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Post by drmemory on Oct 12, 2021 22:58:35 GMT
I think Aata's comment "They're just useless machines" may reveal a lot about the attitude of the court toward the robots. They don't generally let the robots do anything important, except (possibly) for the Seraphs, who seem to have their own schemes. The robots are expected to self-police (robot jail). They aren't really tightly monitored (Robot King, Boxbot, S13 and his cult). The robot in She Gave Us an Ocean was checking water-pipes, and worried that nobody else was when he was awoken - not even a full janitor job!
This stuff doesn't really make me think of an organization that highly values the AIs in their midst. The shadow men came up with a plan to embed code in many of them to act as static projectors for a force field, and I have to think the court approved, or even originated the idea. The court didn't stop functioning when so many robots were taken out of service.
The only robot that seems to have a distinct, official role is Arthur, who is actually a member of the Shadow Men (according to Juliette). I don't know how to explain this anomaly - maybe Juliette kept him with her as her lifelong companion, and he wasn't really a member in his own right?
Except for the Seraphs and Arthur, the robots pretty much seem to do menial labor, and possibly lack names beyond like model-version number. In other words, they are indeed treated like useless machines, and the court finds the idea of bridging the gap between machine body and human mind... distasteful.
Oh well, I'm sure this is all gonna blow up soon, whether Annie blurts out something inadvisable or not. Maybe it's time for Gunnerkrigg Matrix!
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Post by drmemory on Nov 28, 2021 7:17:37 GMT
Looks like we're finally going to get some answers about the robots!
Here we see a couple of New People (self-identified) out and doing things for the first time. I wonder why, and very much wonder where they've been hiding all this time! These look quite human and could probably pass out in the world, but there really aren't enough people in the court for them to hide in the crowd! There are no crowds in the court, and I have to think that if any court personnel saw one of them walking around, they would be challenged.
So here we have a Seraph robot talking to these two New People, telling them to ignore a Dover Demon (assumed to be a forest dweller). The NPs sorta dis him, saying he could have had his own new body (and mind?) if he hadn't pissed off Kat so much. She does seem pretty pissed!
Robot is behind a lot of what's been going on with Kat. When we first met him, he'd been disassembled and stored in a box. Annie saved him from that, because she needed a mechanical walking device to carry Shadow over the bridge. After he came back from the forest, he was again disassembled, and his CPU put in robot jail. Annie saved him from that as well, and Kat re-embodied him. The Seraphs evidently hunted him after that, and when they found him, took him captive for spreading misinformation and rumor, and was only released when he sold them on "Kat as Creator". Kat and Annie saved him this time. Kat knows most or all of this stuff.
What she doesn't know is that S13 is behind both the Kat Kult and the boat incident. The Seraphs were basically doing as he wanted there, to get Kat to focus on her robot projects again. Note that he didn't pay the price for that, just them... And of course, Kat knows none of this, as far as we know. I wonder if she'd still like Robot as much if she knew he is the ringleader of the Kat Kult and the one who caused a lot of the bad behavior on the part of the Seraphs?
I'm really glad to see we might finally learn more about what's been going on with the robots, both pre-Kat and recently. I still have a couple of pet theories about Kat, but no direct proof... Even if she was created by the court and/or isn't entirely human and/or is still strongly linked to all of her New People creations, Robot and his motives are still a lot more worrisome. Kat really seems to mean well and wants to help the robots. S13's motives aren't as clear to me.
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Post by drmemory on Nov 28, 2021 7:24:24 GMT
Oh right, I don't really know if S13 is male, but do not have the energy to use "he or she" all the time and "it" doesn't seem right. The only human-ish form we've seen him use is a smug angel, which looked distinctly female, but who knows! Do robots even have genders? How about New People?
We know Arthur was given male parts, and can guess that they probably function to some extent due to the whole forbidden love thing... Also, the first two NP we met certainly seem like a boy and a girl, but you can't always trust appearances!
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Post by saardvark on Dec 1, 2021 15:32:14 GMT
I posted this first on [2553], but on second thought it seems maybe more appropriate here:
The ex-robot New People are mostly organic, so presumably they need to "eat" to repair/fuel themselves. Unless Kat has a separate supply of non-doctored food, the NPs would start showing up on Court sensors, which would have to raise eyebrows and unwanted questions....
Although... Forest creatures may start eating Court food supplies spilled here and there, and thus rather confound the usefulness of the Court tracking system. They won't know what they are tracking anymore...
