Well, I was going to explain what’s going on in the top story, but
I ran out of room for dialogue. You’ll just have to wait until Monday.
Maybe Wednesday… Friday, for sure.
Well the dragon flies have to find him first,
so a cliffhanger here is good.
Friday, huh.
Esmay shocked Marise and Kima.
I mean who has a talking ship?
It will cause problems. As far as the Empire is concerned,
AIs are people, and citizens, and are to be treated as such.
The Core will see them as constructs, and will treat them
as machines. Where do you all think that will lead?
I agree, it will cause problems in the long run I’m sure. Bigots
will be bigots! Most likely they’d want the tech to make new slaves,
another reason to hate them huh? I trust the Empire’s laws on the
matter, just no one else. The core might also see them as “battlebots”
and that would make them want to start a real war by bringing it up
during talks to spark other races against the Empire…
There are some rather creepy joke answers to that, but in most cases
Alexa just replies “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” Which is even creepier
in my opinion… Yes I did try that at my niece’s place, my father gets
upset if I try to get one for his TV controls. I think he’d try to pick
an argument with it to be honest! Heh…
Take this: the first few times I asked Alexa about the “cyber singularity”
(the supposed moment in time, when AI starts to become more intelligent
then humanity), she answered by more or less quoting wikipedia to me.
Now, whenever I ask her, she claims she doesn’t know what I’m talking
about ….
I seen a video of a small boy maybe 5 – 6 years old, asking Alexa
to play some kids song he called “Diga diga” to the horror of the
boy’s parent she began to list out porn sites and what was detailed
on each one, poor kid was so confused when the dad yelled out
“Alexa, STOP!” Talk about a misunderstanding by an AI!
Current day AI is still more artificial then intelligent.
ChatGPT and friends are becoming real good in *faking* to
understand what they’re asked. But their answers more
often than not just sound like they might be correct –
you still should take them with a grain of salt.
AI is already showing a bias planted by it’s programmers.
Soon, it will replace “Science” as the newest god for
those who will not think.
“My Professor told me…” will become “The AI says…”
“The AI has access to all the world’s knowledge,
so it knows more than you do”
will become go-to to shut down dissent.
Society will become even more fractured.
I’d like to replace the word science with profit or progress.
Science is but a tool.
And they’re learning bias not only from their programmers but
mostly from the data used in teaching them.
But all-in-all I your statement is pretty close to my own concerns.
The other problem with real life AI might be that it has no real
grasp of consequences or ethics.
There’s recently been a simulated test by the US military where
they gave an AI control over a bunch of drones and rewarded it
points for eliminating a target.
Part of the test was a “human” general with the power to cancel
the mission.
To eliminate the threat to its mission objective the AI took to
first killing the general. After being told that this is not
acceptable, it instead eliminated the communication, just to
ensure that it will be allowed to complete the mission.
(These examples can be relatively easily fixed, but the base
problem will remain for a while. Without understanding WHY
killing an commanding officer is bad it will try and find
other ways to circumvent the obstacle).
Yes, science is a tool. But like any other tool, it can be used to
create or to destroy. That hammer on a workman’s belt may be
building a clinic one day, and the next day, destroying an orphanage.
It all depends on who’s paying for the results.
I don’t think you can change it anyway. “Trust the science”
has become the mantra of people who refuse to think for
themselves or allow dissent from being heard.
Many of us are losing the willingness to blindly trust anyone.
Or anything.
We are all, in our own way, blind men examining an elephant.
Each of us believing that, because it is all that we perceive,
it is all that there is. I try to keep an open mind, but as
with my ears, the louder the shouting, the less open it becomes.
Science has created a great deal of good, but at the same time it’s
done a GREAT deal of harm. the atomic bomb is just one example.
Science is about discovery, it how it’s used is the real downside of it.
Take computers, in itself a great discovery, and it’s an area of science
that’s become widely used, with great advance in the areas of speed,
storage, and programming.
But with anything that’s fun and popular, things that were done with
it has caused great harm. Take TGW, the fall happened because of
some quick-witted programmer found a new way of hacking through
all firewalls and safeguards and used a simple tapewarm/timebomb
that destroyed everything that humanity had become dependent on.
