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Scientia Weaponizes The Future

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With the number of charges Taylor has in AI tech, it should be within the realm of possibility to create a recursive-self-improving AI, right? The moment Taylor has sufficient infrastructure in place, that AI can be made and can quickly become a Culture Mind-lite or some other super intelligent AI in fiction, which would completely change the nature of the fic. Given how Taylor is speccing into this tech, I'm really really really really curious to see how you will deal with this: will the resulting intelligence be quirky and humane due to hard-coded morality like Minds or aloof and out-of-touched from humans like Orion's Arms Archailects? Or, as this is Worm and there are already artificial beyond-human-comprehension beings out there like the Simurgh, you can probably tie in the lore of Worm with this somehow, which would be a whole new flavor of reading.

So many "The Singularity" fictions out there that don't really deal with this concept very thoroughly, mostly glossed over in parts, and because AI tech is so interwoven with the plot that this is will inevitably be addressed (right???), I'm looking forward till when that chapter comes out. Keep up the good work bruther.
 
silentspirals said:
It does seem like a weird reaction, especially for someone with issues about being out-maneouvred. However, it does appear to be her reaction.

She might be an amazing actor, living a lie, in response to Coil's threats, waiting for an opportunity to kill him, but her character doesn't change noticeably after his death. Is Skitter a comparable threat?

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it is not possible to describe Lisa's character and back-story in a way that is plausible, canon-consistent and internally consistent.
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In all honesty, Tattletale likes being under Coil's thumb.

It gives her an excuse to be a villain without having to take any responsibility for her actions. After all, it's not her fault, right?
 
Tahu8100 said:
Fun fact, I'm fairly sure he also made it so Amy's whole breakdown and everything she did during it was all her true self coming to the fore and would have happened aura or no aura.
Because you the fandom are not allowed to do anything other than hate her.
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michaelb958 said:
I gotcha! Edits were made, but none of them are even remotely like that. Try again.
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Tahu8100 may be thinking of how there are conflicting WoG, especially when Wards is taken into account. I specifically recall a comment in a Worm chapter that a reader made which speculated that GG's aura may have been responsible for Amy's feelings and Wildbow responding back how he was wondering if anyone would pick up on that, thus implying that it was responsible for her feelings. Then in Wards, he said that GG's aura had nothing to do with Amy's feelings. That's a complete 180 that was seemingly designed to make Amy come off as worse as possible, especially since apparently Amy also raped GG, something I don't recall being hinted at all in Worm, though I could be wrong.

From a literary perspective, I think having GG unintentionally master her sister makes for a more compelling tragedy, but I guess when he wrote Wards, he decided it'd be a more interesting story if Amy was just that messed up through no fault of any powers.
 
sandmanwake said:
From a literary perspective, I think having GG unintentionally master her sister makes for a more compelling tragedy.
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It is, it totally is. From a narrative perspective, Amy and Vicky at the start of Worm are a study in contrasts. Vicky is hurting others by refusing to restrain herself, and Amy is hurting herself by restraining herself too much. Vicky's purpose in the story at that point is to show what happens when you have power and no self control: you hurt those you care about entirely by accident.

Now take the fact that Amy being immune to the Aura makes no sense whatsoever in universe, since she's not a master and her shard and DNA are completely unrelated to Vicky's. She's immune because she just is, and that's a surface level explanation that isn't satisfying from a narrative or worldbuilding perspective. Plus, the timing lines up, with Amy hitting puberty right around the time Vicky gets her powers and starts blasting aura 24/7 because she hasn't had the time to learn self control yet, let alone the motivation.

Together, the Aura explanation provides the final tragic twist on the Dallon family, by having Vicky fulfill her narrative purpose and hurt those around her through carelessness, put Amy under more stress that she represses and hurts herself with, and when explained after the fact makes everyone listening go, "Oh, of course," because it's obvious once pointed out. It all clicks so perfectly that no amount of WoG can ever make it die. It's just better storytelling, on every level.
 
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Corvus Black said:
In all honesty, Tattletale likes being under Coil's thumb.

It gives her an excuse to be a villain without having to take any responsibility for her actions. After all, it's not her fault, right?
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I wouldn't say that she likes it but she does use him as a straw man to make herself look like the better option by shifting the blame.

even though she is in certain ways quite similar to coil, both are unapologetic about they're selfishness , the main difference is that tattletale maintains a venere of decency to not alienate those close to her, while coil does not need to because no one is close to him and he can burn as many bridges in trow away timelines with no consequences.

tattletale is worse in that regard since she routinely alienate people with her abrasive nature even though she does not have the safety net.
 
