I notice a distinct lack of Bots and Droids
- Thread starter ScotHarvest
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http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Droid
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
Those links might be of interest to you guys. The entries take into account Expanded Universe stuff.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
Those links might be of interest to you guys. The entries take into account Expanded Universe stuff.
So they describe cheaper droids with lesser reasoning capabilities - just like in other settings. The main difference seems to be in the number of true AIs available in the SW setting. The only other place I've seen so many AIs was in Iain Banks stories, though those mirrored SW in that there were plenty of little worker-bot drones that could carry out sophisticated functions but didn't have the capacity for independent reason.
It isn't about the reasoning ability per se. It is a matter of self awareness. AI doesn't mean self aware.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Which is why I prefer the term AS - artificial sentience - to describe the TL16+ stuff. Machine sentience may be a better term too.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
If we adopt the usage seen in the long-running webcomic Freefall, the term "Artificial Intelligence" becomes a Venn Diagram all by itself. Uplifted species which took a lot of brain work fall into the AI group alongside sufficiently advanced robots and software AIs such as groupmind gestalts. If you further differentiate "sentience" and "Sophont" along the lines of some modern AI research, you get quite a complex assortment of modified and/or constructed beings.
Then there are the clear indications that the Fourth Imperium will use different definitions than the Third did. Specifically, the Third accorded certain rights to all Sophonts, but does not classify Machine Sentience in any form as a possible Sophont. The Fourth Imperium, built with the help of the Cyms, makes no such distinction.
That's not quite the case. Even though Cleon I lived at a time where machine sentience (which Traveller does refer to as artificial intelligence (or is it 'true AI'?)) was clearly not possible (the Imperium being four or five tech levels below true AI at the time), he explicitly said that there might be a question of a robot being sentient but there could be no question that it was a lifeform. And the Imperium accorded protected status only to sentient lifeforms. Hence a robot was not a protected being within the legal meaning of the term.
Hans
Yep. IMTU there is A.I. ~TL11 but no A.S. (I use that exact terminology)
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
Within the OTU we have the statement in the MT timeline that Terran officers during the late ISW period had access to AI assistants.
Now how this plays out IMTU is that the Terrans embraced AI at TL11/12, and continued to develop these machines throughout the Rule of Man.
Thw Vilani were not happy - they have a major cultural bias against any form of "thinking machine" - an expert system is about the limit they would allow.
The third Imperium is heavily influenced by the old Vilani bias and the terrorist use of a robot that lead to the accords.
Now how this plays out IMTU is that the Terrans embraced AI at TL11/12, and continued to develop these machines throughout the Rule of Man.
Thw Vilani were not happy - they have a major cultural bias against any form of "thinking machine" - an expert system is about the limit they would allow.
The third Imperium is heavily influenced by the old Vilani bias and the terrorist use of a robot that lead to the accords.
This is one reason I dropped using the 3I decades ago. Completely unbelievable sociology work up for an Empire that large and diverse. A better (although not by much) way to explain is that people rioted when their jobs were taken by 'bots. Even that only works in a limited sense and for a limited time. Not thousands or even hundreds of years.
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GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
It only has to work on one person: The guy who holds shares in every major robot building corporation in the Imperium. The single richest man in the Imperium.
Significantly, the Imperium never had a major ground war that might have exhausted manpower enough to make robotic troops necessary. All of the Imperium's major wars until the Rebellion were dominantly Naval, a venue where arming robots is really not necessary unless you embrace the necessity of frequent boarding actions or decide to make your fighters/sensor extensions robotic.
In the OTU, only the cowardly Hivers use robots for primary combat machines, and only the Zhodani use robots for boarding actions.
Yes, it's a setting full of old SF cliches. You can choose to embrace the cliches or you can head into ATU territory.
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Wrong. Another company would just retool to fill the need. Econ 100. Not even worth talking about beyond these few sentences it is SO elementary.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
And just where is the need? "Supply and Demand" depends on demand.
A statement that has to be interpreted as not applying to actual machine sentience (since that is specifically said to be unavailable at late ISW Terran tech level) but a more limited form of AI. Just what does it say?
The Vilani parts of the Imperium perhaps. Not the Imperium as a whole. And the terrorist attack led to a bias against vindependent armed robots, not thinking robots.
Hans
There is a simple explanation that works: The use of autonomous mechanical devices (aka robots) is more expensive than the use of the equivalent humans.
Hans
Except that it isn't. Not even by today's limited A.I. usages in manufacturing. It is MUCH cheaper. Expert systems can save a lot of money. I guess you could have some type of 3I wide Uber tax on 'bots. That would just lead to systems leaving the Empire so that they could keep up with the rival civilizations outside the 3I...
The game needs a revamp from its '70's sci-tech assumptions. It isn't a criticism of the original game but a reality based on time.
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The game needs people to realize that it's not a futurist model of reality that has to be adapted every time a scientist makes a new discovery. It's a game designed to emulate the classic SF of Anderson, de Camp, Norton, Piper, Tubb, Vance and all the rest of those guys. To achieve that you have to suspend disbelief in some aspects of the setting and strive for self-consistency rather than futuristic realism. If you don't like that, there's a simple solution: set your game in a different setting. I'm sure that could be equally entertaining, or even more so.
But it won't be the Third Imperium setting. For that you need to stick to those '70's sci-tech assumptions.
Hans
Never! I will never suspend disbelief! I will ... oh wait, I'm playing Sci Fi.
Never mind.
Place looks very Pournellish to me, and you're right: there's a rich vein of robot-free sci fi, back to the guy whose own robot stories popularized the notion of humaniform robots - Asimov. It was a lot of years that people puzzled over the dichotomy between his robot novels and his robot-less Foundation series before he decided to hatch some rationale for it.
