Page 36. At least it can stand upright this time.
I’m in the middle of a week-long sale at the O Human Star store. Until midnight CST on Sunday, all books can come sketched in at no extra charge, and a free print is included with every order!
O Human Star
by Blue Delliquanti
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augh! Biting my nails hoping this demonstration goes well! But also bracing for a disaster – what if the proxy fails? what if it does something embarrassing like, eh I dunno, exploding, or trying to hump Al’s leg? And what does a *successful* demonstration even look like?
Suspense is killin’ me here…
They look quite professional there. I’m really curious to see what the proxy is going to do :D
Oh god please work :(
Oh, it’ll work fine. It’s been imprinted with her mind perfectly, and it’s not going to fizzle out or anything.
But there can only be one >:D
oh man oh man oh man this could go soooo many ways!!
I think it’ll work, because all this suspense over what the robot DOES can’t be building up to just nothing…can it?
Copying someone’s mind to entertain a crowd and make a sales pitch? Geez, I guess I’m the only one disgusted by this. Perhaps a few of you should see the movie ‘AI’, its all about what happens when you make sentience disposable. What is the responsibility of someone towards their newly created artificial sentience? Do you consider them a product or disposable? to be discarded after your little performance? Or just enslaved to do work you don’t want to do? Funny, I thought the human species was trying to progress away from treating our ‘children’ like intelligent beasts of burden made merely for the economic utility of the parents.
What are Al and Brendan going to do with their ‘cloned’ mind after their little performance? Treat it like toy and turn it off? Hmm. I guess they aren’t so different than modern parents who want to have fun, get pregnant and then decide the ‘child’ is a disposable choice.
You do raise some good points, but I don’t think that what the emulator produces is a true sentience. The brain waves thing makes me think it’s like xeroxing a 3D object; it appears somewhat the same, but is clearly not the same thing. Brendan and Al are good people, I’m sure they wouldn’t destroy a true living being.
It’s like pressing your hand into plaster. The imprint looks a little like a hand, but it’s not a hand, and you couldn’t even construct a full hand from it, just one surface. If there was time for a full copy, the copy would be like a plaster mold that you can cast things with, but this copy is just a rough outline.
I guess this entire storyline is rubbing me the wrong way. I’m just considering the implications of the little puppet robot suddenly finding itself self aware inside a toy, it reminds me of “I must scream and have no mouth”. Forgive me if I don’t find this scenario charming, even in a nerd geek kind of way.
It’s a work of fiction. The science and technology being put on display here isn’t as yet real. So who knows how much sentience the robot has; it may only copy the patterns of a human mind without having a conscience existence. We know that eventually the work they are doing now leads to the world where Sulla is alive, so obviously the technology does progress to a point where the robots do have a sense of existence, but at this first step? Perhaps that *is* an issue that will come up further down the road. At this moment in time we don’t even know what will become of the little robot, so perhaps before you jump to the conclusion that Al and Brendan are going to be irresponsible with it, we allow the story to show us what happens?
1) OK It’s a work of fiction; but it’s intended to hook our empathy module, and it’s done that in spades for me – I care what happens to Al and Brendan. Why should I not care about Helena trapped in a diving bell?
2) Sure, we don’t know yet what the denouement will be, but we can be forgiven for worrying about it. I’m with CFT. Even if the bot is only a rudimentary Helena, she still deserves our empathy (see(1) above)
3) Where’s my next episode? It’s Monday already and I’m ready to burst! C’mon, if I don’t get my fix…
I don’t argue that we’re meant to empathize with the characters, and it’s good that we do. But as we can see, Helena is fine. They didn’t trap her soul, they didn’t take her brain, they made a quick copy of brain wave patterns centered on a specific problem. This robot that now has that specific set of data is not going to go around thinking and acting like it’s Helena the rest of its existence. I suppose that’s where I differ in opinion here; I don’t see the need to empathize with a small selection of brain wave impulses that have been transferred to the robot. As far as I can see, there is no indication as yet that the robot has sentience.
Found it yesterday, caught up, re-reading now. OMG.