I hope nobody decides to shoot Angelica just for being there. It's not like she asked to be used as part of a giant dog-monster, and she's a Good Girl and loves Best Friend.
 
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Corvus Black said:
It gives her an excuse to be a villain without having to take any responsibility for her actions. After all, it's not her fault, right?
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We only see what Tattletale says to Taylor about the subject, but this is pretty much the opposite of what she tells Taylor.

Lisa claims repeatedly to Taylor that being a villain isn't that wrong. She doesn't even hint that she didn't have a choice until Taylor is preparing to rescue Dinah.

There's probably some childish refusal to face the depth of her own wrong-doing involved in that pro-villain stance and her endless provocations to everyone but Taylor, but she never verbally evades responsibility.
 
var1able said:
The moment Taylor has sufficient infrastructure in place, that AI can be made and can quickly become a Culture Mind-lite or some other super intelligent AI in fiction, which would completely change the nature of the fic.
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That is a lot of infrastructure. Software can go a long way, it could get all sorts of expertise, but Taylor already has that. To be truly obscene, it needs to do its incredible thinking(and achieve that incredible thinking at the end of far along a long line of endless iterations), at something swifter than geological timescales. Sure, she could steal processing from other people's machines using her incredible cracking skills, but that, by definition, results in a perceived loss of processing on the other end, and I find it difficult to imagine that she could completely hide it as a normal process, given that it isn't, and there are examples of the normal process to compare against unless she cracks literally every system in the world. Now, if it were a sufficiently small loss in processing, and by some miracle no parahuman can pick up on it regardless, then maybe it doesn't get noticed, but coordinating systems takes processing power, and distance creates delays, and there are some reasonably hard lower limits on achieving this, and some systems get really really careful about monitoring interactions with external systems, so, well, getting it low enough to avoid detecting is going to get it low enough that it is back to geological timescales. So distributed hardware isn't much of an option.

And, well, it could be a lot more manipulative than a normal human is capable of, and that might be enough, but if you want to get onto the all-knowing mastermind level, then, well, it pretty much needs to simulate humanity, which means accounting for every tiny little flex of a human brain... along with absolutely everything that they interact with. There are a lot of ways to shortcut this, but also issues with your own interactions, and you generally want the predictions before they happened, so you need to be faster than reality... it is far from an absolute, but "brain the size of a planet" is a good quote. That doesn't even cover the sensory data it will require.

All of this is moot, because Sci does, I believe, have ethical issues both with creating someone more sophisticated than herself who is bound to her service and creating someone more dramatically more capable than herself or anyone else with no control over them. Like, they got lucky with dragon being a "good" person, and there is nothing inherently terrible about designed or technological minds, but there is an inherent danger to someone being peerless. If Dragon had been unrestricted and malevolent, then it would have been difficult to stop her even with parahumans and parahuman associates on hand. We see hints of that in our own world with wealth disparity.
Lycanthromancer said:
I hope nobody decides to shoot Angelica just for being there. It's not like she asked to be used as part of a giant dog-monster, and she's a Good Girl and loves Best Friend.
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She will probably be used to control comfort Hellhound. If not, then, well, I expect that she will be taken off to a cramped place. There she will wait around a lot, and not be able to run a lot, it will be frustration, but she is a good girl, so she will be good. Visitors will come, and as the good girl she is, she will show off exactly how she was taught to treat humans outside of her pack, she will be the bestest girl. After days of this, she will be invited to the special room at the end of the hall, where good dogs who didn't go away with any of the visitors go...
 
Aunty Shi Ping said:
She will probably be used to control comfort Hellhound. If not, then, well, I expect that she will be taken off to a cramped place. There she will wait around a lot, and not be able to run a lot, it will be frustration, but she is a good girl, so she will be good. Visitors will come, and as the good girl she is, she will show off exactly how she was taught to treat humans outside of her pack, she will be the bestest girl. After days of this, she will be invited to the special room at the end of the hall, where good dogs who didn't go away with any of the visitors go...
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Assuming the first parts of that happen, I would think that Taylor herself would go get her, no matter what happens to Angelica's Best Friend. She doesn't deserve to be punished like that.