When the writers write far future sci-fi, they want to write about what the people are doing, not what the robots are doing for them. Even in the robot-heavy Star Wars series, at least until that Phantom Menace mess, the robots were primarily sidekicks and plot tools; people drove the ships. And, the dangers implicit in Asimov's Robots of Dawn, and in similar stories by other authors, remains: an over-reliance on robots to do our thinking and doing for us could breed a lazy, cautious culture ill-suited for expansion into space.
Me, I like bots, and I like to squeeze a few into the background where they can help without taking over the story. My military bot series were tools, with about the intelligence of a donkey and a good deal less independence. A bed with built-in arms to make the bed when you push a button is useful enough to not get into arguments over. However, I'd prefer to keep a person in the pilot's chair and elsewhere, even if I have to invent rationalizations to accomplish it. I like a universe peopled by people.
I'm currently working on a rationalization that addresses both the lack of proliferation of robots and the lack of proliferation of high tech industry. It focuses on the lack of bright bots in Imperial spacefaring culture without eliminating bots from the local planetary scene and is intended to be used as an IMTU explanation for the limited appearance of robots in the player's experiences.
In this model, jump space fields are almost perfect in shielding a ship from jump space intrusion and maintaining normal-space fundamental physics within the ship, but they are not perfect. There is a very slight deviation that is most noticeable by humans during a misjump: the deviation has a slight effect on nerve cells, noticeable in the inner ear during misjump, otherwise detectable as a very slight but measurable decline in reaction time, imperceptible to travelers. Human nerve cells recover almost immediately following exit from jump space. However, jump space also affects synaptic processors and nanobots, because nanobots depend on a related technology for control. The field effect is uniformly lethal to nanobots, rendering it impossible to export any industrial process or machine that uses nanobots; beyond about TL11, worlds must lift themselves by their own "bootstraps," independently building the technology, if they intend to progress in most advanced manufacturing industries.
The field effect on synaptic processors is not lethally but is damaging and permanent. A robot with synaptic processors that is subject to a jump field will suffer degradation of synaptic function with unpredictable results ranging from program faults to complete failure of the brain. It may function correctly for hours or days, function partially for hours or days, or fail completely upon the first demand. It may return to normal operation for a brief period after a shutdown and reboot, or the brain may shut down completely and permanently. Limited function can typically be restored by isolating the synaptic processors, but this will leave the bot functioning effectively as a dumbot with limited basic command, able to accept only very basic orders and follow simple, explicit commands; it will typically be unable to run its applications programs while in a limited function state.
Computers at TL12 and above use a similar synaptic technology to improve computer performance. Those processors are vulnerable to jump space as well but are designed with multiple redundancies, triplicate error checking and processor-level physical damage detection and repair systems. As a result, those processors are far more robust and reliable but are significantly larger and more expensive, up to two orders of magnitude larger and more expensive. Because of their redundancies and error-checking, they are also a bit slower than robotic synaptics, rendering them less useful for the kind of real-time decisionmaking and perceptual response programming that robots commonly employ.
It is known that the Hivers have developed a solution, but the nature of the solution is not known and the Hivers are not telling. It is known that the Zhodani have developed a psionic-based intensive diagnostic routine for identifying and isolating damaged cells in a synaptic processor; the routine is applied to all robots after jump. Robots are therefore more prevalent in Zhodani space than in Imperial space, but the added cost associated with the need for skilled diagnostics by trained psionics and for occasional replacement of processors too damaged for repair significantly limits their spread. Because the diagnostic routines are psionic, there has been little interest in the Imperium in gathering information about them.
To date, the Imperium has not identified a cost-effective method for producing jump-resistant synaptic processors, or for shielding existing models of synaptic processors or repairing them after jump. The fact that the Imperial government has not applied its considerable research resources to the problem has been attributed variously to official apathy or hostility toward robots, to concerns about the potentially destabilizing employment and societal effects of large-scale exports of robots to worlds that presently do not have them, and to concerns about the potential for their misuse by internal enemies hostile to the Imperium, as tools of espionage, war or terror. In consequence, high tech robots tend to be limited to the system of manufacture, and most robots encountered elsewhere will be dumbots with very limited intelligence, typically built into existing machinery to make the machine more useful: for example, industrial manufacture machinery, automated labor-saving devices such as vacuums and laundry machines, and auto-pilots.
Yep, that's the big loophole in Cleon's abolitionist policy. I don't think it was an accident. (IIRC, some of his contemporaries also thought this was the case, according to T4 source materials).
IIRC, T 4 describes the Zhunastu corporation as a major robotics manufacturer.
Get rid of slaves, primitive natives! Slavery is doubleplusbad. Buy robots instead.
The conflict of interests is obvious.
IMO, his diktat on AI was rooted in his anticipation of the metaphysical, moral, legal, and political difficulties that AI would bring about. If his corporation put out new robots that showed self-awareness and creative intelligence, well, it wouldn't do to have people call that slavery. So he did what autocrats do: he made a decree.
The interesting thing is that his decree seems to have really stuck. Bigtime.
You and others have pointed out some in-game explanations for why the 3I policy on robots and AI seems to have altered so little over a thousand years. Vilani beliefs being a big one. The Shushudaam(sp) Accords.
I think there is plenty of room for variations within the framework provided by canon.
The Imperium may not recognize AIs as having any rights whatever, but member worlds could have very different sets of beliefs and laws.
Maybe high intelligence robots can be citizens of some worlds, or form a "serf" class, or are otherwise treated differently than mere property.