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Post by pyradonis on Dec 1, 2021 16:36:10 GMT
Oh right, I don't really know if S13 is male, but do not have the energy to use "he or she" all the time and "it" doesn't seem right. The only human-ish form we've seen him use is a smug angel, which looked distinctly female, but who knows! Do robots even have genders? How about New People?
We know Arthur was given male parts, and can guess that they probably function to some extent due to the whole forbidden love thing... Also, the first two NP we met certainly seem like a boy and a girl, but you can't always trust appearances!
Tom answered this in the past and said most robots, including S13, identify as male.
This was long before there were any New People, obviously. If a lot of robots are like the water pipe maintenance bot and choose a randomly generated body (it was said "many" of them made the same choice), the New People might have a more equal distribution of sexes among their bodies. An interesting question would be whether robots who identified as male before would still do so even if the random body generator gives them a biologically (as far as this word can even be applied here) female body; or whether they would accept a new identity like the female animals who became humans all seem to do (whereas of course the transition from animal to human is much bigger than from female to male...).
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Post by speedwell on Dec 1, 2021 19:35:39 GMT
Oh right, I don't really know if S13 is male, but do not have the energy to use "he or she" all the time and "it" doesn't seem right. The only human-ish form we've seen him use is a smug angel, which looked distinctly female, but who knows! Do robots even have genders? How about New People?
We know Arthur was given male parts, and can guess that they probably function to some extent due to the whole forbidden love thing... Also, the first two NP we met certainly seem like a boy and a girl, but you can't always trust appearances!
Tom answered this in the past and said most robots, including S13, identify as male.
This was long before there were any New People, obviously. If a lot of robots are like the water pipe maintenance bot and choose a randomly generated body (it was said "many" of them made the same choice), the New People might have a more equal distribution of sexes among their bodies. An interesting question would be whether robots who identified as male before would still do so even if the random body generator gives them a biologically (as far as this word can even be applied here) female body; or whether they would accept a new identity like the female animals who became humans all seem to do (whereas of course the transition from animal to human is much bigger than from female to male...).
Oddly, the individual with long curly red hair and a slightly developed bust still reads as male to me and I'm not that sure why. I am assuming that randomly assigned bodies are... random. I've thoroughly learned the lesson that in this comic bodies are no sure indicator of what a person is like.
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Post by drmemory on Dec 2, 2021 22:54:19 GMT
Tom answered this in the past and said most robots, including S13, identify as male.
This was long before there were any New People, obviously. If a lot of robots are like the water pipe maintenance bot and choose a randomly generated body (it was said "many" of them made the same choice), the New People might have a more equal distribution of sexes among their bodies. An interesting question would be whether robots who identified as male before would still do so even if the random body generator gives them a biologically (as far as this word can even be applied here) female body; or whether they would accept a new identity like the female animals who became humans all seem to do (whereas of course the transition from animal to human is much bigger than from female to male...).
Oddly, the individual with long curly red hair and a slightly developed bust still reads as male to me and I'm not that sure why. I am assuming that randomly assigned bodies are... random. I've thoroughly learned the lesson that in this comic bodies are no sure indicator of what a person is like. What about the other one? The one with green eyes? He looks male but seems a lot less... aggressive than the other (for lack of a better term).
I'm guessing they are Robot and the water pipe leak checker mainly because we haven't seen too many robots acting as individuals. We already know what Arthur's NP body looks like, and neither of these make me think of the robot king nor the weather station robot. Also, it's pretty strongly implied that they aren't Seraphs!
Also possible they aren't anyone we've seen previously, of course. "and these guys!" made me suspect they might be someone we've seen before, and the red one's knowledge about the Seraph situation made me think she has to be up on what's gone on. Generic manual labor robots don't seem like they'd be up on robot politics.
Of course, we haven't really seen what Kat tells a NP when they wake up. Maybe they get briefing packets. Or newsletters. Or maybe they are linked to her and know what she knows! Who can say?
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Post by drmemory on Dec 4, 2021 3:32:13 GMT
Another minor mystery about robots: Are there different models? I mean on the computer side, not the obviously different bodies.
We know the Seraphs are special, and at least S13 had an add-on on his CPU. The ancient golem robots certainly seemed to come in different models, but we don't know much about the ones that they created, our modern pre-NP robots. I ask because I'm wondering if they might not have different levels of compute capability - more cores, more memory, higher clock rates, that sort of thing. Did they all run the same kernel and core programming, with different applications loaded? Also, how much could they learn as they got older and gained more experience?
