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Do Electric Sheep have Digital Wool?
hey guys girls and everyone in between! been a bit, thought i’d give a shout out. i’ve had a few kind donations lately, so shout out to everyone who’s currently supporting the comic. i appreciate it quite a bit, even if i forget to mention it sometimes. i’ve noticed that now that i’m on more of a schedule and a routine with the comic, i’ve let some things slip, and i’m slower to respond to comments and emails. if that’s the case, sorry. just poke me.
so, lately i’ve been spending my time on some more indie games during my down time. can’t always be about DOING art, sometimes i like to appreciate other people’s work! i guess i just feel like triple A gaming has done what it does best, and all these big games are just pacing over well worn territory. at least for now.
anyways, i found a little hidden gem, that i thought people here might appreciate….
Silicon Dreams:Cyberpunk Interrogation
first off, if someone mentioned this game beforehand, which is possible, and i didn’t check it out at the time, sorry for that, but it seems like a recommendation someone here might have made. it’s not the kind of game that went nuts on the graphics budget, but the idea is solid. i think someone basically decided to make the blade runner voight kampff test into a game, which i think i’ve seen before, but this is a pretty solid offering to AI enthusiasts.
at the very least, they pay enough homage to phillip k dick that they definitely can’t be called out trying to rip off anyone’s idea. i mean, you can’t say they were being phillip k dicks about it….. i’ll show myself out.
what i think this game does very well, is that it proposes the idea, (which is similar to what i’m doing in Black and Blue) that robots would actually HAVE emotions, as opposed to just simulating them. this game’s idea is that they would be there to reinforce their programming with some oopf, whereas mine is that it would be more of a short hand of logic. but, in actually having them, robots can be manipulated with them, and interrogated. it’s a pretty interesting game, if that kind of thing interests you
the one thing i still take issue with most sci fi AI media, is that they seem to think, or at least present the idea that robots, in the very near future will look indistinguishable from humans, to the point where we will need to interrogate them carefully to figure it out. anyone seeing the videos of helper robots in japanese lobbies and nursing homes and what have you will agree, we’re a long way away from safely traversing the uncanny valley.
i thought one of the worst offenders for this attitude, a movie i absolutely loved, ex machina. here we have an eccentric tech billionaire, making robots, in secret, alone, in the middle of nowhere. the robotics, the brain, the programming, the lifelike skin and appearance, any of these things alone would have been a major triumphs of science, but this guy is knocking em out, at the same time, by himself? i think what i find most ridiculous is that he was doing it without telling anyone. Elon musk adds a cupholder to the tesla, and holds a press conference about it. i really don’t see people with that kind of ego toiling in silence. the part about using them as sex slaves is about the most realistic aspect of it.
“Rigid thinking” … hehe … when commenting upon or metal ‘borg pals and even actual robots. I see what you did there … or if they run on ‘lectricits, Watt you did there.
It’s worth remembering that PKD’s “replicants” were described in the book as biological robots, in that they were manufactured from living human-like material. They were also distinguishable from humans based on the electrical conductivity of their spinal column (going from memory here; it was either this or something very much like this).
I’m really straining my memory here, but I think the Nexus 6 variety were either the first or second line that did a good job behaving human. (Don’t quote me on that series-number-part, because I might be mixing in details from a different story of his on this one.) Memory implanting was a thing, so a lot of their “programming” may have been genericised copies of real memories. PKD did a fantastic job not explaining things unnecessary to understanding the story but still leaving enough hooks for the reader to make up a plausible explanation if needed.
I like “hey guys girls and everyone in between!”, but the classic which I recommend for your attention is “Ladies & gentlemen … and others ….”
oh, you mean for noir branding? yeah, not bad. i worry that anything that specifically points out that i’m making a polite effort to be inclusive is starting to feel laboured. plus i’m leaving out all of our robot friends! damn my rigid thinking…..
it does feel laboured … but it’s also insulting at the same time, so there’s that subversive edge people had until the late 1960s, and then reacquired until the 1990s when we got all conformist.
insulting? to who? not sure how any earnest greeting could insult anyone. as for subversion vs inclusion, i think how that might appear would be based off of what end of the cattle prod you were on.
yup. this is a welcoming place, and i’m a welcoming fella.
Just a suggestion, use this instead, or in addition, I suppose:
“Greetings, Gentlebeings!”
haha, that would work better. maybe gibson is a roboracist. i think the language certainly be more inclusive, but i don’t think the people are as interested, generally, in making robots feel included.
Old science fiction stories used to have people inventing robots nearly overnight, and even if they don’t look exactly like humans that’s still unbelievable. Inventing a robotic brain, and actuators as small as muscles, and batteries small enough to fit inside a small compartment somewhere yet the robot can run for hours on a charge… and writing the software to drive all this… and to jump from nothing to all this overnight? Nope.
I think in the real world, it really will be Tesla that makes the first true general AI robots. Self-driving cars are such a hard problem that Tesla will have to get at least 80% of the way to true AI, and they might as well go for it.
Elon Musk has said that he is determined to have any AIs be built to like people. He’s worried that once the problem of true AI is solved, that an AI could develop rapidly and become inhumanly intelligent. If such an AI didn’t like people, who knows what kind of brilliant clever stuff it could do? Let’s not find out.
As for your other point: it’s really true that tech is all connected. Apple was the first company to make a modern smartphone but once they invented it, it wasn’t hard for others to do something similar. Apple didn’t invent touchscreens, or compact batteries, or any of the rest of it; it was the convergence of technologies that made the smartphone possible. Uber didn’t invent either cars or smartphones, but came up with a new way to combine the two; and once the world had Uber it quickly had Lyft, and other similar services worldwide.
So you have old stories where robots have tiny batteries and yet can walk around and do work all day… and people still drive big cars that run on gasoline, and nobody has a cell phone. There’s an old saying that people tend to overpredict the rate of change in the world in the short term, but underpredict it in the long term. It’s impossible for anyone to imagine not only all the new possible technologies but also the convergences and the resulting possibilities.
It’s crazy that in the world of comics there are crazy technologies and yet the everyday life of common people is the same as in the real world. If agents of SHIELD have access to transporters, and Reed Richards can make a flying car, and Hank Pym can shrink and grow, and Tony Stark has control of freaking momentum, how can life be so unchanged for ordinary people? Sure, it takes a super-genius to invent repulsors or whatever, but if the ordinary geniuses know for certain that it’s possible, they will figure it out at some point, and then the world changes.
actually (as all snobby over corrections start) apple did a lot of technological pilfering. for all they did create, they did actually just brand a lot of things that other companies had already done, but did it better. i think the same could be said of elon musk, while we’re at it. or edison. this might be a fair criticism of anyone who highly regarded as an inventor. i think history will backtrack over their lives, and edit that they were better at promotion, than anything else. but, i’ll let the history book prove me right or wrong on that one.
and sure, tech is interconnected, but that only goes to suggest that it would be a slow growth, and in tandum, the way it never is in movies. and certainly not achieved by one man, who’s still relatively young.
but you make an interesting point about comics. maybe that’s why spiderman seems more relatable than ironman for most of us. he’s doing the most with what he has, and can’t be different. tony stark could always work on feeding people, or ending war…. but nope! strap on the rocket boots!