The Nightstar Zoo

Here's a thougth on the computer massmind.

I'd always assumed Petey looks like a mutant koala because that's what his creators looked like (There was a comic that bore this out somewhere) and he was made in their image. However Athena appears to be a human vessel since we don't see any aliens on board, and she looks like a human only in the vaugest sense.

And the other ships look like a real motley crew of weirdness. While we all know why that really is, in the story sense that's rather odd. Do ships just look like whatever they want? Or is it just human ships? Or is Breya's fleet made up of many alien races?

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Machine Gun fire: It has a beat, and you can make people dance to it.

I've always thought that the constructs AI's choose to represent themselves are simply the logical extension of the concept of Clippy, that 'helpful' office software agent.

A race with extreme paranoiac xenophobia -- like the O'benn, who were apparently driven to intersteller conquest by there deepseated racial bigotry -- would have a relatively unimaginative construct. Hence the Koala.

A race like Humanity, however, who instead of being confronted with the spectre of other sentient races and the need for conquest and domination right off the bat like the O'benn were, develop a certain romantic notion of helpers from outside of their race.

A blue elf named athena who runs the ship would dovetail nicely with humanity's relatively pacific development, wouldn't you say?

-Horatio

Well, the O'benn looked like koalas anyway. So they probably just used themselves.

Yeah, thats my point: if they'd used anything other than a spitting image of themselves, their ingrained xenophobic impulses would drive them mad everytime they had to interact with it.

You could see a race taking the opposite tack under similar circumstances, though: Imagine if they considered their own race to be sacred, and wouldn't defile it by having it preform menial labor (like managing starship systems) even if it was in symbolic, AI construct form and instead "enslaved" some suitable non-racial image.

Of course, a talking interface with a computer is a "bad thing", at least as far as humans are concerned: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... 2May8.html.

-Horatio

Yes, but with a super-intelligent computer like Petey or Athens, it would be more natural for the crew to interact with it like anyone else, as opposed to typing, wouldn't it? Since they're capable of understanding and participating in normal conversation, it would be just like telling Kevyn or Der Trihs something. Well, a Kevyn that can do a half-zillion operations a second, but still...

The point flew straight over your head. They're not talking about whether AIs should have humanoid avatars - they're just speculating as the motive behind the choice of a specific avatar.

- Sir Bob.

Nope. Look now. I was talking about a completely different point.

If you ask me, the thing thats missing from the schlockiverse is a suitably advanced mind/machine interface. Maybe Howard avoided the subject because nano-neurological implants would have gotten his strip branded as cyberpunk, but I think high-bandwith connections are important.

Petey's argument against explaining the situation to Tagon ("every three seconds a hundred thousand people die") is compelling, but it would be at least partly solved if Petey could just display the situation to Tagon's consciousness.

True, if you want to think of the ship as 'just another crewmember,' the floating hologram is an excellent paradigm. After all, Petey could be appearing lots of places other than the captains quarters. But the total amount of information Petey (or any user-friendly AI construct) can present is limited on a user by user basis. Which would be better: Tagon asking Petey for a status report (and probably recieving a snide remark for his troubles) or Tagon looking at a carefully designed status display?

Of course, just because a technology isn't featured prominently in a strip doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. We can trot out the same arguments against defecation and sleeping: maybe looking at viewscreens doesn't make for good entertainment. But when the plot (and whether or not to give a certain AI with a demonstrable psychiatric condition full control of the ship) revolves around the fundamental limitations of computer-to-human data transfer, we have a legitimate point to wonder about.

-Horatio

She's a Smurf?

So you're talking to yourself, now? You should have that checked out.

No good can come of this.

Kritter out

Um... I like... stuff

The voices say I'm perfectly fine. They also say my dorm room would look good wallpapered in your epidermis, but they have no interior design skins. Er, skills.

Multiple interfaces for multiple purposes is a Good Thing[tm], which is why I don't agree with the article talking about the problems of speech as a computer interface. (It's point is valid, but it doesn't rule out situations where the trade-off is favorable for a voice interface. You wouldn't want to control your Windows desktop in that way, but that's just one type of computer interaction.)

But Petey's argument wasn't that it would take too long to express what he was doing; it was that Tagon thinks too slowly. Put gigabit ethernet on a 286, and it's still a 286. It's a question of how fast the data can be received <i>and processed</i>.

Was Petey exaggerating the speed problem? I think so. Maybe because he's trying to get more control in general. (Notice a pattern among the jobs he thinks he should take over from the crew? Advising Tagon (probably the real reason he pushed to oust Breya) and facilitating/controling communication with the command staff...) Maybe because of his native racism...

What I'm saying is, if the rescue op takes 3 days, they could've spared a day to preserve a semblance of chain of command and at least provide an executive summary of the plan to the captains, and still had what looks to me like a huge margin for error.

I don't have an epidermis.

But it's showing! Look!

I think Doythaban qualifies as an advanced mind/machine interface. People in the Schlockverse just don't appear to like such things, or perhaps they are prohibitively expensive. At any rate, they exist but are not very common.

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Machine Gun fire: It has a beat, and you can make people dance to it.

That's, ah, merely a holoprojection of an epidermis. Yes, that will do.

Darn it! Another thread I'm too dumb to post on...

Oh, wait-- Doc, you like stuff? I like stuff too!

Good morning, how are you? I'm Dr. Worm.
I'm interested in things...

--TMBG

"I'm not a real doctor, but I am a real worm, I am an actual worm."

TMBG rocks. indeed.

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Indeed.

I always thought he was a simple-minded Okie
Little did I know he was the king of karaoke
He was everything that a man should be
Problem was that it wasn't with me

Pour me, pour me
Pour me, pour me another shot of whiskey
Bartender hit me one more time
He left, I cried
I'm lost inside, won't ya help me
Fill it to the top 'cause I hit rock bottom this time

* * *

I went to lyrics.com to get some more TMBG lyrics, but they didn't have any listed for them. Instead, a little selection from Trick Pony.

Oh well. Better luck next time.