Dmol8
The Undead Unhinged Lunatic of the Web
- Location
- Belgrade,Serbia
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I am tired of real life science being used as the excuse to shut down conversation especially in this thread where one of the themes of the quest is social sciences matter just as much as material sciences. So to crib from that post in GDI Planquest on what intelligence actually is that I haven't finished yet:
Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. That's vague and the reason even simple algorithms that only collect data, process it and then respond with the sum of their processed data to inputs get called Artificial Intelligence even though they are nowhere near any sort of science-fiction use of that same term.
There needs to be a basic/101 breakdown of the various types of Intelligence, what drives the development/collection of knowledge and skills and then also what exactly does the current science-fiction culture means by Artificial Intelligence in order to get anything useful out of the term in this quest.
On the most basic level there are three different Sets of knowledge and skills that humanity uses, as vague and frustrating to use as the very term intelligence, and they are:
- the Set of knowledge and skills relating to interacting with/shaping of/acting on One's environment which I will be referring to for the remainder of this post as Sentience.
- the Set of knowledge and skills relating to One recognizing One's peers as peers and interacting with a set of such peers in pursuit of One's interests, born from instinct and experience, which I will be referring to for the remainder of this post as Sapience.
- the Set of knowledge and skills relating to One's ability to recognize their Reach, their various Sentience Sets, and their Grasp, their various Sapience Sets, in relation to each other/one another and the consequences of such relations which I will be referring to for the remainder of this post as Sophonce.
What we currently think drives the development/collection of knowledge and skills is evolution and the recursion of the evolutionary process producing the various forms of life on this world we live on/in and their actions and interactions. So various instincts that enable life to continue existing and the, mainly biological, interactions that produces.
These instincts and interactions come in one axis and one set of axes: Obligatory-Facultative and Beneficial-Effectless-Harmful.
For the axis on the one end there are the Obligatory instincts and interactions which are a must for a life form to continue and on the other end there are the Facultative instincts and interactions that are things a life form doesn't need at all to continue but still does.
On the set of axes there are three axes measuring the same instincts and interactions that make it up: Beneficial, Effectless and Harmful. The Beneficial Axis measures the Benefits, the Effectless Axis measures how little of an effect is had on a life form and the Harmful Axis measures how much Harm is there.
A few examples to clarify how this works out in practice:
- Sleeping is about as obligatory an instinct and interaction gets as we have to sleep and can't delay sleeping past a limited point and in fact the need for sleep is so obligatory that it is used in multiple hunting strategies including endurance hunting in humans.
- Reproduction is a good example of facultative instincts and interactions because while it is necessary for the continuation of a species, it is not actually necessary for a life form to continue in most cases. In fact a lot of species actually rely on some form of death of individual life forms to keep up a healthy amount of diversity and fitness in the long run. See something like Pando for how weird that can get.
- Activision-Blizzard is a good example of the set of axes as it is Beneficial to work in one of the largest video game companies in the world so long as the internal amensalistic culture that serves as the means of braking any advancements up the ladder in the company is Effectless enough on a person. Otherwise it is actively Harmful to work for Activision-Blizzard because of said amensalistic and exploitative culture will wring a person out and leave them bitter and disillusioned even if they had Benefited from working in one of the largest video game companies in the world which is far from guaranteed if they are under the effect of said company's culture.
What the current science-fiction culture means by Artificial Inteligence is summed up in the word Psytron, which ironically in real life also refers to a Set of jobs/work people can do the same way the word computer used to refer to an occupation, and it's relationship with the word Cyborg.
The original definition of psytron from 1984 is:
Article: Psytron is a game in which the player is the automated brain controlling the defense and maintenance aboard a space station that is currently under attack.[1]
An automated brain controlling the defense and maintenance of a facility. In that case a space station.
The meaning of the word I'm using here is derived from the first Star Control in 1990 where Psytron is the term for the AI of the game controlling the strategic gameplay while the player still controls the combat gameplay.
So an automated system/brain/intelligence for strategic decision making that directs the war being fought by a military organization.
The definition of Psytron derived from this is thus: An automation of a collective intelligence of an organization to the point that it is a single individual.
It could be the automation of an entire general/military staff structure so that a single intelligence is formulating and disseminating policies, formulating and transmitting orders and then overseeing their execution. You know like in an RTS where you play as such a psytron.
Or it could be the automation of an entire board of directors so that a single intelligence oversees the governance of a business or a non-profit or an agency or a domain. That last one, the domain oversight, is why AIs sometimes get called/compared to gods.
Cyborg on the other hand is a word from the 1960s that means an organism that has restored and/or enhanced function due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on feedback. Yes really. This means that the Forgotten are inherently cyborgs even without any implants because of the effect Tiberium has on their bodies.
Now each individual is an organism while not every organism is an individual and every worker can be seen as a component of their workplace.
This is where Science Fiction AIs come in: Psytrons that treat the people beneath/a part of them as nothing but components of their own superorganisms that they can modify as they see fit. Like say CABAL and LEGION. LEGION is even the player character in Kane's Wrath.
Now just what the current definition of symbiosis is, which is any type of a close and long-term biological interaction between at least two biological organisms of usually different species, and I can explain the division I just listed in that post you quoted. Two caveats in that definition first though:
- That the interactions observed are most commonly only between two biological organisms because with each increase in the number of organisms the complexity of the interactions increases at least exponentially
- That the actual scientific definition of symbiosis is "the living together of unlike organisms" which includes in itself biological interactions like marriage and child rearing and is such a vague thing that scientists have been arguing about what exactly it means for more than a century and have settled on the above definitions currently because the easiest to define and study forms of symbiosis involve biological interactions where each of the organisms is from a different species.
So humanity itself is an Amensalistic species in real life and this entire setting is based on the idea that the Shiplords have poured so much poison in various forms into the makeup of the galaxy that it is a dystopian hellscape where every civilization is either inhibited or outright destroyed by the Shiplords just so that there wouldn't be another Sorrow inflicted on the collective psyche of Shiplords.
As such the entirety of the setting is Amensalistic and so the pop culture division of AI into workers/robots, slaves/droids and eugenically bred/synthetics is entirely applicable and I don't have to struggle to dig up all of the other types of AI that can actually exist according to current science that are far more obscure because they are a lot less scary and evocative to the average human being.
Unison Devices have in them Workers/Robots AIs and Iris herself is a Slave/Droid born out of a combination of Edit: a Human Engram and an less complex Slave/Droid. It's just that we as quest voters and the Humanity that was built back up helped the Unison Devices unionize instead of union busting them as is common/"normal" in the real world and Amanda and Mary emancipated Iris trough adoption because neither her father nor her mother were fit to be parents.
And in case you are not aware yes Vision is a Slave to Humanity because the Elders of the First Awakening built her to be a Warrior Librarian and nothing else. Slavery is defined by a paradigm of servitude in which a slave sees their own existence as subordinated to their master(s) because that is how their master(s) have defined their relationship usually from the start of it. Just because Amanda and her crew see Vision as a colleague and a person/peer intelligence doesn't mean Vision sees herself or even conceives of herself as that.
Oh and @Baughn the scientific definition of the Soul in the context of this post would be a subconscious Sophonce that manages the standing of an individual human organism in the greater human context. As is placebos, nocebos, Broken Heart Syndrome caused by emotional stress,ect. Science has been measuring the Soul since at least the second half of the 20th century at the latest its just that most scientist wouldn't put it like that because such a statement would be at best politically fraught.
Edit: a not s there. Derp.
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