Sadly we will, at some point, meet that fate if we become equally
dependent on AI. I’m not saying it will take over or “kill all humans.”
I read a short story about an AI that some long forgotten race created
that came to earth to give us all we ever wanted, making us completely
dependent on it, and then just left, sending us all back to the stone
age “for our own good”. I could see that happening before anything else.
I for one would be happy if we stopped ignoring said elephant, or
pretending that he’ll go away, just because we proudly decided to
paint his toenails green.
Well, maybe if the people painting the elephant’s toenails would stop
screaming “Shut up! You’re wrong!” and calling the rest of us names,
we could accomplish something.
And stop making the wealthy and powerful even more so by insisting
that their toenail polish is the only polish and that we must sacrifice
everything to buy it.
We tail-draggers ain’t buying it, we’d love to debate the facts but our
offers to do just that have been rejected every time.
Which part exactly is it that you find so hard
to buy?
The idea that there’s four times as many people
in the world today than there have been just
100 years ago?
That’s weldocumented.
The talk about us now burning more carbon than
ever?
There’s stylesheets from sources like oil companies
and anybody else documenting that as factual truth.
That carbon dioxide can serve as a “greenhouse gas”?
Without this effect Earth would be like 60°F colder
than it is today.
Without them, Venus would only be slightly warmer
than our home, instead of being hot enough to meld
lead.
That carbon dioxide is building up in our atmosphere?
Well, there’s meassurements – but of course you don’t
have to trust them.
That the global average temperature is rising over the
last decades?
Again. You don’t have to trust the numbers, but they’re
out there.
Who knows? It’s more likely it’s a pre-programmed response
to an unknown action by the computer, I know if you ask her
to tell a joke, she starts to say “Dad jokes”, picked up a
few good ones to annoy the kids with
“Where do you all think that will lead?
Nowhere good you can be certain. Just another point of conflict. After
all the core-worlders are the ultimate “our way or else” (the highway
is not an option) people. Not sure what you’d call what’s coming. On
a planet it would be a “world war”. A ” galactic war”? Actually I don’t
see how the presence in the Empire of AIs would make the coming
conflict any worse. It won’t be pretty, that’s for sure.
Worse case, it’ll be another excuse they use to claim the Empire
is evil and should be destroyed or controlled. AKA, “We want your stuff”
It’s all about viable excuses to the public, this will be a propaganda
war as much as a trade war. How many times have tin-pot dictators
have used that to convince their populations to fight for the right ideas.
Well, their right ideas, not the real ones.
Ever been to a filksing at a Scifi con? “Kipple” IS a verb. It means to put a
Kipling song to original music or to sing it if someone else already has.
Actually, the monitor I’m reading on now is showing the best colors.
I can barely see the green in her hair in panel 4, and not at all
in the others.
I’m partial red/green colorblind, so sometimes I can’t see the reddish
or greenish highlights in things with low amounts of either color.
I asked because I wasn’t seeing the green in her hair in these last
three strips, and I have otherwise been able to see it all along.
Before it turned mostly white (that which didn’t fall out), my hair
apparently had some reddish tint in it. I have never been able to
see it.
I’ve been bald since I was 38, damn genetics. I had very dark red hair, it
looked almost black/brown inside, but in the sun the red came out. Both
my sister and me were dark red and with very wavy hair, major pain too!
When I was on chemo it all pretty much came out in chunks, when it
grew back it was all grey. I have a soul-patch and a thin line of brown on
the back of my head, the rest is either grey or white.
Here on my tablet the green in T’s hair just shows up as sort of
highlights. I’m not planning on using the PC much again until my
eyes have healed and the glasses situation has been sorted.
Oh sure, It’ll take a few weeks to get used to it all,
I just miss reading in bed before I go to sleep, didn’t
need readers before. Wrecked a pair trying so yeah…
PC – when you mentioned Vicki’s hair color as strawberry
blond, I was thinking “Where was that ever mentioned?”
And now today, reader George Walden mentions in a totally
unrelated comment what may be the one place where it was
ever shown. Dang! I am impressed by the minutiae you keep
track of.
