they are children of Gaia and Uranus, brothers to the Titans, older than the Olympians, smiths, and confined to Tartarus. In Homer, they are Poseidon's children, shepherds, and live on an island. If you look at Catherine Briggs's An Encyclopedia of Fairies you will find that English accounts of what fairies are like and what they are likely to do vary widely from region to region. These discrepancies are not surprising, since travel was difficult, most of these stories were transmitted only by word of mouth for a long time, and even when they were written down, few people could read and even fewer could afford many books.

In the case of folk tales, the notion that fantastic creatures are there for the sake of the plot just doesn't make sense, for many folk tales don't have  plots. Two typical tales from Briggs:

>A workman on his way home in the evening finds a broken doll in the road by a stone and hears passionate weeping coming from under the stone. He sits down in the road and fixes the doll, lays it by the stone, calls "There you go, girl, I fixed it for you," and goes his way. The next day the doll is gone. He has good luck after that.<

>A farmer going home late is chased by an enormous black dog. It is almost on him when he leaps across a brook, and then it stands baying on the far bank, unable to cross the running water.<

There are many correct ways to read any story, so that it is impossible to say what the one true function of any part of a story is, but I certainly find it plausible to suppose that people who saw almost no strangers in the course of their daily lives would be concerned about the kind of people you might meet in the woods, on the roads, or in the evening. Any stranger would seem uncanny.

You can read Polyphemos as a thing that happens so that other things can happen, but he isn't always read that way. It has been pointed out that Polyphemos breaks hospitality laws in every possible way, but it has also been pointed out that Odysseus and his men also break hospitality laws by walking into his home and helping themselves to his food. They act like animals, expect to be treated like guests, and instead are treated like animals.  This eventually brings Poseidon's curse upon them. Read this way, the episode looks like it is about how to behave toward strangers when in their land.

I'm just not going to argue about whether QC gives the depth of detail and resolution of character of a comparable short novel or short story. It would be like arguing about whether a patch of blue is a patch of red.

Arguments having been dutifully made, full disclosure.

All my talents, such as they are, lie in the humanities, and after years of careful reading in the humanities, I am sometimes thoroughly sick of humans. It is pleasant to imagine the company of some other sort of rational creature.

[Is it cold in here?]

My guess is that Jeph started out treating AI characters as jokes but then saw the issues of conscious beings excluded from society.

[Is it cold in here?]

A difference between them and us that I'd like to see explored is how it affects how someone's mind works if they can't feel pain and aren't in fear of it.

[ckridge]

Somewhere near the beginning of this topic I argue that in this story robots express hope that the future will be full of strange new people to talk with. (And have sex with, because this is a comic for bonobos.) It occurs to me that they also serve to comfort fears that AIs will endanger us, as, of course, they will. Sladek pointed out that Asimov's three laws of robotics are absurd because the very first reason robots will be built is to kill people. Sterling points out that computers already play the stock market better than humans and will soon come to play the entire economy for their corporations' short-term profit. Current work in facial recognition is likely soon to produce AIs that can pick any given face out of thousands of hours of security camera footage. Current machine learning methods mean that no one will know on just what basis the AI made the decision to kill, buy, sell, or identify. This is scary.

What Jeph is pointing out is that conscious AIs won't be the problem. A non-conscious AI is a powerful, intelligent, giant insect. A conscious AI would be a person. People are what we are best at. Our best is none too good, god knows, but we would be no worse off with new people than we are with the old ones. It would be very difficult for anyone to be worse than us.

A conscious robot soldier wouldn't be the Terminator. It would be Bubbles, or, more likely, Deathbot 9000. We can handle that.

[Is it cold in here?]

> Current machine learning methods mean that no one will know on just what basis the AI made the decision to kill, buy, sell, or identify. This is scary.

Don't we have the same problem with other organics? And with our selves?

-------

Here's another difference between synthetics and us. Only a very few humans could stand being a toaster.

