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The Voyage Without

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To quote Freefall, "To be safe, robots need common sense. Turns out conciousness is a necessary component for that."
 
Moochy said:
thing is, it's going to be tasked with running the drones that are repairing and maintaining the ship, the scope doesn't really get much bigger than that. at the very least he's going to come up against being proactive and useful versus reactive and in the way.
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Sure it does. For a relevant instance, "your job is to get the ship home with maximum number of crewmen saved" is much bigger. Maintain the ship can be implemented with a very short planning horizon.

Reactive isn't bad, reactive is entirely working as intended. For the most part Zephyr's whole department is reactive in nature anyway, and the parts that aren't are not the parts they need automation for. He isn't trying to get an AI that is more effective than a crewman, here.
 
ptbptb said:
If it looks like a person, it talks like a person, and you don't know what the fuck it's doing in there, then treat it like a person.
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He knows perfectly well what it's doing in there. He just can't work out the specifics of the how it's doing what it's doing successfully due to its black boxed nature.
 
JmonsterNEO said:
Like a crazy combination of a Space Marine Dreadnought, a sentient Servitor, and a Machine Spirit?
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Pretty much just the first one, except instead of a small bipedal tank they're an interstellar transport (or other things but the characters are mostly ship brains).

Incidentally this is some fairly old SF.

Although also typically they didn't live a conventional human life first.
 
Aineko said:
Reactive isn't bad, reactive is entirely working as intended. For the most part Zephyr's whole department is reactive in nature anyway,
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i disagree here, he's in need of drones to help maintain as much as to jump in and carry plasma spanners or whatever the technobabble doohickey is, plus the test was "what happens when you screw up?"

maintenance is very proactive, though a reactive force is going to help, just unless they're useful and familiar to the crew the rest of the time, if all they do is come from the woodwork out when things are on fire they're not going to be trusted, so not going to be useful.
 
ptbptb said:
If he knew perfectly well what it was doing in there then it, by definition, wouldn't count as black boxed.
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There IS a difference between 'I don't know how this works because it's too complicated or there's some other element involved' versus 'I don't know how this works because the technology is set up to self-sabotage when I try to reverse engineer it'.

But yeah, technically speaking you are correct: from an IT perspective, it wouldn't be black boxed if he could do more than look at I/O.
 
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Hiver said:
Let's try adding a full personality matrix on top of it instead and see what happens. Waste of processing power, but might as well give it a try.
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I wonder why Zephyr is, well blind to what he is creating and the implications.

Was there something in the past that made him oblivious that life always finds a way and that the current computers have the potential of sentiency and sapiency?
 
It's funny, I'm seeing most of the comments looking at this from the perspective of artificial...not sentience I suppose but sapient...ness? Not sure how that word transitions properly.
Anyway, the direction I'm worried is if he will go down the easy path and the system will start running a constant 'social value index' of all the crew, and how active it would be in that calculation. :p
 
Baran3 said:
I wonder why Zephyr is, well blind to what he is creating and the implications.

Was there something in the past that made him oblivious that life always finds a way and that the current computers have the potential of sentiency and sapiency?
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I joked earlier, but that's just not true in setting. Sapience in the holodeck is weird and unprecedented, and personality matrixes aren't people. (Until dumbass texhnobabble starts showing up. Looking at you "neural energy")

Most ships in the fleet use holograms, holosuites are everywhere, If sapience popped up in any significant way then there'd be chsnges.

We just know it's gonna happen here cuz plot:
 
Moochy said:
i disagree here, he's in need of drones to help maintain as much as to jump in and carry plasma spanners or whatever the technobabble doohickey is, plus the test was "what happens when you screw up?"

maintenance is very proactive, though a reactive force is going to help, just unless they're useful and familiar to the crew the rest of the time, if all they do is come from the woodwork out when things are on fire they're not going to be trusted, so not going to be useful.
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What do you mean by 'proactive' here? Every single time Zephyr is doing maintenance on something or ordering something maintained it is in reaction to signs of a problem.

One might suppose there's routine scheduled maintenance in addition which is proactive in a sense, but requires even less initiative than reacting to problems because you just need to follow the schedule.
 
I still think the breakthrough here is going to be "the holomatrix code that managed to solve this is blackboxed and too complicated for me to comprehend, but I have a super-calculator wired into my brain so I'm gonna have it do the analysis on what trick Zimmerman managed to pull". And then possibly getting an answer he doesn't like. >:3
 
Hiver said:
The air before me shimmered into a geometric diamond shape.
.

Let's try adding a full personality matrix on top of it instead and see what happens. Waste of processing power, but might as well give it a try.
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The callback towards the sims is great (geometric diamond shape) the ai program is going to be controlling the drones like the sims does let's hope that doesn't lead to pool ladder removal shenanigans
 
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    • "Bridge to engineering."

