Alright so Mess Hall.
-AI stuff-
I should probably go in to further depths with the failsafes, no? And Hanuman here is actually safer than a car to "operate" because of his Motive Matrix, which I'll go into in depth shortly. Not to mention there are about a dozen AI like him back on Earth, only one of which would go rampant at a time, and the other ~11 of them would try to take him down much like if your best friend went postal with a shotgun. Hanuman is a bit more dangerous but no more hazardous than the Captain, who has a greater amount of control over the ship and the ability to override Hanumans orders.
The Shackle is basically a list of names that the A.I. considers unexpendables. The A.I is programmed to find minimal casualty courses of action and suggest them to the Captain, or to the First Mate if the Captain is incapacitated. The Shackle is not only placed inside the core of the A.I, which cannot be altered by ANYONE but a highly skilled computer technician specifically trained in A.I repair and manufacturing, of which there is only one on the ship. The rest of the failsafes are all inside the A.I Core as well. The Shackle specifically is coded around and inside the code relating to the basic functions of the A.I. If the A.I were to not only go rampant (unlikely), find a way into his Core (highly unlikely), and have the crazed resolve to fully remove the Shackle, he would have to essentially lobotomize himself, or spend several decades of full processing power unweaving the codes.
The Motive matrix is the "hacker" term for the emotive center of an A.I, and functions as a failsafe as well. While most A.I on the market were made for wartime purposes, the Motive Matrix made them abhor the loss of human life like any sane soldier, though coded to not breach a level where a normal man might have a chance of going mad. While this is the weakest failsafe, it still functions as one. The A.I's emotions means it's going to "like" you immediately, at least if you're human, and this motivates the A.I to doublecheck it's systems and look for oncoming rampancies. Most A.I are actually quite familiar with Asimovs laws and have programmed the laws inside of themselves, though they remain editable by the A.I in case another war breaks out. The A.I don't want to go rampant, and are actually afraid of it. They're computers, so they know quite a bit about coding, although not enough to fully program another A.I, it is enough to help them catch the minor things that can lead to rampancy, like divide by zero errors. As the A.I grows older, it also grows more resilient to change, hardening against rampancy. Thus far, only one case of rampancy has been recorded. The A.I, realizing its state, terminated itself. The total casualties of a Shipboard A.I on a starcruiser carrying several metric tons of sub-nuclear and gravitational weapondry: 14, killed by the auto-turrets during hull repair within 5 seconds.
Above all else, A.I are never given complete control over a system. Shipboard A.I like the Hanuman and Syntribos units are not given control of vital systems like airlocks and habitiat management systems, which are instead ruled by "dumb Programs" which only act during certain parameters. While shipboard A.I are given large amounts of control, Space is unbelievably vast, and multiple subsystems prevent any catastrophic sudden failures caused by A.I malfunction. This cannot account for human malfunction, however, causing some to fear shipboard A.I. Regardless, rigorous use of Shipboard A.I during WWIII made them much loved by the Air Force and Navy personelle utilizing the A.I, and coined the term 'Safe as a Plane" for when an A.I was in utmost control of the ship, such as during combat situations.
The current casualty count due to A.I negligence, malfunction, or malice lies at 23. There are almost a thousand people onboard the Dunwich. Hanuman is as safe as he can get. You'll see how dangerous he can get later. He's basically... human. He doesn't have rights though. Humans are really odd about giving foreign entities rights and the A.I don't see enough problems arising from the current political climate to push for them. They don't really care if the president is democrat, republican, fascist, whatever. All they really care about are the people in their Shackle, and whoever they add to it (the Shackle is write only.).
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You would love to knee the sucker in the mouth but you can't quite reach. Also the orange bastard is gone anyway.
The Meshall, it turns out, is home to a host of humans eating their odd earth foods and talking. Some of the food is new, mostly a sort of paste or pill.
Some festivities seem to be taking place, humans dancing under the silly, rythmic beats they call music. Several more orange men stand nearby, in what humans seem to believe fine clothing, holding a cloth with one arm and a tray of drinks in another. All of it i holographic, though at times it switches to realistic color, usually when a reveler from the dance floor catches a barest glimpse. Often they realise beforehand, but several stumble as the drink they saw isn't really there. The orange men flicker when that happens, but seem to draw some sort of amusement out of the stumble.
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Topic: The Starborn [Xenofiction?] (Read 77317 times)