This question arises because of the differences between the librarian NP and the pipe inspector NP. Now that I see them, I can see that both are rather different than Arthur as well. Arthur was nearly human, personality-wise, even before getting his new form. The librarian robot seems to know a lot of what was going on, and was a bit of a people-watcher. She also knew about the Seraphs and their issues with Kat, and understood humans well enough to actually plan out a form she'd like. The pipe guy is pretty clueless so far.
And of course, S13, who started out as a Seraph, was different from any of those. He knew enough to do a fairly good job at manipulating others, started a cult, got the boat robot and other Seraphs to go along with his fairly major scheme to get Kat to work harder on robot evolution... He's not that nice of a guy really.
So how much of this is because robots are different models and/or have different capabilities? Does the court realize how unique their minds are? Consider - humans are each unique, and most assuredly not created equal. Phones or PCs of a given model, from a given manufacturer, are identical. Where do the robots fall?
Consider how different the king robot is from the others named above. I doubt that was programmed in! Does he even have a real (human-imposed) job?
Could the pipe inspector robot have been a librarian or did that require a different model? How about now, in NP form?
If there are different models or series of robots, how will that affect them when they get their NP bodies and brains? How different are their brains now? Will the differences be magnified, or will something entirely different happen? They clearly can have memories of their previous existences, but to what extent, and what does that say about them and what they will become?
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Post by mturtle7 on Dec 4, 2021 6:06:10 GMT
I think Aata's comment "They're just useless machines" may reveal a lot about the attitude of the court toward the robots. They don't generally let the robots do anything important, except (possibly) for the Seraphs, who seem to have their own schemes. The robots are expected to self-police (robot jail). They aren't really tightly monitored (Robot King, Boxbot, S13 and his cult). The robot in She Gave Us an Ocean was checking water-pipes, and worried that nobody else was when he was awoken - not even a full janitor job!
This stuff doesn't really make me think of an organization that highly values the AIs in their midst. The shadow men came up with a plan to embed code in many of them to act as static projectors for a force field, and I have to think the court approved, or even originated the idea. The court didn't stop functioning when so many robots were taken out of service.
The only robot that seems to have a distinct, official role is Arthur, who is actually a member of the Shadow Men (according to Juliette). I don't know how to explain this anomaly - maybe Juliette kept him with her as her lifelong companion, and he wasn't really a member in his own right?
Except for the Seraphs and Arthur, the robots pretty much seem to do menial labor, and possibly lack names beyond like model-version number. In other words, they are indeed treated like useless machines, and the court finds the idea of bridging the gap between machine body and human mind... distasteful.
Oh well, I'm sure this is all gonna blow up soon, whether Annie blurts out something inadvisable or not. Maybe it's time for Gunnerkrigg Matrix!
Ooh, I know I'm a bit late in responding to this, but I think it's a really interesting point and I have a bunch of stuff to add to it!
First of all, when the shield protocol took all the robots out of commission, this actually provoked the Court into tacitly admitting that they DID need and value the robots...because they immediately grabbed a bunch of robot bodies and zombified them using rudimentary AI programs. I think that's actually the most convincing piece of evidence there is for your point that the Court only cares for their menial labor, and especially doesn't care for their unorthodox methods of consciousness.
Also, an interesting thing I noticed about the Shadow Men, even back when I was first reading Spring Heeled, was that they seemed to be a fairly even mix of humans and robots...at least, the ones who showed up to the Spring Heeled Incident were. It wouldn't be too hard to speculate, however, that the robots are only there to do relatively menial labor for the humans... serving as roving surveillance devices, for example, while the humans collect and analyze the resulting data.
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Post by DonDueed on Dec 4, 2021 14:22:48 GMT
Another minor mystery about robots: Are there different models? I mean on the computer side, not the obviously different bodies. It's pretty well established that robots can learn and grow as individuals. That suggests that their "brains" might all start out in the same state, with relatively simple and basic skills and capabilities. Each would then receive some specialized training based on their role (which may be determined or limited by their physical bodies).
Thus, pipe bot would be shown how to inspect plumbing and report issues but not much more; thereafter his opportunities for further development would be quite limited since he'd spend all his time in the bowels of the Court and have limited interactions with humans or other robots.
Pink-eye, on the other hand, was trained as a librarian and had constant contact with humans and their books, giving plenty of opportunity for growth.
Then we could consider Arthur, trained as a research assistant to the Shadow Men and working closely with them and, in particular, with Juliette. It's not hard to see how he could have developed highly sophisticated awareness, enough to fall in love (and be loved).
Of course, this is all speculative and there could indeed be a range of robotic capabilities "right out of the box", but I don't see it as necessary as long as they all have learning capacity.
