Drone warfare vs manned spacecraft in sci-fi

[Stark]

Meanwhile, in actual good fiction, you can have a team that includes several AI members and have plot and philosophical drama emerge from the concern that they may be developing 'true' intelligence with complete independent identity and volition throughout the series, and how the characters (and their belief systems and relationships) react to that. Ironically, giving them an emerging and child-like personality makes them seem far more 'human' than the allegedly human characters.

Some common ideas (like 'can't have drama without illogical decisions') are just fundamentally wrong. Artificial characters can make mistakes, make the audience emote, and sell an interesting contrast to 'normal' characters. Excuses are just excuses.

[The Disintegrator]

Like I said, it can be done, but it certainly adds to the challenge.

But with an unmanned spacecraft chances are its going to be one AI running the whole show, so character interaction is probably going to be fairly minimal. That and if the AI has a child like personality I'm not really sure I trust it to fly a billion dollar spacecraft.

[Stark]

But with an unmanned spacecraft chances are its going to be one AI running the whole show

Why? This seems like something entirely up to the author.

so character interaction is probably going to be fairly minimal.[/qutoe]

Why?

That and if the AI has a child like personality I'm not really sure I trust it to fly a billion dollar spacecraft.

Are you unable to separate technical competence and intelligence from user interface? You may not be well-equipped to talk about artificial intelligence.

Anyway, its just sad to see people make up reasons why xyz isn't done in fiction when it's done, it doesn't have any problems or 'challenges' and can be used effectively to raise all kinds of strong themes. People have to just broaden their horizons a bit.

[Starglider]

Having multiple AIs in one vehicle / drone constellation, restricted to relatively human-like communication, is perfectly sensible if you say that the only available AI technology is relatively human-like artificial neural nets. There are numerous significant scaling problems with ANNs that could reasonably take a long time to overcome. Artificial intelligences based on direct symbolic computation (i.e. like existing software engineering) are unlikely to experience those kind of scaling problems and have effectively perfect mind-sharing / telepathy. However you might still want to use multiple instances with hard partitions and limited communication for reliability / robustness reasons (as in the classic three-brained Beserker ships). At the very high end of fantasy tech you can invent arbitrary scaling issues e.g. there seems to be some hard upper limit on the size of individual Minds in the Cultureverse, but at that point you're far enough from real engineering that any explanation of why the limit exists is just flavour technobabble.

[The Disintegrator]

But with an unmanned spacecraft chances are its going to be one AI running the whole show

Why? This seems like something entirely up to the author.

I'm thinking in terms of realism, which seems to be one of the larger motivations for spacecraft. Dissenting personalities tends to be a good thing on human crewed aircraft, but I'm not sure it'd be a good idea for a computer guided spacecraft. But with that said I'm willing to admit that AI could go in just about any direction.

so character interaction is probably going to be fairly minimal.[/qutoe]

Why?

This is going off of the assumption that it's a single AI flying a spacecraft pretty far away from Earth, in which case it wouldn't really have anyone to talk to except over a long delay.

That and if the AI has a child like personality I'm not really sure I trust it to fly a billion dollar spacecraft.

Are you unable to separate technical competence and intelligence from user interface? You may not be well-equipped to talk about artificial intelligence.

My thought here is that if it's a developing personality its motivations could be difficult to gauge.

Anyway, its just sad to see people make up reasons why xyz isn't done in fiction when it's done, it doesn't have any problems or 'challenges' and can be used effectively to raise all kinds of strong themes. People have to just broaden their horizons a bit.

If someone wants to write a story about an unmanned spacecraft then awesome, more power to them. I'm not trying to say that it can't be done, or that it shouldn't be done. The main point I'm trying to get at is that there are legitimate reasons in universe and out of universe for wanting to write manned spacecraft.

[Stark]

And it's a bit sad that your reasons (which you call 'realism') just ignore why it doesn't really matter. Multiple AIs, AIs at different levels of development, AIs with user-friendly interfaces; it doesn't have to be boring ass shit like FIRE ROCKET WHEN BEST MOMENT FOR ROCKET FIRING REACHED. You can have drama either way.

I mean most scifi isn't about drama, so who cares?

The whole idea that more than one AI = dissent is pretty funny though. You should write a story about it.

[jollyreaper]

The problem with limiting AI to within the realms of human relatability is that you risk making them just humans in electronic boxes. The problem with making them incomprehensible is that the audience has no way to relate to them.

Have there been any really good examples of telling stories of completely nonhuman, rather alien protagonists? Most of the examples I can think of have heavy doses of anthropomorphization. Nature documentaries will construct narratives from the footage, couching what we see in ways the audience will sympathize with, find appealing.

The strongest candidate I can think of for completely inhuman story that isn't really just humans by another name is the Hogan short story where an alien Von Neumann probe lands on a lifeless moon and creates an entire ecology.

There are also imaginary natural history stories exploring fantasy alien ecologies, future permutations on Earth ecologies, post-human races, but they are rather specialized story structures.

I don't think this kind of story is impossible to tell but it must surely be very difficult to do well.

[Stark]

More black/white thinking from Jollyreaper. :V

Regardless of all the fiction involving alien aliens or alien motives or alien experience, the audience is small. AI doesn't have to be UNKNOWABLY INSCRUTABLY ALIEN OMG to drive drones and retain drama. Indeed, its arguable that the less human-like they appear the more stark the mirror they cast on humanity becomes, which should assist drama. There's just no point making a boring story about stuff people can't relate to for intellectual pride.

[jollyreaper]

The question I'm asking is whether there's prior art for this? The surest proof that something can be done is showing it. And there's a lot of scifi out there.

On one hand you can call making AI inscrutable an artistic conceit. On the other hand you can say that making it scrutable is not respecting the intelligence of the audience.