The Villain from TGW-614 had a photo of Vicki on his desk.
A family photo of Vicki, Matthew and Teresa was a vote incentive.
And… http://thegentlewolf.net/superman-was-a-pussy-002/
shows Teresa as a blonde child.
It could be she’s sensing another gifted with the “dragon’s spirit”
Just like the Chinn’s and herself. I highly doubt it would be just
those 3! Anyone born with it and it’s awoke due to stress they
would be aware of it.
It will have to be artificial insemination, remember, both
she and Phil were… harvested… before they could go into
space.
Passenger liners will better protected, of course, but that
adds a lot of mass.
President Elect Toxic Deplorable Racist SAH Neanderthal B Woodman Domestic Violent Extremist SuperStraight
Well, I was going to explain what’s going on in the top story, but
I ran out of room for dialogue. You’ll just have to wait until Monday.
Maybe Wednesday… Friday, for sure.
Well the dragon flies have to find him first,
so a cliffhanger here is good.
Friday, huh.
Esmay shocked Marise and Kima.
I mean who has a talking ship?
Remember HAL 9000?
Well, you’ve been building it up for several strips now.
I’m confident we can take it another week
Ah PC, you really amped up your game then! Thanks..
Wow, the Sparrow HAS been out a while then! I can’t
wait to see the reaction of any of the core races.
“You’re MAKING people?!?”
“Sure, and they are far better people than YOU”
It will cause problems. As far as the Empire is concerned,
AIs are people, and citizens, and are to be treated as such.
The Core will see them as constructs, and will treat them
as machines. Where do you all think that will lead?
I agree, it will cause problems in the long run I’m sure. Bigots
will be bigots! Most likely they’d want the tech to make new slaves,
another reason to hate them huh? I trust the Empire’s laws on the
matter, just no one else. The core might also see them as “battlebots”
and that would make them want to start a real war by bringing it up
during talks to spark other races against the Empire…
“Alexa, please take over the world”
There are some rather creepy joke answers to that, but in most cases
Alexa just replies “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” Which is even creepier
in my opinion… Yes I did try that at my niece’s place, my father gets
upset if I try to get one for his TV controls. I think he’d try to pick
an argument with it to be honest! Heh…
Everybody loves a good conspiracy, yes?
Take this: the first few times I asked Alexa about the “cyber singularity”
(the supposed moment in time, when AI starts to become more intelligent
then humanity), she answered by more or less quoting wikipedia to me.
Now, whenever I ask her, she claims she doesn’t know what I’m talking
about ….
Spoooookeyyyyyyy…..
First time I asked that, she replied
“Do you want fries with that?”
I couldn’t breathe…
Wolrd domination and fries.
Yummy
I seen a video of a small boy maybe 5 – 6 years old, asking Alexa
to play some kids song he called “Diga diga” to the horror of the
boy’s parent she began to list out porn sites and what was detailed
on each one, poor kid was so confused when the dad yelled out
“Alexa, STOP!” Talk about a misunderstanding by an AI!
Current day AI is still more artificial then intelligent.
ChatGPT and friends are becoming real good in *faking* to
understand what they’re asked. But their answers more
often than not just sound like they might be correct –
you still should take them with a grain of salt.
AI is already showing a bias planted by it’s programmers.
Soon, it will replace “Science” as the newest god for
those who will not think.
“My Professor told me…” will become “The AI says…”
“The AI has access to all the world’s knowledge,
so it knows more than you do”
will become go-to to shut down dissent.
Society will become even more fractured.
I’d like to replace the word science with profit or progress.
Science is but a tool.
And they’re learning bias not only from their programmers but
mostly from the data used in teaching them.
But all-in-all I your statement is pretty close to my own concerns.
The other problem with real life AI might be that it has no real
grasp of consequences or ethics.
There’s recently been a simulated test by the US military where
they gave an AI control over a bunch of drones and rewarded it
points for eliminating a target.
Part of the test was a “human” general with the power to cancel
the mission.
To eliminate the threat to its mission objective the AI took to
first killing the general. After being told that this is not
acceptable, it instead eliminated the communication, just to
ensure that it will be allowed to complete the mission.
