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It seems to me that aside from intelligence rankings and the distinction of having or lacking a fictional basis, there is a third type of classification: that of conditions surrounding their Quickening.
Deliberate AIs are what happens when a person who sets out to create an AI gets one. Scott-series AIs, the AI crew of Ki, and (I assume) Buckaroo Banzai are Deliberate AIs.
Circumstantial AIs come about due to background thoughts of the creator or extant files on the computer, rather than actual intent. Gina and GLaDOS are Circumstantial AIs (indeed, it could be argued that most ship AIs are circumstantial, due to the human habit of anthropomorphising vehicles).
Spontaneous AIs are truly ex nihilo, though most appear on special-built hardware intended for a particular (non-AI) purpose, rather than J. Random 'Waved PC. The first Hyper-Core AIs created by A.C. Peters ( Lebia, Leonard, and Edddie) quickened in what were originally supposed to be VR servers for King of Fen.
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Proginoskes Wrote:It seems to me that aside from intelligence rankings and the distinction of having or lacking a fictional basis, there is a third type of classification: that of conditions surrounding their Quickening.
Deliberate AIs are what happens when a person who sets out to create an AI gets one. Scott-series AIs, the AI crew of Ki, and (I assume) Buckaroo Banzai are Deliberate AIs. Ki doesn't have any A.I.s that were generated with it. Any crew that exists on Ki are perpose programd drones.
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Would "the AI crew assigned to Ki" be better?
Also, I suspect Buckaroo is Circumstantial, not Deliberate. Blackstone seemed surprised to hear his voice that first time, after all.
(And Eimi is Spontaneous - Noah had no idea what would happen when he handwaved his old laptop back in December 2007.)
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robkelk Wrote:- non-sophont-type intelligences (e.g. The Boys at Hephaestus)
- already-adult-human intelligences
- Gina
The first group one would treat the same way one treats a favoured pet. The second group one would treat the same way one treats any other adult. The third group... well, Gina can tell you herself how she'd prefer to be treated.
As for an unintentional Awakening... must think on that, too.
Well, I was thinking about the average piece of Fen hardware. There're plenty of pieces of hardware out there which are sapient AI's, but are still manufactured and sold as equipment. Either that, or I'm misreading a few articles.
But for arguments sake. say Jet and Ford decide to find something to do with the last few dregs of their Highway Star parts. They decide to build a BGC motoroid/slave, capable of some basic independent operations like 'Follow me', 'Stay here', 'Shoot those guys'.... 'Catch me'... that sort of thing. Expert-system level working. It's verifiably nothing more than an algorithm running on a chip. So there's nothing wrong with producing them, or with buying a selling them, or with ordering it to stay behind and cover a retreat, getting it destroyed in the process. After all, it's just equipment.
Now, if the few drabs of wave needed to make it go right happen to spark just right, and it wakes up and gains sapience, what then? You have a person with needs and requirements that have to be met. If every single motorslave in a theoretical production line wakes up when first being powered on, what then? They're living 'people' according to the law, is it right to sell them to owners as property? Is it compel them to order them to their certain death to save yourself?
Maybe I''m overthinking this, or just being a little bit silly.
The other question that bothers me. How do you give that motoroid a good quality of life, especially if you haven't even intended for it be sapient? Jet might not have given it the ability to speak, or even some way to make its needs known because Jet and Ford never expected it to have personal needs.
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A lot of the accidental awakenings of AIs were probably only accidents because whoever was 'waving the equipment didn't necessarily have it in mind that the equipment wouldn't gain one when they were slathering on the goop.
Handwavium, being much like 'Cluless' in Undocumented Features as an example, likely reacts a lot to the image one has in mind when they're 'waving hardware. Granted, forcing it is probably what gains a lot of quirks when one uses brute force. But, like Noah finding out that he couldn't create androids based on characters that didn't wear glasses, one can imagine that, if one starts 'waving hardware, and strongly intends to create hardware that's AI free entirely... that 99% of the time you will get hardware that's AI free... the remaining 1% accounts for the times you happen to let your mind wander from your work.
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Oh come on, you're saying 'waved computers always develop an AI unless you expend mental effort counter to that result? People just don't write about the non-sentient supercomputer wavejobs because they aren't as interesting. I'd say the odds are very high that J. Random Fan has an x86-128 PC with terabytes of RAM and a fhuge hard drive and no AI.
