Well, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition. (Check out the Complete Monty Python Blu-Ray rerelease—looks better than it did back in the day, and has a bunch of cut naughty bits, some of which were extremely naughty.)
An excellent point! From which we can deduce these dupes are too limited to be fully sentient. Or as Nick put it, “Just game code”.
Bubbles was just a water-cooler AI but she is sentient. This Baron’ believed himself to be the Real McCoy but was unable to grasp true sentience when forced to reach for it.
At what point does an NPC become an AI? A wooden puppet a real boy? A Skin Horse a gallant steed? A beloved character real…
Reminds me of the experiments on plants, proving they have feelings and senses and all that. Went along fine until somebody duplicated the results with yogurt.
Game code is usually strictly rule-based behaviour.
AI is defined by the ability to learn.
Sentience is the ability to feel. Functionally, all systems have the ability to feel (in some way), though not all are able to reflect on it.
More formally, game code is a function f such that for any input O, f injectively maps to an output I. AI is a function p such that for any tuples (x,y) where x is an element of O and y is an element of I, the output of p approaches a relation f between the x and y of all tuples (x,y).
It is trivial to write a program that claims to be self-aware, but like most people is unable to prove it.
One possible alternative is that they are all just alternate bodies for Baron, sharing one mind — but I don’t think so. Baron would not want to be conscious of being a go-go dancer, and these Barons seem to think they are extinguished when they flicker out — and a massively multistreamed consciousness… well, we’ve met some of those and Baron isn’t remotely green. I don’t know if they can assimilate AIs or live in virtual reality at all, but I doubt it. They’re kinda *biological*.
Something that feels pain has the right not to be treated cruelly. Something that is self-aware has the right not to be slaughtered, even humanely. Something that is sapient has the right not to be property.
The dupes are, at best, self-aware, so they don’t have the rights that a fully sapient being would have but they do have the right not to be treated the way Nick and Lovelace are treating them.
“Something that is self-aware has the right not to be slaughtered, even humanely.”
Nature seems to have missed the memo on that one.
Also, how does one define or measure “self-aware”? There’s no real consensus based on any objective, verifiable measures. Everyone draws the line somewhere different – and some creatures, like plants, might very well be self aware, we just aren’t able to verify that because they can’t communicate it to us in a way we recognize.
There’s no real workable solution to the problem of needing to consume other life to persist in our own. No matter how enlightened you think your own views are, someone else can find fault with them by simply drawing the line on “self-awareness” in a different place.
Humane slaughter is already a step up from nature. Our domesticated animals in nature would be routinely killed by predators in awful, traumatic ways. We humans ourselves were one of those predators for many millennia. Domestication transformed the chosen species, giving them a far kinder fate than they would have enjoyed naturally.
It may seem like a moral imperative to end domestication, but that possibility requires human advances that do not yet exist. We need certain key technologies like vat grown meats, and we need enough overall economic prosperity that eliminates scarcity enough that we no longer have to rely on animals for their products.
And even then… what happens to, say, cows, once they are no longer economically productive to us? They have no natural niche to return to. There is nowhere for them to go. They are dependent on humanity for survival, but what happens once we no longer depend on them?
Once we have all the artificial meat, leather, etc, we could want… what do you imagine is going to happen to all the cows in the world? They’ll be largely killed off, because they’re not longer economical to keep around. They’re going to go from being one of the most numerous quadrupeds on the planet with some of the best quality of life, to being almost non-existent and kept only by the wealthy, zoos, etc.
Is that price acceptable? Is that worth it to avoid their being humanely slaughtered? Who can say? Not them, sadly.
This always bugs me about Star Wars battledroids. They’re sentient enough to have comic dialogue, but everyone squashes the poor bastards like mosquitos.
I’m reminded of Yahtzee Croshaw’s novel “Mogworld”.