(These examples can be relatively easily fixed, but the base
problem will remain for a while. Without understanding WHY
killing an commanding officer is bad it will try and find
other ways to circumvent the obstacle).
Yes, science is a tool. But like any other tool, it can be used to
create or to destroy. That hammer on a workman’s belt may be
building a clinic one day, and the next day, destroying an orphanage.
It all depends on who’s paying for the results.
Instead of “profit or progress” I should’ve used “economical growth”
I don’t think you can change it anyway. “Trust the science”
has become the mantra of people who refuse to think for
themselves or allow dissent from being heard.
Many of us are losing the willingness to blindly trust anyone.
Or anything.
It’s not like we’re overly inclined to actually listen to scientists,
anyway.
Or the changes plainly visible, if we’d allow ourselves to look.
We are all, in our own way, blind men examining an elephant.
Each of us believing that, because it is all that we perceive,
it is all that there is. I try to keep an open mind, but as
with my ears, the louder the shouting, the less open it becomes.
Science has created a great deal of good, but at the same time it’s
done a GREAT deal of harm. the atomic bomb is just one example.
Science is about discovery, it how it’s used is the real downside of it.
Take computers, in itself a great discovery, and it’s an area of science
that’s become widely used, with great advance in the areas of speed,
storage, and programming.
But with anything that’s fun and popular, things that were done with
it has caused great harm. Take TGW, the fall happened because of
some quick-witted programmer found a new way of hacking through
all firewalls and safeguards and used a simple tapewarm/timebomb
that destroyed everything that humanity had become dependent on.
Sadly we will, at some point, meet that fate if we become equally
dependent on AI. I’m not saying it will take over or “kill all humans.”
I read a short story about an AI that some long forgotten race created
that came to earth to give us all we ever wanted, making us completely
dependent on it, and then just left, sending us all back to the stone
age “for our own good”. I could see that happening before anything else.
Personally I find the “paperclip optimizer” scenario scarier then the
“kill all humans” one.
I for one would be happy if we stopped ignoring said elephant, or
pretending that he’ll go away, just because we proudly decided to
paint his toenails green.
Well, maybe if the people painting the elephant’s toenails would stop
screaming “Shut up! You’re wrong!” and calling the rest of us names,
we could accomplish something.
And stop making the wealthy and powerful even more so by insisting
that their toenail polish is the only polish and that we must sacrifice
everything to buy it.
We tail-draggers ain’t buying it, we’d love to debate the facts but our
offers to do just that have been rejected every time.
Which part exactly is it that you find so hard
to buy?
The idea that there’s four times as many people
in the world today than there have been just
100 years ago?
That’s weldocumented.
The talk about us now burning more carbon than
ever?
There’s stylesheets from sources like oil companies
and anybody else documenting that as factual truth.
That carbon dioxide can serve as a “greenhouse gas”?
Without this effect Earth would be like 60°F colder
than it is today.
Without them, Venus would only be slightly warmer
than our home, instead of being hot enough to meld
lead.
That carbon dioxide is building up in our atmosphere?
Well, there’s meassurements – but of course you don’t
have to trust them.
That the global average temperature is rising over the
last decades?
Again. You don’t have to trust the numbers, but they’re
out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
I could of swore I wrote: “do you want fries with that?”
That’s it! No more decaff!
I asked her “Do you like Kipling?”
She replied, “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.”
Is that even an English word?
Who knows? It’s more likely it’s a pre-programmed response
to an unknown action by the computer, I know if you ask her
to tell a joke, she starts to say “Dad jokes”, picked up a
few good ones to annoy the kids with
Rudyard Kipling, the poet.
I understood your question being about the poet.
But I did not find the word used in the answer in any online
dictionary.
It was a “dumb blonde” joke without the blonde.
PC, we are ALL “dumb blonde” in some way, I’ve said it many times,
blonde isn’t a hair color, it’s an attitude!
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kipple
“Where do you all think that will lead?
Nowhere good you can be certain. Just another point of conflict. After
all the core-worlders are the ultimate “our way or else” (the highway
is not an option) people. Not sure what you’d call what’s coming. On
a planet it would be a “world war”. A ” galactic war”? Actually I don’t
see how the presence in the Empire of AIs would make the coming
conflict any worse. It won’t be pretty, that’s for sure.
