Another layer of the onion finally peeling back. Oh my, yes. Not to mention, we finally get to see Mike “naked” as it were – this is what an Echo-class Rumbler looks like on the inside; Mike’s “brain” if you will.
Thanks, everyone, for the good wishes concerning the car accident. It was really just bumps and scrapes, actually, and a lot of mental stress. Had a nasty bruise on my shoulder from the seatbelt, and so forth, but really, the car did what it was designed to do, and protected me from injury. They’re repairing it now, which will take a few weeks, apparently. Fortunately, the other guy finally surfaced to corroborate my account of the event; my thanks to him for doing the honest thing, and my gratitude that he wasn’t injured, either. So the insurance company is doing the rest, and I’m not liable to pay for any of it. And a good thing, too – it’d be more than I could afford, for sure. He really whacked me good.
Anyhow, another week, and another page, and another… yeah, I better just go to bed. Oo-wah.
All the best, folks!
That seems like a rather complicated ‘Prime Function’, open to a lot of interpretation.
And this is the first time I’ve ever been a first commenter! Woo Hoo! 😀
Yet, how typical of common sense being overtaken by political rhetoric.
I’m getting flashbacks to an episode of Babylon 5, where an ancient biomechanical weapon reactivates on the station, bonding with an archiologist and starts blasting everything in sight, because the weapon had been programmed to protect the race that created it, but it had been programmed to only take orders from ‘True’ members of that race. As a result of the absurd politcal garbage they’d been programmed with, the weapons identified EVERYTHING as the enemy, including their own people and exterminated them.
Yeah, me too.
I AM NOMAD. I AM PERFECT. THAT WHICH IS IMPERFECT MUST BE STERILIZED.
(BLAH BLAH BLAH)
KIRK: That’s three errors you’ve made NOMAD ….
NOMAD: Error? Error?
Kirk: You’ve also screwed up by not realizing you’ve screwed up. That’s another screw up
NOMAD : Fiiiiz, pop, B-zzz, smoke…..error….error …
Hmmm, interesting. I wonder if Haulley is going to peel apart Mike’s orders and interpretation of them to show Mike the problems in his very loose interpretation of his programming and how Mike will react to that.
I think he’s going to find out. 😉
This strikes me as a really, really bad idea.
The smart thing for Haulley to do would be to change the subject ASAP and hope Mike is capable of forgetting about that line of inquiry.
Mike is obviously operating outside the bounds of his original design and programming already. He is still following his original directives, though.
Now Haulley is going to point out that these directives are inherently flawed.
Which, if he manages to convince our favorite little weapon of mass destruction, might very well lead Mike to discard said directives and come up with something else instead.
Right now, Haulley still has a very, very tenuous hold over Mike’s behavior. If he takes this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, however, that’s about to evaporate.
Or MIKE rationalizes in a different direction (there might be more than one Kind of “doing the right thing”), thus causing the conflict with Haulley.
I think this may be the first time I’ve actually been a little afraid of Mike… They’re both playing a pretty dangerous game right now, eh?
Well, digging into anyone’s mind is a dangerous proposition. More so, Mike, though – no way to know if his mind is working anything like you expect it to.
“list your Prime Directives”
Directive 1: Protect the Innocent
Directive 2: Serve the Public Trust
Directive 3: Uphold the Law
Directive 4: Classified
Any attempt to nuke a senior OVC employee results in shutdown.
“Open the pod-bay doors, Mike.”
“I’m sorry, Colonel; I can’t do that.” 😀
“There’s a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.” – Commander William Adama, Battlestar Galactica
Last panel with Haulley looking at MIKE’s brain-box got me all thinking about Bender checking out some robot-blueprint-porn.
xp
Oh man, check out the processors on HER!
Yeah I got an upgrade for ya…!
Okay, this is going to get out of hand.
On a different note… anyone here ever read Asimov’s “Naked Sun”. It contains a nice paradoxon about the robotic laws and what happens if a robot actually violates them [unintended].
All of Asimov’s Robot series are excellent for that reason – explorations of the logic problems inherent in robotics. The robots always seem to be trying to do their best to interpret conflicting orders.
I can’t remember the name of it, but there is a good old Science Fiction story in which the Robots (that have ‘Rhodium’ motors inside that go forever :- D ) take the Three laws a little too seriously and won’t let humans do anything dangerous, not even cutlery.. Can someone remember for me?
Is this going to end in some sort of logic paradox that gives M1E pause?
I guess it’ll depend on how comfortable Mike is with illogic and foolish emotions. If you will.
“Foreign AND Domestic”… I think that one’s gonna bite Haulley in the ass.
Way to go pulling himself together and attempting to take charge of the situation after scary-time, though.
In the end, though, I think the M1E is smarter than the meat-sack.
The draw back of giving a machine a self defense ability. So far none of ours has that programming—-yet. Without some loyalty to the humans old Mike killed his crew in order to continue with the mission. No hard feelings, it was just programming. They wanted to abort. He saw no good in it so dead they became. Without very precise limits the machine, or a human being, could take it to areas no thought of to those giving the orders.
Unfortunately it would seem that autonomous weapon systems are not that far away. As weapons they will for sure not follow Asimovs robot laws, and in addition where was the last time a critical computer system had a “glitch” anyway.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across “Autonomous weapons: States must address major humanitarian, ethical challenges” on the International Committee of the Red Cross web site.
Though the title unfortunately says more than the content it is a slightly scary thought with movies like the Terminator movies and Screamers in mind.