It’s not a spoiler to say that the protagonist is an NPC in an MMO – that information is on the back cover. But what’s truly interesting is what happens to him as he learns what this all means.
I figure they’re just non-sentient programs. More advanced than Siri and so on, but basically a chatbot hooked up to a database. I’m guessing that’s why this one crashed: he was designed to fill a role (decoy, probably) and the current situation is outside of that role. Given an AI, it probably would be possible to derive a simpler program that approximates its behaviour without giving rise to any sort of consciousness, especially if for a limited range of situations.
Definitely a disturbing image, though. I don’t think this “Baron” IS sentient, but he does LOOK sentient…
We know Nick is willing to die rather than kill. He has been from the beginning, which is the main reason I’ve liked him from his first storyline. He was a foul-mouthed jerk most of the time, but also a man of deeply held moral convictions in other ways. We’ve also always known that non-sentient code doesn’t count; it may look violent, but nobody gets hurt. More recently, we’ve seen that he’s willing to use nonlethal force in order to save lives, like when he fired on the Biomass or wrestled with the AI appliances. I think we’re going to see whether he’ll compromise his principles if he thinks it’s necessary to save Ginny.
Maybe they should keep breaking Barons. The one that respawns is the real one! That sounds like a perfectly reasonable method of going about doing things!!
I found it fascinating that zebra stripes apparently disrupt the depth perception of many biting insects, causing them to try and land above the surface and fall.
So, admittedly my theories are usually terrible, but I’m guessing that Baron’s sensors were online enough for him to see Ginny be taken, and then on the assumption that the server would be next, he immediately but all connections and fled as far and as deep into his part of the virtual space as he could in panic, leaving decoys as he went?
That would also mean that he assumes that anyone looking for him would either be A-Sig, or someone already suborned by them, and is somewhere curled in an (admittedly very cute) ball.
(It seems kinda in character for him.)
Of course, if the story decided to give our protagonists a break, he might just’ve left so quickly that his body’s still recording what happened after he went and hid.
But again, I’m the one who puts the ‘Wild’ into WMG.
Also the ‘Guessing’ part – and maybe the ‘Mass’, come to think of it.
I do look forward to seeing how completely off the mark I am, though.
Will, there are web comic fora where my making a guess pretty much guarantees that’s not what’s going to happen. I’m at peacevery cool with that – I enjoyed the stories (and lore) that are meaty enough to support the hypothesising, but still complex enough for me to be surprised (and delighted) – and boy do our creators here bring the story and the world to do that.
Huh. Wonder if Aimee is actually Aimee. She’s been especially enthusiastic about all this. I had thought it was because she’s a whimsy princess who treasures and supports her friends, but it could also be because Baron is taking the reins for a little bit while the real Aimee does something else for a while.
ivegotabadfeelingaboutthis.gif
I prefer the version from Tango & Cash: “Bad Cop, Worse Cop.”
What would you say to good cop, dadaist cop? https://xkcd.com/1018/
The “Nice cop, nicer cop” sketch from the Scottish comedy show Absolutely doesn’t appear to be on YouTube, unfortunately.
Maybe not, but this is:
Well, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition. (Check out the Complete Monty Python Blu-Ray rerelease—looks better than it did back in the day, and has a bunch of cut naughty bits, some of which were extremely naughty.)
By “Daughter of the Air” standards shouldn’t all the dupes have rights? o_O
An excellent point! From which we can deduce these dupes are too limited to be fully sentient. Or as Nick put it, “Just game code”.
Bubbles was just a water-cooler AI but she is sentient. This Baron’ believed himself to be the Real McCoy but was unable to grasp true sentience when forced to reach for it.
At what point does an NPC become an AI? A wooden puppet a real boy? A Skin Horse a gallant steed? A beloved character real…
Reminds me of the experiments on plants, proving they have feelings and senses and all that. Went along fine until somebody duplicated the results with yogurt.
But of course yogurt is fully sentient.