[ckridge]

We have a million-odd years of practice in sorting out that, say, that cop who has an uncanny knack for telling if someone has a gun on them doesn't like black people or can't quite ever believe that a woman could have a gun, or that the genius teacher is a genius only with boys and girls she can convince herself are boys. Part of it is that we know how humans glitch, and part of it is that language is full of connotations, double meanings, imagery, emotive phrases, and emotional tones, all of which we use unconsciously to express ourselves, and all of which we are exquisitely tuned to understanding. If you listen carefully to the undercurrent of their speech, most people will eventually inform you of their prejudices and blind spots. There are jargons specifically designed for removing that undercurrent, and some of those are deliberately designed for lying in, but one can tell instantly if someone has retreated into a jargon.

AIs - expert systems or algorithms might be better words for what we actually have now - are harder to figure out than that. They don't talk, and they don't glitch in the ways we do.

If they could talk, really talk, it would be different. Talk to someone long enough, and you can figure them out.

[ckridge]

>Take, for example, an episode recently reported by machine learning researcher Rich Caruana and his colleagues. They described the experiences of a team at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who were using machine learning to predict whether pneumonia patients might develop severe complications. The goal was to send patients at low risk for complications to outpatient treatment, preserving hospital beds and the attention of medical staff. The team tried several different methods, including various kinds of neural networks, as well as software-generated decision trees that produced clear, human-readable rules.

The neural networks were right more often than any of the other methods. But when the researchers and doctors took a look at the human-readable rules, they noticed something disturbing: One of the rules instructed doctors to send home pneumonia patients who already had asthma, despite the fact that asthma sufferers are known to be extremely vulnerable to complications.

The model did what it was told to do: Discover a true pattern in the data. The poor advice it produced was the result of a quirk in that data. It was hospital policy to send asthma sufferers with pneumonia to intensive care, and this policy worked so well that asthma sufferers almost never developed severe complications. Without the extra care that had shaped the hospital’s patient records, outcomes could have been dramatically different.

The hospital anecdote makes clear the practical value of interpretability. “If the rule-based system had learned that asthma lowers risk, certainly the neural nets had learned it, too,” wrote Caruana and colleagues—but the neural net wasn’t human-interpretable, and its bizarre conclusions about asthma patients might have been difficult to diagnose. If there hadn’t been an interpretable model, Malioutov cautions, “you could accidentally kill people.”<

http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/is-artificial-intelligence-permanently-inscrutable

[JoeCovenant]

... If there hadn’t been an interpretable model, Malioutov cautions, “you could accidentally kill people.”<

http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/is-artificial-intelligence-permanently-inscrutable

Well, I don’t think there is any question about it.
It can only be attributable to human error.
This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.

[Thrudd]

Also the premise "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

You overlook one little detail or a factor or assumption and things can get dangerous rather quickly.
ex
Collect all of the pertinent data, as far as you know
Feed it into a computer
run your data analysis
The answer is 42

[SpanielBear]

Also the premise "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

You overlook one little detail or a factor or assumption and things can get dangerous rather quickly.
ex
Collect all of the pertinent data, as far as you know
Feed it into a computer
run your data analysis
The answer is 42

"What do you get if you multiply seven by nine?"

In other words, if you ask a computer a question, make sure you asked the right one.

[ckridge]

All true, and they are going to be running the economy, battlefields, assassination programs, diagnostic programs, and surveillance programs -- in short, civilization -- on the basis of data sets too large for us to fully comprehend, based on algorithms to which we have no access, without any desire either to understand or to explain themselves. It doesn't matter whether the resulting errors are their errors or human errors blown up to enormous size. Those errors are going to be scary. AIs are going to be scary.

Conscious AIs, by contrast, would almost necessarily want to understand themselves. One only becomes conscious of that which catches one's interest, and therefore only becomes conscious of oneself if interested in oneself. Such an interest is very likely to entail interest in how one works and why one does things one way and not another. If, as seems to be the case, language is the only tool suitable for gaining such self-knowlege, and conversation the best linguistic path to self-knowledge, we have a situation like the one we see in QC, only probably with less sex. Probably.

A situation like the one in QC does include the possibility of a robot Nero, Ghengis, Hitler, or Stalin, and of robots doing all the other monstrous things we do. We are adapted to that already, though.

[ckridge]

Google assures us that they are providing the Pentagon assistance in having drones find and track particular individuals only for non-offensive purposes.
https://gizmodo.com/google-is-helping-the-pentagon-build-ai-for-drones-1823464533

[JoeCovenant]

Also the premise "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

You overlook one little detail or a factor or assumption and things can get dangerous rather quickly.
ex
Collect all of the pertinent data, as far as you know
Feed it into a computer
run your data analysis
The answer is 42

"What do you get if you multiply seven by nine?"