    I flicked my eyes to accept in my visor, "Zephyr here. All ready down here, Captain."

    "Good job, Janeway out."

    "Alright people, the bridge crew is going to try to break our ship again," I said loudly, "Let's make sure they don't succeed."

    Everyone let out a whoop and then got back to their tasks, focused on their consoles and instruments.

    I watched in my visor as the sensor readings slowly cleared up. We were leaving the nebula.

    Contact! A Kazon ship... two light hours away.

    That's close.

    But not close enough, suckers.

    The sound changed slightly as Voyager jumped to maximum warp. The hum of the engines got louder and a bit more frantic as the power levels spiked hard, but they kept humming along as The Convict pinned the proverbial gas pedal to the floor.

    Voyager was fast.

    Very, very fast, one of the fastest ships in the fleet even. If we could hold this speed, we'd be back home in a couple of decades.

    Problem was that keeping it for even twelve hours would cause us to need a complete refit at a shipyard.

    Right now, we just needed to get out of the Kazon's general area.

    The result would be a lot of maintenance and my bodyweight in spare parts, but with some luck, nothing should blow from it.

    "Stress is above acceptable limits," A voice said in my ear.

    "Yes it is, but sometimes it's necessary," I said, "Watch the logs, alert if something is about to break."

    "Understood."

    My best attempt at making a managing controller so far. Still didn't bother making a humanoid form or something that dumb and I did give it the same voice as the ship's computer, but it had a lot more personality than was strictly necessary. I'm just not good enough to make it work from scratch."

    Turns out, making an actually useful real world AI was difficult.

    Who knew?

    So I had cheated, like Zimmerman. But I was fairly sure I would have killed it if I gave it my personality, so instead I taught it the basics and then had it 'learn on the job' so to speak.

    I even named it. Voyager.

    Because if I didn't name it, one of the monkeys would. At least this way I could pick something not dumb.

    It was not useful yet. But if it remained stable and passed all the tests, I would allow it to try directing one of the drones in a month or so. So far, it was watching the logs and absorbing data of my interactions with the crew. But so far it looked stable.

    "Bridge to Engineering."

    "Zephyr here, Captain."

    "How are we looking?"

    I glanced at the readings. A secondary display from Voyager showed a simple thumbs up emoji.

    "We're good for now," I told her, "But the longer we keep it, the worse it will get and it will be exponential. I can't recommend more than thirty minutes or we'll start burning through spare parts."

    "Twenty minutes more and then we can drop back to cruising speed," Janeway said, "That should bring us far enough for them to be unable to catch us with any incoming vessels."

    "We can do twenty minutes," I agreed, "Zephyr out."

    It didn't just strain the engines. The energy conduits, the dilithium crystals, even the matter/antimatter flow regulators.

    It was even a high drain on our antimatter supply.

    ...Hell, thinking about it, even if we had an indestructible ship that could keep this speed, we'd run out of antimatter in a month at this speed instead of lasting years. Antimatter has awesome energy amounts for its size and Voyager has big tanks.

    There were ways for us to get more antimatter, even without refueling.

    But it was all a slow and slightly risky process involving low orbits around stars for months at a time to catch free antimatter with massive magnetic fields. The efficiency would be horrible, but it worked, it was a true and tested method of doing it.

    Hell, that's similar to how many Federation antimatter refineries worked, but they also used enormous solar collectors for energy to matter conversion in addition to boost the yield.

    I didn't even want to think about building anything like that on Voyager. Tested method or not, it involved building a lot of stuff and then hanging around in close orbit to a star for months.

    But if they keep using photon torpedoes like candy, I might have to!

    Growling softly to myself, I flexed my claws and turned to look at the closest monitor.

    Warp core internal temperature and pressure within limits, but was pressing against the redline.

    "Warning," Voyager said in my ear, "Port plasma conduit A-1782-Zeta is experiencing a containment anomaly."

    A second later, an alarm from a console beeped and Carey looked at it, "Jacksson, Tibi, Plasma conduit A-1782-Zeta almost breached, backup took over. Get up there, get it repaired."

    A pair of crewmen ran from engineering.

    "Well done, Voyager," I said quietly, "keep watching. Look at how they repair it."

    Another thumbs up appeared in the window in my visor.

    I glanced at the timer. Twelve more minutes.
     
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    • Nice to see something come of your AI efforts.

    Is it odd that I'm thinking that it'll imprint on Zephyr? Because I'm thinking of a cute Yu-Gi-Oh cybernetic baby dragon popping up in the corner of his vizor is cute as hell.


     
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    frozenchicken said:
    Actually, chronologically I think it was Discovery? They had that data package turn sapient and become the ship's computer.
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    Given how much time travel exists in Star Trek for everything written after Voyager I find any attempts to list things chronologically...dubious.
    In those shows, Time spends most of its existence crying in the corner.
     
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