The most audacious kind of drama is taking the unfamiliar and making it comprehensible. Even if you do not agree with the POV, at least you can understand. The earliest example of this I encountered as a kid was reading up on the kamikaze. Because at first blush, the mindset was so incomprehensible that it was really true horror. Things take on a whole different perspective when you understand the cultural and historic context and move beyond the conventional western explanation of "japs be crazy, don't try to figure them out."

You can get away with a lot more in prose than you can in film. If an AI has five minds that must reach consensus for action, there are ways to describe it in print. In visual you often end up with things that are clunky like cylons talking to each other with voice boxes. Would they be using radio instead? Yeah. Would the audience be lost in that kind of exchange? Yeah. What other options are there? Human actors representing avatars of the minds talking in a comfortable virtual space? Eh, it's tough.

For lack of better ideas, we always end up needing a Watson as audience proxy for the story to be explained to. Any truly incomprehensible AI or alien is explained in the context of the humans that interact with it. They are our pov. Are there counter examples that defy the cliches?

[Stark]

I'm starting to wonder if you're even capable of discussing things like a normal person instead of throwing out finished thoughts as fact. :V

Dude, you just need to read more science fiction. Who knows what you'll engage with, but it really seems like you have a very narrow view of the genre. Yes, some science fiction can address huge or complicated issues in a detailed way with high barriers to entry. For obvious reasons, this will always be a minority of then genre. Not everyone wants to read a book they have to put down every few pages to try to work out what the fuck is going on. Even if you add a surface layer that entertains people without them having to understand the subtext or implications of what is being described, people may simply ignore those meanings (or you'll end up like Neal fucking Stephenson singlehandedly destroying intelligent science fiction for a generation).

Since people were talking about why people don't use artificially intelligent ships or drones or whatever, I think the problem (on SDN) is that people think of the AI driving a missile and think 'hurf durf what does a missile have to say' when this is certainly not the only (or even most obvious) way to do this. There aren't many drones in popular scifi space combat for the same way that there aren't much of other ideas outside the mainstream: because people just want endless retreads of the same shit.

[Connor MacLeod]

The problem with limiting AI to within the realms of human relatability is that you risk making them just humans in electronic boxes.

Why is this a problem?

The problem with making them incomprehensible is that the audience has no way to relate to them.

Again, why is this a problem?

[jollyreaper]

If AI is basically just humans in boxes, it is not an invalid critique to say that it is a failure is imagination. We can accept bumpy forehead aliens in life action scifi because cgi is expensive. But in a game setting like Mass Effect where they could animate anything, it seems like a missed opportunity. Looks human with bumps, thinks human more or less, it's not really that alien, is it?

As for the incomprehensible, it depends on how the story is told. Has anyone used
The completely incomprehensible as a tight pov character? The only examples I can think of they are kept as the antagonist and the pov remains with the humans.

The relatability question comes down to what the story is about and how it is structured. We do have a tradition of unreliable narrators and awful humans as protagonists or narrators but they are still broken within human terms.

As a comparison, Blindsight the novel features incompressible aliens but the story is told with the humans as the focus. It's not from the perspective is the aliens because that would be nigh impossible to render. And even the humans are a pretty hard stretch to understand.

It remains difficult to tell a story with a protagonist who is unlikable and unsympathetic. Unrelatable in even human terms is even tougher.

So, stark, can you point to examples where the SDN limited thinking has been exploded? With many problems recognizing them for what they are isn't the difficulty, coming up with a better solution than the one we're not satisfied with is. This is not a rhetorical question. Are there good examples that remain obscure?

[Stark]

I think you're missing that the expectations of the market are often consistent across media. Sure, ME could have been really innovative and creative and out there - but it's Bioware, and they stayed with what works and what sells.

And people don't 'explode' 'SDN thinking' because it isn't possible. If someone doesn't want to engage with something or has a limited imagination, you can't CROWBAR THEIR MIND OPEN or FORCE THEM TO UNDERSTAND. I believe there are very specific attitudes and 'answers' to scifi questions in the SDN community and answers outside this are not looked for. I mean with regard to the example I suggested, the idea that a battle might involve AIs doesn't mean each bullet is an AI thinking MUST HIT MAN KILL KILL SYNTAX ERROR as people might think. It could (trivially) be about superfast information warfare, inscrutable motives, and iterative planning with regular bullets. It doesn't have to be 'like in that movie we all like' or even 'realistic'. When you can have a fucking cartoon explore complex ideas like the 'standalone complex', its not like it is impossible to express these complex or abstract ideas. Generic scifi creators just don't even want to, because generic scifi fans don't want to read it.

[Connor MacLeod]

I don't find much problem with either 'unfathomable AI' or 'human in box' ideas, because they each can be approached or explained differently. 'human in a box' (or maybe somewhat better than human. Faster reactions/processing, the lack of organic squishy bits to be harmed by accel, etc.) could be dictated by cost, economics, or even moral issues depending on how artifical intelligences and robots are viewed in a society and/or whatever excuse or contrivance you come up with. There's no reason to assume AI or military shit is always going to be the most expensive, bleeding edge top of the line shit. Heck, something even as simple as the Dune 'human bias/fear' angle can work for limiting AI powers/capabilities. Robots might be logical but humans are not always so, and its silly to assume humans invariably stop being humans just cuz its the future.

As far as 'unfathomable' goes, I see that as just another way of saying 'godlike being', and many fiction writers (fantasy and sci fi) have written godlike entities into existence without problems and explanations in how they 'relate' (talking down to lesser beings always works.) but it may also be that the author doesn't want the 'unfathomable' to relate.. maybe they want it to be weird and alien and unknowable. Its not exactly unusual in sci fi for things to be 'alien' even if it is human made.