Artificial Intelligence - Why is it prohibited in Elite Universe?

Boomer Kay

B
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A normal day at the office :D
 

GilliganTX

GilliganTX
Lily from anim.o.v.e said:
why would any true intelligence spread a self destructive and ressource wasting race into the galaxy? Thats the opposite of intelligence.
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Because lots of reasons that I can't get into with out spoiling the book, so...


The AI's invented something called a "Farcaster" which is basically a jump gate, that connects two points in space through "the void which binds" via a singularity "string." The quantum strings between these farcasters are the hardware in which the AI world exists. They destroyed earth early on, forcing human expansion and colonization, so that humans would go on and "spin their web" for them, by creating farcasters all over the galaxy. They needed us to expand this web so that we could expand out population. People plugged into "the web" via neural implants were used for more processing power. They needed more people, and a bigger web, to help expedite their quest for the ultimate knowledge.

The AI's in this book series were generally only self serving, and cared not for other forms of life. Only their own pursuit of the ultimate knowledge.

Non-spoiler answer:

They needed to.
 
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dublicious

D
W4rSkuLL said:
Illegal or prohibited doesn´t mean its not used. Pirates and lawless drug cartels, crime lords or other types of moguls might use them for their own interest, and they may be produced in illegal underground facilities or on desolate space stations/outposts. Often when stuff are illegal, its suddenly everywhere.
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This. It is super hard to enforce the ban on intelligent AI. There are far too many planets to monitor even all the ones within reasonable shipping range to acquire materials.
 

znôrt

znôrt
Boomer Kay said:
It's semantics. There is such a thing as "human intelligence" .. or "the way humans are programmed" .. which, like I wrote some pages ago, conceptually stems from "understanding", which is more than just "computing".
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yes and no :D

Boomer Kay said:
The computer does not "understand" the stock market, it just crunches large number of data to make a decision
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not yet. it could in time. indeed a long time and we don't know how to teach it right now, but it's conceivable it could.

a simple line of code 'f = (a, b) -> a+b' (a computation, you would say) has 'understanding' of producing the sum of two numbers. it doesn't have understanding of what addition means, nor does it know anything about math, it is not self-aware, but it understands adding two numbers, and will react according to that understanding when given the right stimulus (i.e., you call it with two numbers) as you would expect from a number adding function: adding two numbers.

if you expand the code to, say, accept a variable number of numbers you just broaden its understanding a bit, and it now can react in a wider environment. it just got more intelligent regarding number addition.

now keep adding the right bits of 'understanding' to it and you could eventually produce an entity that earns itself a degree in maths.

that's actually how life, including us humans, and including all our 'human intelligence', came to be: from a mineral cell that only 'understood' how to exchange electrons, received the right stimulus and got a lot more 'understanding' added to it, a bit at a time. from a piece of rock. why shouldn't that be possible from a piece of metal?

what you are referring to is maybe self-awareness, reflection, imagination, humor, abstraction, etc, but these are just other features (of intelligence) that got added along the way. they may be exlusive to some species we know of, but i don't think they are a requirement for intelligence. human intelligence is just the intelligence of humans, the most developed we know of (unless as i suspect cats do know what the answer to life, the universe and everything means, which would explain why they look down on us the way they do!)

Boomer Kay said:
In the video Michael mentioned that the AIs created previously were considered "dangerous" by the 3 major factions - unanimously (which is already suspicious) - and therefor banned.
We kinda assume that "dangerous" means destruction of the human race. Taking the agendas of the powers in charge into consideration, you can also come to the conclusion that the AIs were a threat to the "status quo" and their respective powerbases - and maybe a huge progressive step for mankind as such.
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spot on! :D sadly i see michael already spoiled that possibility below ...
 

Malak'kai

Malak'kai
If you happen to remember where you read that story, or the name could you let me know? Whether E:D related or not it sounds like an interesting read.


Kiiyor said:
I recall reading something about it, perhaps in one of the novels - or it may have been on a forum somewhere (or, er... possibly even fan fiction, who knows, my recollection is terrible tonight) - but the gist of it was that a terror event caused the whole thing.

There was a hacker that spent months engineering a virus to take over the AI's on hundreds of thousands of ships - merchant, military, whatever he could reach through established human networks - and he could reach a lot. When he had enough, at a specific time, all the infected ships disabled their crews by either venting atmosphere or poisoning the air inside each vessel, and set course for a heavily populated planet. They were all programmed to gain as much speed as possible and crash into a specific location on the planet's surface. Thousands of ships impacted with the planet at terrific speed microseconds after each other, exploding with huge force, buckling the planet's crust and eventually tearing it to pieces. The loss of life was staggering.

The hacker was caught, and when questioned about his motives it was found that he did it pretty much because he could, and wanted to see what happened. He didn't have the skills to engineer the whole thing though, which is where the AI came in; he asked them how to do it, and they helped him plan the whole thing, as they had no moral compunction to do anything other than what they were asked and had access to enormous computational power. The collective factions and corporations of humanity were horrified at the ease at which the whole thing was carried out, and they unanimously banned all AI to prevent any future catastrophes.

That's what I recall of it - again, I can't remember where I read it, and I have no idea if it's considered canon or not, but as far as explanations for game mechanics go it was effective enough a narrative to help suspend my disbelief at the whole thing.
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Frank

Frank
Slopey said:
Isn't there a sort of AI in one of the ED sanctioned books? (Might have been Kate's - I can't remember).
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Kate's book has a bot called DORIS. It's difficult to say whether on not she is sentient.

There is an absolutely definite AI in the Fantastic Books series.. "A question of Intelligence" by Lisa Wolf was one of the stories in the Anthology "Tales from the Frontier". Just because something is outlawed doesn't mean they don't exist, after all, there aren't many statute books that have laws governing unicorns.
 
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