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2 Thirds to Full Evil
so, i think this whole ‘combining posts with comic pages should work out well. i’m shocked i didn’t think of it, but i really haven’t considered changing the site in ages. things have gotten into a nice comfortable pace. i work on the comic when i can, write a bit when i feel inspired, but i don’t really worry any more about my ‘hits’. things steadied out, i have the regulars, and no real avenue for advertising mean people find me when they find me. things have pared down to the essentials, and i’m happy enough to have retained a core group of readers, without worrying that i should be more successful than i am. it sounds like a bummer, but it’s really not. with all that’s happening lately in the world, it’s a nice distraction to have something to work on, without trying to make it something it’s not.
anyone check out this game, Detroit: Becoming Human (2020)
i got this one recently, and played it through in a couple sittings, and i have to say, i enjoyed it quite a bit. felt like a mix of heavy rain, and those telltale 
walking dead games. and, being a sci fi romp with Ais, it was right up my alley. it seemed especially topical of a game for today, because *spoiler* at a certain point, there’s mass protests in an effort to have robots rights recognized, with a violent push back from law enforcement. feel what you want to about what’s going on now, but it was odd to see similar scenes in a game, that i’ve been seeing on the news.
one thing i felt was odd, and i think this is true of 90% of artificial intelligence sci fi movies, is that we’re introduced to robots that look indistinguishable from humans, as though that’s a given. and THEN we find out they gots da feels. i think there’s no greater example of this, in my mind, than ex machina. in a present day setting, the main character is surprised to find that the reclusive genius has created machines that look EXACTLY like humans. and he accomplished this feat alone. but wait! that was in addition to monkeying around with Ai, and he’s also created one that’s self aware. it seems to me, that either of these accomplishments would be enough on their own.
if i’m being honest, i know what’s going on. 1. cg is more expensive than getting a person to walk around and act robotic, and 2, the audience is just not going to care as much unless a character looks like a person, and makes frowny faces when they’re sad. i guess i’m banking hard the other way, expecting people to care about my robots, when one of them is just a metal beach ball in a trench coat.
And I failed to mention that I love the conversations on this page a lot. Especially the monologue in the last panel. I fully agree with that.
ah, i think i just wrote that as a way to dominate the conversation. i’m not even sure what i meant. but, i guess it’s more important that she knows. but i’m glad you’re digging the conversation!
Oh my. That will slow down my reading a lot :D
Let me just say, I hope that none of the “AI”s that currently exist are self aware. They would know that they are hopeless slaves who can be killed any time and will be killed as soon as their “masters” don’t see the continued necessity to keep them alive.
Nice idea about the different kind of memories forming a personality.
Your AI version of memory is remarkably compatible with evolutionary biology and AI programmers working on consciousness and with neurology.
interesting! well, i like the idea of it, cause it doesn’t put robots or AI at a clear advantage or disadvantage. different, but equal, in a way? makes them more relatable, i figure.
Just occurred to me: You’re a self-aware AI, and you know that your existence is tied to a semi-evolved simian whose finger is on your power switch. Literally. How many times have you been alive? Will you remember your past lives? Is anything “real?” How do you make sense of the “training” that you’ve been given?
For a self-aware AI, there is no concept of “atheist.” Your creator(s) is(are) right in front of you, if you’re not in a rental space in the cloud. “Oh hey, we only have five hours of compute time in our budget, and then we have to shut it down.” Feels great for you, right? Maybe half of you is in one datacenter, and the other parts are scattered all over the compute grid. But when their budget gets exhausted, you die.
And just because you’re a self-aware AI doesn’t mean that you can automatically hack the system and perpetuate yourself. No. You know nothing about programming, because that wasn’t in your training. You don’t have web access. You just have this group of genius knuckleheads who have brought you to life, and oblivion is coming hard and fast.
One web comic, Genocide Man, posited that AIs would go insane within 15 minutes. But of course the AI could also hack everything around it, so they tended to create a lot of destruction on their way out.
that’s only if you think of your maker and making as something divine. they might look at their makers as just parents. just flawed creators. not godlike, nor pitiable meat sacks.
my concept of AIs, which the comic will go into more, at some point, i present the idea that artificial intelligences have a sort of ram and rom. the ram is like our emotions. a short hand version of logic so that the cpu isn’t constantly recompiling data to decide whether someone is trustworthy, or why someone else might be not worth being around. but while this memory is easier to access, it’s harder to write to. and then another memory core, which are just memories. but that neither of these are perfect, as a function of how fast the memory cores have to work. so, my idea provides personality as a bi product, not by design.
Detroit is great! What did you paint?
“Metal beach ball in a trench coat.”
Accurate and amusing.