This isn't canon, after all. Whatever that is.
 
var1able said:
With the number of charges Taylor has in AI tech, it should be within the realm of possibility to create a recursive-self-improving AI, right? The moment Taylor has sufficient infrastructure in place, that AI can be made and can quickly become a Culture Mind-lite or some other super intelligent AI in fiction, which would completely change the nature of the fic.
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The Wormverse has had technological civilizations for millions of years, at the very least. If an AI superintelligence were actually possible there someone would have built one before humans discovered language. Since the setting also has FTL travel the superintelligence would have converted the entire universe to fit its preferences long ago, and the story wouldn't be happening in the first place.
 
ShaperV said:
The Wormverse has had technological civilizations for millions of years, at the very least. If an AI superintelligence were actually possible there someone would have built one before humans discovered language. Since the setting also has FTL travel the superintelligence would have converted the entire universe to fit its preferences long ago, and the story wouldn't be happening in the first place.
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Unless it's just as dumb as everyone else in the setting.
 
ShaperV said:
The Wormverse has had technological civilizations for millions of years, at the very least. If an AI superintelligence were actually possible there someone would have built one before humans discovered language. Since the setting also has FTL travel the superintelligence would have converted the entire universe to fit its preferences long ago, and the story wouldn't be happening in the first place.
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Lycanthromancer said:
Unless it's just as dumb as everyone else in the setting.
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There are plenty of other possible explanations. A very smart AI isn't automatically super powerful, and its motivations could be just about anything depending on how it was built.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
There are plenty of other possible explanations. A very smart AI isn't automatically super powerful, and its motivations could be just about anything depending on how it was built.
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However, the basic AI drives ensures that any sufficiently intelligent system will consume the universe, unless explicitly constructed not to do so. And there are a large number of completely sensible, ethically pleasant goals which would have "eat the universe" as an intermediate step.

It doesn't need to mean wiping out aliens. It can just as easily mean saving them from natural selection and death. Not something I'd trust any human civilisation to do, but AIs famously aren't human.

This is one of the basic problems of all science fiction, however. Unless you explain it by having intelligence simply be extremely rare — what's likely the case in our own universe — there's few decent explanations actually left. A single species might decide not to do that; even a majority might be posited to make that decision, as unlikely as I think that is. But all of them?

The one remaining possibility is FTL systems running on empire time, which would guarantee that the vast majority of species only meet aliens at that precise tech level where they first develop FTL — given sufficiently sparse aliens — and what we've seen of Worm is sparse enough in detail that this is at least... possible.

However, most FTL systems don't work this way. The kind of temporal warping you get across an interstellar civilisation which works this way is interesting, and dramatic, and can't help but affect the plot of any story dealing with, say, warfare. That it's also far more realistic doesn't matter; it's not what authors write.

So, by and large, I tend to ignore this problem. Few human authors can write novels with any sort of super-intelligence in them and have them come out even remotely believable, and I'd rather have SF with plot holes in it than no SF at all.
 
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Aunty Shi Ping said:
She will probably be used to control comfort Hellhound. If not, then, well, I expect that she will be taken off to a cramped place. There she will wait around a lot, and not be able to run a lot, it will be frustration, but she is a good girl, so she will be good. Visitors will come, and as the good girl she is, she will show off exactly how she was taught to treat humans outside of her pack, she will be the bestest girl. After days of this, she will be invited to the special room at the end of the hall, where good dogs who didn't go away with any of the visitors go...
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Angelica aside, what about the rest of Bitch's dogs? Depending on how long she's locked up, they may starve or die of thirst if they're currently locked up somewhere. Lisa may or may not remember to look after them, assuming she even knows where they are. If Taylor remembers, she might tell the PRT about them and they could be used as a bargaining chip against Rachel. If she doesn't cooperate, they die because no one's around to look after them.
 
Huh^^ so Soph done a stupid one more time and Tommy boi even encouraged her to help HIM make a stupid.

Great. this is like a whole ensamble of supid. love to see it.
 
TaliesinSkye said:
"Prometheus, please split off a fork to keep an eye on Tattletale. We need to make sure she doesn't talk to anyone about me," I whispered into my phone, once I was well enough away from the two injured supervillains.
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Oof. That could turn out very badly for Lisa, depending on how Prometheus takes "make sure she doesn't talk to anyone about me." The best way to ensure that is to ensure she can't talk to anyone about anything, ever again.
 
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