peterverse | blasto, meet official opinions on self-replicating minions

peterxy posting in

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.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

thinkering

"I mean, my best guess is that the bot should act less conservatively in general but that's only a guess."

From:

mxglam

"What exactly do you mean by conservatively, here?"

From:

thinkering

"When it's not quite sure if I would, say, swear, or gesture, or suggest an idea, it defaults to not doing so unless there's some other reason it should. So overall it does those things a little less. It's also not quite as creative as I am so it does come up with fewer novel ideas in the first place."

From:

mxglam

"Hmm. Well, the first thing's fixable but I'm not sure about the second."

From:

thinkering

"Yeah. But this doesn't come up in most casual conversation in a statistically interesting way."

From:

mxglam

"Well, doesn't it? Perhaps there are very subtle ways in which you creatively choose what to say?"

From:

thinkering

"Maybe. You might be picking up on that."

From:

mxglam

"Sounds a bit like a just-so story, though. Too convenient."

From:

thinkering

"Is it?"

From:

mxglam

"Well, isn't it? You didn't seem to think it very plausible that your superior creativity would be something one would notice before I pointed out its possibility, so it's not a likely hypothesis a priori."

From:

thinkering

"I could have been wrong, though, I don't talk to myself in the way that other people talk to me."

From:

mxglam

"Yeah. And now that you say this, the obvious trick to distinguish you two would be to just talk about something that requires creativity. I wouldn't even need to talk to both of you."

From:

thinkering

"You know, under normal circumstances the bot and I consult each other a lot."

From:

mxglam

"Which is to say that under normal circumstances there is very little fact of the matter as to which of you is the real you, you're basically the same person."

From:

thinkering

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

From:

mxglam

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

From:

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?"

From:

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."

From:

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."

From:

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."

From:

thinkering

"What do you mean?"

From:

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."