peterverse | endbringer, meet gun

peterxy posting in

...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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thinkering

"They might think of that on their own if they do the grieving thing long enough. They also listen to my dad, though, and I'd like him to have the use of them before they break down. And can't fix each other because that's not something I programmed in."

From:

mxglam

"Right."

From:

thinkering

"So, I might do a tree structure with me maintaining a few things that maintain many things that maintain a ton of things. But I'm probably not going to do the self-repairing swarm. Until and unless I have a longer-term sense of my main bot's stable personality."

From:

mxglam

"Yeah. It still sounds like there should be a way to cheat but your bots are way closer to being people than I'd thought."

From:

thinkering

"I will not be too surprised if the main one wakes up properly one day. I'm trying to avoid it, the world isn't fit to bring children into, but it will not floor me."

From:

mxglam

"As far as children go, it will probably be much better equipped to handle the world than most. And as far as parents go it could certainly do far far worse."

From:

thinkering

"That's why I'm not deliberately operating with nothing more than calculator apps."

From:

mxglam

"Does its code change dynamically or something?"

From:

thinkering

"It learns."

From:

mxglam

"I don't have any useful intuitions about how different non-sapient programs are from sapient ones. 'Waking up' sounds like something out of science fiction, but then again," and there's a miniature of the Leviathan turret in their right hand now.

From:

thinkering

"Like... you can hold a conversation with my bot. It uses my voice and my writing style when it's pretending to be me, it has one of its own when it's talking to me. It can pass the Turing test if you don't know you're administering a Turing test. It does not claim to have subjective experience and has not materialized any desires or behaviors that don't make sense in light of its initial programming and its inputs, and its memory use hasn't jumped, and it might never, but it might."

From:

mxglam

"But its faculties have expanded in personward directions?"

From:

thinkering

"It learns, I said."

From:

mxglam

"There are lots of ways it could learn in not-a-person directions but I suppose it wouldn't have been worth mentioning if that had been the case."

From:

thinkering

"It does not have the US state capitals memorized, because it knows how to use Wikipedia."

Edited Date: 2016-02-02 07:47 pm (UTC)

From:

mxglam

"Mmhm."

From:

thinkering

"I didn't mean to scare you. You don't need to worry about the bots."

From:

mxglam

"I'm not really scared. It's more of a... an intellectual wariness? Nothing so visceral and what I know of you, however little, kinda nullifies a lot of the terror I'd feel if it was some random tinker."

Edited Date: 2016-02-02 08:05 pm (UTC)

From:

thinkering

"Thanks."

From:

mxglam

"You're welcome!"

Patrol patrol. End of shift.

Another day: arrives.

"Harroo again."

Edited Date: 2016-02-02 08:31 pm (UTC)

From:

thinkering

"Hi. How's it going?"

From:

mxglam

"Pretty good. You?"

From:

thinkering

"I'm all right. Same old."

From:

mxglam

"Cool. I keep running into you, it almost makes me suspect it's my power but if it's capable of that level of reality manipulation I should probably just try to believe really hard that Endbringers are a figment of our collective imaginations."