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Post by drmemory on Dec 5, 2021 4:43:55 GMT
Then we could consider Arthur, trained as a research assistant to the Shadow Men and working closely with them and, in particular, with Juliette. It's not hard to see how he could have developed highly sophisticated awareness, enough to fall in love (and be loved).
Arthur is part of what started me down this path. We know he went through a bunch of different bodies as he grew up.
That all seems like they um grew him (for lack of a better term) on purpose. He went through at least 26 versions that we know of! More really, as he looked quite different from MK.26 when we first met him. Also, on the Recruitment page, it is mentioned that they had been doing work as a team, which implies pretty high level functionality, to be teamed with a human scientist like that! Also, he obviously has emotions...
So clearly, Arthur grew and changed quite a bit over time, and was very high-functioning. So are the other Shadow Men robot members like that as well? Is there a Shadow Robot model or what? Are there other models?
On the other side of things, the Seraphs all look alike (except for S13, who was changed by Kat). They don't look all that different from the Golem Seraph really, just a little less gothic.
Maybe there is an age factor here, where robots can just get more mature and knowledgeable as they get older, but even so it seems like there may be different models and maybe levels of robots. Some that are built for a purpose and stay that way, modulo a bit of general learning over the years, and some that are intended to evolve and even get new bodies over time?
Arthur = Companion bot, paired with a young human from the start and updated as the human aged Seraphs = Some sort of Court Guardian bot? Static bodies, dunno about minds Pipe Inspector = Low-grade menial labor bot? Probably not high-capability, mentally, because it would just be cruel
Librarian = Higher end bot? Ship = High end bot with mobile servo bots
I'm sure there is more to this, even if "different models" is part of what we're seeing. For example, do they all start out with the same CPUs? Except Seraphs of course, as we know they have that extra add-on (or at least S13 does). Also, I believe it was mentioned that there have been previous attempts by robots to leave the court! Then there are all those CPUs in Robot Jail - it seemed like a lot of them, and there was a procedure in place to deal with S13 and put his CPU in jail...
So, to summarize, I'm wondering if there are different models of robots, if they all start out with the same CPUs and basic programming, and how much they can evolve and learn autonomously. Also, why there are some like Arthur that get so much more attention from the court.
Best guess at this time - yes to different models, same basic CPUs and starting programming, and some basic additional task programming in the case of the menial labor bots. No guess about the higher end models.
What Kat is doing may be more disruptive to the plans of the court than previously thought, if she is giving them all more intelligence and emotions and more complex minds in general. Not to mention free will.
Flashback to the cult - Is there any way to interpret "But I enjoy using my strength to help humans!" as anything other than programming?
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Post by maxptc on Dec 11, 2021 7:20:25 GMT
Flashback to the cult - Is there any way to interpret "But I enjoy using my strength to help humans!" as anything other than programming? By thinking of it the same as someone who enjoys helping animals, free will and kindness. Not saying its that, programming makes sound sense as well. But robots might just be chill and not really see an issue with how they are treated, or think we desperately need help. Also, Atta saying the robots failed and are useless(which to the best of his knowledge is a statement of fact based on the current situation, not a judgment) isn't necessarily implying he or the Shadow men always thought of them as useless or mindless, it doesn't even automatically mean he dislikes them. He could just be explaing to Shell why revealing this to Annie isn't a problem any more; the shield failed and they are just non/barely functioning machines at this point. They are probably aware of the sentience(sp?) Robots have, they aren't idiots, so maybe they were happy to have any willing and intelligent robots in the organization. They were just also willing to sacrifice them all for the "greater good". The Shadowmen being willing to sacrifice a large force of robots doesn't necessarily mean they wrote the entire species off as stupid or useless, just that they are cold-blooded and goal oriented.
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Post by pyradonis on Dec 11, 2021 13:25:51 GMT
Flashback to the cult - Is there any way to interpret "But I enjoy using my strength to help humans!" as anything other than programming? By thinking of it the same as someone who enjoys helping animals, free will and kindness. Not saying its that, programming makes sound sense as well. But robots might just be chill and not really see an issue with how they are treated, or think we desperately need help. I think this page sums it up. The robots yearn to be active, and see it as a lucky coincidence that the humans of the Court can use their help. While being aware they are usually not friends with the humans they don't see any problem with fulfilling their wishes, because what they first and foremost want is having something to do. Of course we don't know whether S13's preachings have changed some robots' attitude regarding this.
