endbringer, meet gun

[peterxy]

...Very unseasonable rains can be seen in the distance from the shores of Acapulco.

The Brockton Bay Protectorate starts organizing volunteers to be transported or teletransported in batches to it. Heroes, rogues, villains, anyone's assistance is appreciated. A rendez-vous point is set for non-Protectorate capes wishing to volunteer, and Protectorate capes are informed of the situation via communication devices.

Comments

[mxglam]

"...okay, point. If I joined the Wards I'd probably swear in, unless I already had quite a lot of attention already."

[thinkering]

"I owe it a fair shake, and some people really need the structure or the support, but I don't."

[mxglam]

"Do you have actual plans for when you graduate?" Pause. "You're you, of course you have plans, what a stupid question."

[thinkering]

"Why thank you."

[mxglam]

"You're welcome. Care to share with the class?"

[thinkering]

"I will still show up to Endbringer fights and I will become stupidly rich selling useful things to people."

[mxglam]

"Sounds pretty good, I suppose. Though I'd peg you as one to go the Sphere way."

[thinkering]

"I'm not sure if I can stretch to space colonization. I'll try it when I have better than Ward budget to play with, but it's not natural to me."

[mxglam]

"I meant it more like, creating stuff that will help usher humanity to a new era of peace, prosperity, and growth."

[thinkering]

"What says I won't? It's not incompatible with becoming stupidly rich."

[mxglam]

"I guess, though I'd've mentioned it first if I were describing it."

[thinkering]

"The key to my basic strategy is that tinker tech needs the tinker tech to maintain it, but I think I can get at least three layers deep - robots maintained by robots that are maintained by robots that I maintain. Possibly include 'create' as well as 'maintain'. I can get good distribution that way. What I distribute is still up in the air."

[mxglam]

"...I wonder if you could create a loop."

[thinkering]

"It's not totally outside the realm of possibility, but the robots would have to be all the same design and that design would have to be not 'consumer electronic'."

[mxglam]

"Hm, can't you create robots with multiple functions? Like, maybe the last link of the loop could have the function of fixing the first link and producing whatever it was you wanted to produce."

[thinkering]

"Oh, my robots are versatile as heck, but... I'm not directly controlling them and there's a degree to which I can't artificially limit their behavior within their capacities. My specialty is like... judgment calls? If the technology does not at any point get to decide without my direction what to do next, I can't make it, you wouldn't believe how stupidly convoluted the calculator app on my computer has to be. I can make a device that can only do three things all of which are fine, but I don't want to make one that can do enough things that it's also smart enough to repair tinkertech and turn it quite that loose among people I don't know how to program it to respect as well as I can get them to with me. This is why my dad's the only other person who relies much on me-tech."

[mxglam]

"Oh. Hm. Well mostly I was thinking about trying not to have the need for a 'you' in the pipeline so everything would be automated and it wouldn't have to rely on you being around to fix it, what with the whole only-maker-can-fix thing tinker tech has going on."

[thinkering]

"I could do that. I might even actually do it, have a swarm of mutually repairing robots. But I'd need to be really sure they wouldn't go nuts if I wasn't around."

[mxglam]

"Yeah, that's what the mutually repairing part is supposed to accomplish, if one or only a few of them go nuts the others can keep them in line and fix them."

[thinkering]

"No, that's not quite... if I made a swarm of, of doctors, then even if they had psychiatry in the specialties list this would not stop some of the doctors from deciding to commit crimes one day, you see what I mean?"

[mxglam]

"Yeah, exactly, but if the other, non criminal doctors could stop the criminals from committing crimes... Well the analogy kinda breaks down because I'm thinking about the other robots actually stopping and editing the criminal ones' brains so to speak which would be kinda terrible to do with actual doctors but the point is that as long as only a minority of them breaks down the others can control them so that the system as a whole remains safe with very high probability."

[thinkering]

"Breaking down is not the danger. Making choices is the danger. My smartest bot is not a person, but it's not a huge gap to clear. My stuff makes choices and it doesn't have to be broken in some fixable way to do it. If the robots could all reprogram each other in the way I would do it, they'd have to be as sophisticated in figuring out what they wanted as I am, which makes the problem worse, not better."

[mxglam]

"Oh. Hm." Pause. Think. "Why was it you can't limit them meaningfully?"

[thinkering]

"If they don't have choices, they don't work. I limped along with a non-tinker calculator program until I figured out how to make a custom one settle for deciding whether to read the answers aloud, print them, or expect further inputs to the function and not display an answer yet at any given stage. The more it needs to do, the more choices I have to allow it. If I am going to make a bot that can fly around and tranq people, it has to actually be able to do that and I need to rely on it not wanting to tranq anybody I don't want tranqed."

[mxglam]

"Your power is terrifying."