In other words, if you ask a computer a question, make sure you asked the right one.

SIX by Nine...

There's something fundamentally flawed with the universe... 

[Morituri]

Also the premise "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

You overlook one little detail or a factor or assumption and things can get dangerous rather quickly.
ex
Collect all of the pertinent data, as far as you know
Feed it into a computer
run your data analysis
The answer is 42

"What do you get if you multiply seven by nine?"

In other words, if you ask a computer a question, make sure you asked the right one.

SIX by Nine...

There's something fundamentally flawed with the universe... 

Well, not necessarily fundamentally flawed.  But that answer should make you start considering why you've been thinking in base ten all this time when the universe clearly does its math in base thirteen.

[dexeron]

Also the premise "A little learning is a dangerous thing."

You overlook one little detail or a factor or assumption and things can get dangerous rather quickly.
ex
Collect all of the pertinent data, as far as you know
Feed it into a computer
run your data analysis
The answer is 42

"What do you get if you multiply seven by nine?"

In other words, if you ask a computer a question, make sure you asked the right one.

SIX by Nine...

There's something fundamentally flawed with the universe... 

Well, not necessarily fundamentally flawed.  But that answer should make you start considering why you've been thinking in base ten all this time when the universe clearly does its math in base thirteen.

It's also an admonition to ensure that only relevant variables are included in one's calculations.  Errant telephone sanitizers  in the mix can completely throw off the entire process.

[Thrudd]

I'll throw in a little QC term here ..... Pareto Analysis.
Pareto Analysis is a statistical technique in decision-making used for the selection of a limited number of tasks that produce significant overall effect.
It uses the Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) the idea that by doing 20% of the work you can generate 80% of the benefit of doing the entire job.
AI system optimizations are based on the principles of this tool.

The problem with such a tool is that you are limited to the tasks/parameters you listed in the first place.
This is where creativity and thinking outside the box would come into play using something called a Fish-bone Diagram.
Often referred to as a cause and effect diagram, or Ishikawa, it is a simple root cause analysis tool that is used for brainstorming issues and causes of particular problems or outcomes.
Unfortunately AI systems are just not capable of such analysis and a goodly number of humans are just as limited.

[ckridge]

I know fuck-all about programming, so my intuitions aren't likely to be of much use here, but, just for the sake of adding ideas to the mix, I will contribute this.

It doesn't seem to me that computers' problem-solving or reasoning abilities are likely to be inferior to humans'. We have been analyzing how we reason since Aristotle invented logic, and we are pretty good at turning our various techniques into sets of rules. This quote from the first article I posted seems to me to summarize computers' primary problem.

“What machines are picking up on are not facts about the world,” Batra says. “They’re facts about the dataset.”

What is astute here is the distinction between dataset and world.

It seems to me that computer development and brain evolution have proceeded along opposite courses. Computer development has been a matter of constructing data processors, and then feeding datasets into them and then, maybe, hooking them up to sensors. Brain evolution appears to have started with organisms that were very little more than sensors hooked to switches, improved those sensors till the organisms were almost perfectly connected to their environments, and then begun to add data processing ability. The computer's primary problem is often dataset deficiency. The organism's primary problem is always dataset excess, that is, so much information coming in that much or most of it has to be edited out before  data processing can be possible.

This is, I surmise, the difference between having a dataset and having a world. Worlds are the unprocessably large body of information that organisms' senses deliver. Datasets are worlds edited down to processable size. Humans are inferior to computers in many respects, but they do have the advantage that if their dataset lacks essential information, they can change the editing rules and extract a new dataset from the world.

In QC, the robots have sensoria comparable in size to that of humans, though different in nature and scope. They live in worlds, though different worlds. Living with them would be like living with a dog that could tell you what it is like to have lingering smells so present that they do the work of memory, or a cat that could tell you what it is like to be sharply aware of every small movement that might be prey.

[Is it cold in here?]

Then there are the big AIs Momo talked about to Emily who have millions of high bandwidth inputs, utterly beyond the imagination of us the carbon-based.