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Post by blahzor on Dec 11, 2021 13:33:16 GMT
it's hilarious that it took me til now to notice that Robot doesn't have the purple arm still
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Post by drmemory on Dec 13, 2021 7:45:20 GMT
Hmmm. The court (well really, Diego) created them, and provided their initial programming. I'd still very much like to know how much of their behavior is programmed. The golems seemed to have emotions and a lot of autonomy! Did they also have free will? Did Diego create life? The golem robots had CPUs, or brain chips or whatever, and there were clearly different models. I get the sense that each was a unique creation. I can't remember seeing two that look too much alike! Even the little ones on his shelves were each unique. When they created their successors, they didn't know how to do what Diego did, so they made less capable models, and it looks like they weren't nearly as unique. The Seraphs are a glaring example of this - they appear identical to each other, physically. So how many different models did the golems create as their successors?
I still think the non-golem robots were created as slaves, but don't know to what degree. Frankly, I don't remember seeing a lot of creative thinking going on until recently and then only in special cases (Arthur and S13 specifically). On the other hand, there was enough uncontrolled thought and emotion going on to require a procedure for what you're supposed to do if a robot develops a crush on you. This makes me think of the law of unintended consequences.
What did Diego really do? Did he know what he was doing, or was part of it unintentional? What did the golem robots really do in their attempt to produce successors? Is a desire to be active core programming? How about serving humans? Perhaps slavery is too strong of a word, but programming is certainly applicable!
If the ether is mostly a sea of souls, and Diego used the ether to power his golem, did some humanity seep in? Life? That first golem robot Kat woke up claimed they were dead when not moving, but clearly it isn't the same as human death. Actually, it's interesting that they are fully active as soon as the shunts are installed - do they each have a little ether stored internally, or are they linked to the Ether?
Regardless, there are big differences between the golem robots and their children. I want to say that the golems were living beings, at least in part, and the non-golems were mechanical creations, purely using science and engineering. But the NP are different - Kat took minds from the mechanical versions and put them in ether-powered bodies.
I wonder what Kat really did, by doing this?
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Post by pyradonis on Dec 13, 2021 13:21:55 GMT
Speaking about being programmed - I had a thought. Aren't all living beings, humans included, "programmed" to a degree, i.e. through instinct? When a baby is born, isn't there already a driver installed that initializes breathing? And for higher level programming, aren't (almost all) living beings driven to protect their own life, seek out the things that satisfy certain needs (shelter, food, water, light...)?
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Post by speedwell on Dec 14, 2021 18:37:30 GMT
Speaking about being programmed - I had a thought. Aren't all living beings, humans included, "programmed" to a degree, i.e. through instinct? When a baby is born, isn't there already a driver installed that initializes breathing? And for higher level programming, aren't (almost all) living beings driven to protect their own life, seek out the things that satisfy certain needs (shelter, food, water, light...)? Yes, indeed, and it's not merely physical. As a middle-aged autistic woman who practices EFT "tapping" and Jungian-style Tarot reading in conjunction with CBT and Socratic methods in the context of providing counseling, I am intimately familiar with how narrowly our perceptive faculties are defined and how similar are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of what we perceive. The bulk of my (informal) practice is devoted to helping people sort their input and "write it into their personal story". As a "cat mom" I am able to successfully make requests of my two cats in natural language almost invariably without raising my voice, because my expectations of cats are reasonable and I work with their inclinations within their capabilities. Principles like these may be applied, with modifications, to anything with self-awareness (a larger category than anyone suspects, and that includes even simple systems capable of modifying themselves based on feedback). Things and people with that capacity are what we mean when we speak of "sentience". People (we no longer refer to them as "things" at this level) who possess the ability to process and communicate at, above, or very near human level are better described as "sapient". I'm going a bit afield here though and I understand your point as being, expanded, that systems that operate in a common environment will optimally function in similar ways, whether we observe that environment in a purely physical or in a cultural sense. I agree.
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Post by drmemory on Feb 20, 2022 21:03:59 GMT
Some of the questions raised in this thread may be about to become much more important, due to current events. All of a sudden there are a lot of robots transformed into new people, and we've never understood what kind of rules they live by. We don't know exactly what robot jail IS, or who decides who gets put in there, or what happens to them exactly...
In short, we never really found out what rules the robots lived by, nor what rules the forest elves lived by, other than "we like to help humans" and "we knew to avoid Coyote and Ysengrin".
Anything short of Loup immediately revealing himself after this may well involve a confrontation between the elves and the robots, or maybe between S13 and the elders, with Kat possibly stuck in the middle. Maybe with Shadow Men or ex-Shadow Men like Aata and Shell in the mix.
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