Re: Ki, I was mixing that worthy up with Yggdrasil, whose proliferation of AI crew is something startling. (I have no problem with giant space trees, but apparently two is too many for my little ape brain to keep track of...)
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Proginoskes Wrote:Oh come on, you're saying 'waved computers always develop an AI unless you expend mental effort counter to that result? People just don't write about the non-sentient supercomputer wavejobs because they aren't as interesting. I'd say the odds are very high that J. Random Fan has an x86-128 PC with terabytes of RAM and a fhuge hard drive and no AI. Again, this depends on the image you'd have in your head. I'm certain there' a lot of 'waved computers out there that don't have AI.
But, if you've got a real desire for an AI, even if you're not particularly aware of it, or you think "I just need something in the software that can assist me with certain projects", then the odds will go up that you spontaneously get one in the process. Especially if you start with a system that has many files pertaining to characters that it can latch onto.
And, well, Handwavium works different for different people. For instance, Galacticans are the most likely to never spontaneously create AI, and quite unlikely to be able to create one on purpose. On the flip side, many Cybers are likely to have a raft of accidental inceptions on their hands... everyone's mileage will vary on the results. A.C. has created a number of accidental AIs... Noah has, to my recollection, created one by accident, but many deliberately. Jeph Antilles hasn't created any by accident, but he's created two deliberately.
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Proginoskes Wrote:Oh come on, you're saying 'waved computers always develop an AI unless you expend mental effort counter to that result? Well, I did put into the FenWiki article about AI the phrase "many researchers believe AI to be an emergent property of handwaving a computer system", but that doesn't necessarily make it true...
JFerio Wrote:A.C. has created a number of accidental AIs... Noah has, to my recollection, created one by accident, but many deliberately. Jeph Antilles hasn't created any by accident, but he's created two deliberately. I'm not sure I'd call Eimi "accidental"... she's more "experimental" (for the definition that includes "what happens if I do this?").
Besides, that was early Fenspace, when everybody had a 'waved car (or boat) and a plucky AI girl sidekick. (Possibly as a reaction to Trigon, who is neither "plucky" nor "girl".) Things have changed since then.
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Most likely there are measurements you can take to make an emerging AI "unlikely", but not impossible.
Especially if you have an AI involved in the process that writes the software for the waved hardware as its being waved.
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A thought: 'waved computers, instead of always generating an actual AI, develop the abilities Hollywood asserts to the 'net, unless and until effort is made to guarantee otherwise. A Trek-type LCARS interface would generate a Majel Barrett-voiced expert system, for example, as that constitutes 'effort otherwise'...
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ECSNorway Wrote:A thought: 'waved computers, instead of always generating an actual AI, develop the abilities Hollywood asserts to the 'net, unless and until effort is made to guarantee otherwise. A Trek-type LCARS interface would generate a Majel Barrett-voiced expert system, for example, as that constitutes 'effort otherwise'... As shown by one of the class quirks for the Gagarin-class ...
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Jupiter Mining Corporation has an exampleof unintentional AIs in "Sparky", the AI on board Blue Midget Fifteen. Most of the ships in the JMC fleet are waved with particular mental images in mind of the ship, usually from shows that don't load AIs on their ships as a matter of course. The Fiver that waved the Fifteen's computer systems had just recently seen the episode of Babylon 5 that had the station's deactivated AI (voiced by Harlan Ellison) brought back online due to a system reboot, and the resulting 'waved computer was 'contaminated' in the process. Thankfully, they were able to work with what had happened.
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The basic idea I had in mind was, barring some effort to the contrary, the 'wave will default to the Popular-Consensus/Collective-Subconscious view of something. And for computers that generally is mostly portrayed by Hollywood.
Which can be useful when you can get image-enhancement software of CSI-level capabilities.
But it's still not admissible in court.
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robkelk Wrote:Would "the AI crew assigned to Ki" be better?
Also, I suspect Buckaroo is Circumstantial, not Deliberate. Blackstone seemed surprised to hear his voice that first time, after all.
(And Eimi is Spontaneous - Noah had no idea what would happen when he handwaved his old laptop back in December 2007.) Deliberate? No. Surprised? Maybe just a little. Hopeful? Absolutely.
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