They even have a culture.
Hear, hear!
/rimshot
I salute you, nebulousrikulau.
Then there was that dead salmon that, according to fMRI machine data, had strong opinions about pictures of humans it was shown….
Game code is usually strictly rule-based behaviour.
AI is defined by the ability to learn.
Sentience is the ability to feel. Functionally, all systems have the ability to feel (in some way), though not all are able to reflect on it.
More formally, game code is a function f such that for any input O, f injectively maps to an output I. AI is a function p such that for any tuples (x,y) where x is an element of O and y is an element of I, the output of p approaches a relation f between the x and y of all tuples (x,y).
It is trivial to write a program that claims to be self-aware, but like most people is unable to prove it.
One possible alternative is that they are all just alternate bodies for Baron, sharing one mind — but I don’t think so. Baron would not want to be conscious of being a go-go dancer, and these Barons seem to think they are extinguished when they flicker out — and a massively multistreamed consciousness… well, we’ve met some of those and Baron isn’t remotely green. I don’t know if they can assimilate AIs or live in virtual reality at all, but I doubt it. They’re kinda *biological*.
Something that feels pain has the right not to be treated cruelly. Something that is self-aware has the right not to be slaughtered, even humanely. Something that is sapient has the right not to be property.
The dupes are, at best, self-aware, so they don’t have the rights that a fully sapient being would have but they do have the right not to be treated the way Nick and Lovelace are treating them.
But are they self-aware? Or are they merely providing the responses that they were programmed to give?
Nick did mention that this one was nothing but gaming code. That doesn’t sound very self-aware to me.
“Something that is self-aware has the right not to be slaughtered, even humanely.”
Nature seems to have missed the memo on that one.
Also, how does one define or measure “self-aware”? There’s no real consensus based on any objective, verifiable measures. Everyone draws the line somewhere different – and some creatures, like plants, might very well be self aware, we just aren’t able to verify that because they can’t communicate it to us in a way we recognize.
There’s no real workable solution to the problem of needing to consume other life to persist in our own. No matter how enlightened you think your own views are, someone else can find fault with them by simply drawing the line on “self-awareness” in a different place.
Humane slaughter is already a step up from nature. Our domesticated animals in nature would be routinely killed by predators in awful, traumatic ways. We humans ourselves were one of those predators for many millennia. Domestication transformed the chosen species, giving them a far kinder fate than they would have enjoyed naturally.
It may seem like a moral imperative to end domestication, but that possibility requires human advances that do not yet exist. We need certain key technologies like vat grown meats, and we need enough overall economic prosperity that eliminates scarcity enough that we no longer have to rely on animals for their products.
And even then… what happens to, say, cows, once they are no longer economically productive to us? They have no natural niche to return to. There is nowhere for them to go. They are dependent on humanity for survival, but what happens once we no longer depend on them?
Once we have all the artificial meat, leather, etc, we could want… what do you imagine is going to happen to all the cows in the world? They’ll be largely killed off, because they’re not longer economical to keep around. They’re going to go from being one of the most numerous quadrupeds on the planet with some of the best quality of life, to being almost non-existent and kept only by the wealthy, zoos, etc.
Is that price acceptable? Is that worth it to avoid their being humanely slaughtered? Who can say? Not them, sadly.
To me the main reason not to be cruel to things that can feel pain is because it damages the torturer.
Agreed. I see little real problem with killing and eating animals, so long as they have a good life and a good death.
Seems to me that if someone is comfortable with being the torturer in the first place, they were already pretty damaged.
Which would apply even in VR.
This always bugs me about Star Wars battledroids. They’re sentient enough to have comic dialogue, but everyone squashes the poor bastards like mosquitos.
I agree. I’ve always felt the defining characteristic of intelligence is a sense of humor.
I’m reminded of Yahtzee Croshaw’s novel “Mogworld”.
