blasto, meet official opinions on self-replicating minions

[peterxy]

The PRT catches wind of a strange increase in disappeared domestic animals in the downtown area. Given that the people who live there are the rich and powerful, this is clearly a problem that needs to be investigated and solved immediately. The PRT, of course, agrees that this is of utmost importance, and not just because of precedent about mass abductions of pets, of course not, why would you think that, they are so very worried about Fido, even Scion recognizes the merits of rescuing lost pets.

(Lorica's asked to maybe keep a few more eyes there than she has been.)

Comments

[thinkering]

"Eh, we're - jointly interacting with the world through one channel," she says.

[mxglam]

"Yeah, so what would the difference even be?"

[thinkering]

"It can't read my mind any more than anything else can and I only read its mind when I'm not doing anything else?"

[mxglam]

"Right, but I mean, what would the actual difference be? You'd be coaching it, it'd be coaching you, both things sound like you talking to me while the bot helps."

[thinkering]

"Oh. If I'm talking to you, the bot doesn't vet my compositions, I just say them. It might present me with the Wikipedia page on the topic of conversation or a conversation transcript from last week or something, or I might subvocalize it to give me a statistic, but I mostly just talk with a really convenient reference on hand. If it's talking, it may send something it wants to say to me for vetting but at normal conversational speed I can seldom make a concrete decision on that; more often it's reading my facial expression while I listen in to guess what my opinion might be and generating its own sentences based on that and saying them without me having time to read them first."

[mxglam]

"Hmmm. That sounds more challenging, and also not exactly the actual test, which was to see if your bot could properly pass for you, so if we do that it's a different test and the subject is me instead of the bot."

[thinkering]

"What do you mean?"

[mxglam]

"Well, the point of the test was checking whether your bot could flawlessly imitate you. If you start coaching it and vice-versa it becomes a test on whether I can tell you apart anyway."

[thinkering]

"...I was listening to the conversation and it would have been monitoring my facial expressions during."

[mxglam]

"Oh. Then I'm really good," they laugh.

[thinkering]

She pats them on the head.

[mxglam]

"Still need to repeat the experiment and validate my results, especially the last part."

[thinkering]

"Let me know when."

[mxglam]

"It'll have to be on a boy or at least enby day."

[thinkering]

Nod.

[peterxy]

The week trudges along without much further ado. No new hybrids emerge, the heroes are praised by the public for averting a terrible crisis, the deaths are mourned, speculation picks up, people note that Armsmaster mentioned a lot of teamwork but for all that the heroes aren't very visible, and the end consequence is that on Friday afternoon the Wards are to visit a school. So, they have one day to prepare a topic to talk about for half an hour each, and will also have to socialize and make the children and younger teens like them.

[thinkering]

Half an hour. Geez. Lorica throws something together encouraging the kids to consider a career in technology.

[mxglam]

"I have no idea what I'm gonna talk about."

[thinkering]

"They ought to have given us longer."

[mxglam]

They raise an eyebrow. "Longer?"

[thinkering]

"To think of something and write up a presentation. And they should excuse Windflower, because can you imagine Windflower trying to do public speaking, poor thing."

[mxglam]

"Oh, right, I thought you'd meant longer than half an hour. And yeah, poor Windflower. I wonder if we can do something, she doesn't have the most sympathetic of powers, either, this is not going to help her image."

[thinkering]

"The bot can write her something and make her a slideshow if she has a topic, but she'd still have to stand up there and talk."

[mxglam]

"Ooh, can it write me something? I think I can do the showmanship part."

[thinkering]

"What do you want to talk about?"