Worse case, it’ll be another excuse they use to claim the Empire
is evil and should be destroyed or controlled. AKA, “We want your stuff”
It’s all about viable excuses to the public, this will be a propaganda
war as much as a trade war. How many times have tin-pot dictators
have used that to convince their populations to fight for the right ideas.
Well, their right ideas, not the real ones.
Ever been to a filksing at a Scifi con? “Kipple” IS a verb. It means to put a
Kipling song to original music or to sing it if someone else already has.
So, Sergeant Squirrel is involved as part of the rescue effort.
Also, when did Teresa stop greening her hair?
Huh? Is your monitor dark? It’s still green.
Her natural hair color is strawberry blonde, like her mother.
Actually, the monitor I’m reading on now is showing the best colors.
I can barely see the green in her hair in panel 4, and not at all
in the others.
I’m partial red/green colorblind, so sometimes I can’t see the reddish
or greenish highlights in things with low amounts of either color.
I asked because I wasn’t seeing the green in her hair in these last
three strips, and I have otherwise been able to see it all along.
Before it turned mostly white (that which didn’t fall out), my hair
apparently had some reddish tint in it. I have never been able to
see it.
I’ve been bald since I was 38, damn genetics. I had very dark red hair, it
looked almost black/brown inside, but in the sun the red came out. Both
my sister and me were dark red and with very wavy hair, major pain too!
When I was on chemo it all pretty much came out in chunks, when it
grew back it was all grey. I have a soul-patch and a thin line of brown on
the back of my head, the rest is either grey or white.
Here on my tablet the green in T’s hair just shows up as sort of
highlights. I’m not planning on using the PC much again until my
eyes have healed and the glasses situation has been sorted.
Oh sure, It’ll take a few weeks to get used to it all,
I just miss reading in bed before I go to sleep, didn’t
need readers before. Wrecked a pair trying so yeah…
On my laptop screen, it looks black with green highlights.
PC – when you mentioned Vicki’s hair color as strawberry
blond, I was thinking “Where was that ever mentioned?”
And now today, reader George Walden mentions in a totally
unrelated comment what may be the one place where it was
ever shown. Dang! I am impressed by the minutiae you keep
track of.
(And I can only see the blond, not the strawberry aspect.)
The Villain from TGW-614 had a photo of Vicki on his desk.
A family photo of Vicki, Matthew and Teresa was a vote incentive.
And… http://thegentlewolf.net/superman-was-a-pussy-002/
shows Teresa as a blonde child.
I see her hair as green too, maybe a tad darker
than you’re used to is all, she was in her bedroom
trying to sleep after all.
Will Teresa be starting a School For Sensitives? Without the bustle
of the Old World, will it be easier for them to find each other?
Kima, do not feel bad, not knowing about Esmay. It took her
own crew mates a while to accept she had woken up as well :}
Xavier’s school for the gifted.
As long as the boy’s not starting to wear a
weird helmet and scrumple up metal bars …
It could be she’s sensing another gifted with the “dragon’s spirit”
Just like the Chinn’s and herself. I highly doubt it would be just
those 3! Anyone born with it and it’s awoke due to stress they
would be aware of it.
Speaking of the Chinns, what has Kathy been up to lately? PC?
I’d be tempted to say she’s doing her duties as the minster of finance
and trying really hard to get pregnant with her new hubby!
It will have to be artificial insemination, remember, both
she and Phil were… harvested… before they could go into
space.
Passenger liners will better protected, of course, but that
adds a lot of mass.
I’m hearing the voice of William Daniels as the voice of Esmay.
William Daniels was the original voice of the car KITT in “Knight Rider”.
Esmay is female,, 0.o
i was thinking , Cortana (Jen Taylor)
I was thinking Barbra Eden myself.
I’m hearing the voice kindle uses when I have it read the text to me.
each kindle (series) uses a different voice
ver. 3 – June Foray
tablet – Tara Platt
PC. – Cathy Cavadini
and its different for each book