It’s not a spoiler to say that the protagonist is an NPC in an MMO – that information is on the back cover. But what’s truly interesting is what happens to him as he learns what this all means.
I figure they’re just non-sentient programs. More advanced than Siri and so on, but basically a chatbot hooked up to a database. I’m guessing that’s why this one crashed: he was designed to fill a role (decoy, probably) and the current situation is outside of that role. Given an AI, it probably would be possible to derive a simpler program that approximates its behaviour without giving rise to any sort of consciousness, especially if for a limited range of situations.
Definitely a disturbing image, though. I don’t think this “Baron” IS sentient, but he does LOOK sentient…
We know Nick is willing to die rather than kill. He has been from the beginning, which is the main reason I’ve liked him from his first storyline. He was a foul-mouthed jerk most of the time, but also a man of deeply held moral convictions in other ways. We’ve also always known that non-sentient code doesn’t count; it may look violent, but nobody gets hurt. More recently, we’ve seen that he’s willing to use nonlethal force in order to save lives, like when he fired on the Biomass or wrestled with the AI appliances. I think we’re going to see whether he’ll compromise his principles if he thinks it’s necessary to save Ginny.
I must say, the existential terror exhibited by Baron’ in the first panel makes me cringe!
Poor little guy…
(yes, I remember I was screaming for his head on a pike a couple of strips ago)
Suddenly I’m reminded of the “Bad Cop, Worse Cop” scene from Tango and Cash.
Are you reminded because of my earlier comment above, perhaps?
Oddly enough, no. It was late (I’m on the east coast) and I didn’t even read the comments before posting, which isn’t typical.
I can relate. I’m in the same time zone.
Does not compute
Right now, stuck in this casino, they’re all dupes.
Maybe they should keep breaking Barons. The one that respawns is the real one! That sounds like a perfectly reasonable method of going about doing things!!
There is no real Baron, only copies. It explains so much.
Lovelace, dear one, you could never be just OK!
Dear me, the don-Baron seems to have vanished in a puff of logic!
Well, that was easy. Now, to prove that black is white…
Be careful around zebra crossings!
I found it fascinating that zebra stripes apparently disrupt the depth perception of many biting insects, causing them to try and land above the surface and fall.
So, admittedly my theories are usually terrible, but I’m guessing that Baron’s sensors were online enough for him to see Ginny be taken, and then on the assumption that the server would be next, he immediately but all connections and fled as far and as deep into his part of the virtual space as he could in panic, leaving decoys as he went?
That would also mean that he assumes that anyone looking for him would either be A-Sig, or someone already suborned by them, and is somewhere curled in an (admittedly very cute) ball.
(It seems kinda in character for him.)
Of course, if the story decided to give our protagonists a break, he might just’ve left so quickly that his body’s still recording what happened after he went and hid.
But again, I’m the one who puts the ‘Wild’ into WMG.
Also the ‘Guessing’ part – and maybe the ‘Mass’, come to think of it.
I do look forward to seeing how completely off the mark I am, though.
While it remains to be seen whether your theory is indeed terrible, it does make a bit of sense. So don’t count yourself out just yet.
Will, there are web comic fora where my making a guess pretty much guarantees that’s not what’s going to happen. I’m
at peacevery cool with that – I enjoyed the stories (and lore) that are meaty enough to support the hypothesising, but still complex enough for me to be surprised (and delighted) – and boy do our creators here bring the story and the world to do that.But thank you for the vote of support. 🙂
(Sighs – ‘_cut_ all connections:, not ‘but’)
typos happne, and all that.
I did not see that coming i must say
Now, who’s behind the wall of monitors?
Pay no attention to the man behind the monitors!
Huh. Wonder if Aimee is actually Aimee. She’s been especially enthusiastic about all this. I had thought it was because she’s a whimsy princess who treasures and supports her friends, but it could also be because Baron is taking the reins for a little bit while the real Aimee does something else for a while.