Comic for Friday, April 26th, 2019
…yeah this page took longer than I planned. I hadn’t planned on drawing the wide shot of the lab, and even if it’s… well, what it is, that sort of thing takes me a long time as I’m terrible at background art. While one would think that I’d make some progress in the… what, 5 years…?… I’ve been drawing this comic, it turns out when you avoid something like the plague you don’t magically get that much better at it. I wouldn’t think too much about what’s there for the most part, I hadn’t planned on doing a wide shot of it, but decided I sort of needed to here.
I had also intended to leave the last 4 panels completely black besides Miko’s eyes in the last two and the magic sparkles, but it just looked cheap and lazy, so I decided to draw the characters, but that means that this ended up being like… .75 pages instead of half a page.
Should have an update on future stuff next week. If I end up staying at my job, I’m going to be going to a Monday/Friday update schedule I think. The reality of it is most of my comic drawing time is on Sunday, so while Monday/Thursday works as a release schedule, Monday/Friday gives me more time to complete the second comic assuming I finish the first one Sunday and at least sketch the second one. It won’t matter if I find time to get a buffer again, but running without a buffer that might be more stable.
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I’ll admit, I did not expect you to kill off a main character. I especially did not expect you to kill off Mium (whom I expected to be near-immortal)…
Mium isn’t dead, not even close to it. But if anyone but Miko had managed to shut down lab 5, I think it would have ended badly for that person.
Mium isn’t dead, he just lost a primary node, though. I suspect he will be testy until someone gets him more processing power.
What is going on!?!?
You don’t cry when you delete your OS. You cry when you go back to reinstall your OS and the digital rights media insists that your license key is wrong. Why is Miko crying over software that should be running regularly scheduled backups? Just what is lab 5?
What is lab 5? Miko’s friend.
She just hurt Mium by deleting one of his oldest processes. He’ll recover, but it makes sense she would be upset over that. Mium is her friend.
Mium isn’t dead, but *this* Mium *is* dead.
I don’t understand how *this* Mium can be dead. Mium is a computer program, right? You simply back him up and reinstall him later.
If Mium (or at least lab 5 Mium) is only a computer program, Miko shouldn’t be crying. She should be saying: “Mium – run unscheduled incremental backup. When done, terminate kernel.” And then after dragons are done hitting things, Miko would say: “Lab 5, restore kernel from backup using most recent copy.” Poof, Lab 5 Mium is back.
But Miko is crying. I think something that cannot be restored from a backup just died…. Have we ever been told that SMAIs can be backed up and restored?
Unrelated, but I have a problem with SMAI. It’s unpronounceable. I keep turning it into SAMI. It almost the same thing (self altering machine intelligence), and it’s much easier to say. Don’t mind me, I’m just being a bit picky in that I suspect the average person would force the acronym into SAMI. No matter how hard everyone in the SMAI field insisted they stop. After all, we’ve managed to butcher so many other words. Like decimate.
Wait! I just thought of something. What if Miko isn’t crying for Lab 5.
Possibility 1: What if she is crying because viMium was forced into a painful decision. What if viMium and Miko had to perform an action ‘against’ the Mium network to save everyone. And that triggers a protocol that will prevent viMium from ever re-synchronizing with the Mium network? In other words, viMium is crying because he is leaving his family and won’t be able to come back home.
Possibility 2: Mium is going to come back, but Miko won’t. Mium tried to stop her because of ‘unacceptable risk’. I initially turned that into a maybe 25% concussion type risk. But what if it’s more like a 90% death risk. Miko is crying because she just said goodbye to her best friend and is now going to sacrifice herself.
Oh no. Suddenly, that makes way too much sense. She’s going to overclock her implant. And her brain is going to fry.
I remain convinced that Miko is crying because she just injured her friend Mium.
And I pronounce SMAI as “Smigh” or “S-My”, to rhyme with “it’s my”. No driving reason why, that’s just how it pieces itself together in my head.
Being German, that’s certainly the obvious standard pronunciation. Nothing even remotely difficult there.
This part of Mium won’t be restored from the backup, because this part could only run here, and it’s going to be running viMium.
She didn’t have time for the backup. She may not have had time for this particular stunt. But by doing it this way, the rest of Mium probably thinks that Miko killed the kernel to be able to do the request she specifically made, which will be less of an alert level than if she told Mium, “I’m going to install an instance of you that you don’t know about and aren’t allowed to have exist.”
It’s probably not quite as much the difference between pressing an elevator call button and telling them, “Hi, I’m the repair guy from Otis. Just checking to see if this stuff is working right. Can you tell me where I am?” and telling them, “Hi, I’m elite Chinese spy. I’m stealing all your corporate secret, but got bored, so decided tell you know I’m here.” But she had to set off an alert to do what she wanted, because blank labs aren’t just lying around everywhere.
That actually gets really close to some Star Trek teleporter philosophy: if you destroy a person in their entirety and reconstitute them exactly, are they the same person? Similarly, if you delete an AI and restore it from backup, is it the same AI?
Most people will be inclined to say “yes” initially. However, if you change the parameters of the question slightly, the tendency reverses. Imagine a less effective teleporter: it can’t instantaneously create a copy of you, there is a speed-of-light delay. Worse, there are teleporter accidents, so after you are scanned into the system and your data is transmitted to a distant location so your clone can be made, you have to wait a week for confirmation that the copy was created successfully. After that point, if you were to return to the teleporter for disintegration, is that murder? You’ve kept existing for an entire week, and your copy is already existing just fine despite you still existing.
This is the sort of evidence that can reasonably lead to a view that a copy of someone isn’t that person, even if it exactly is (or at least starts that way). There’s further down this rabbit hole you can go. If you follow it all the way down, it’s pretty easy to come to the conclusion that people don’t exist, and the identity of a person is just an abstraction we use to help our tiny human minds function (said minds *also* being abstractions).
So if you want to say that Mium is still alive or that one of the Miums has died, etc… well, it’s really all a matter of perspective. I would posit that Miko’s perspective is one of the ones in which Mium has been irrevocably harmed by her actions.
Okay, PastUtopia. This one counts as at least one page. I want to see the comic book where that fits onto 3/4 of a page. That is basically a full page panel with 8 other panels scattered about.
I am never going to complain about more content, but we need to call a page a page here.
Yup. I’d call that at least 1 1/2 pages.
I feel like Miko should be called “little miss plot development”.
Every time she shows up, crazy shit starts going down.
That’s probably because she’s not the focus of the story at all. So she’s only appearing when whatever she’s doing is too important for the story, to not have her appear.
Wow, this just blows my mind. Is her fix to nuke MYM’s nodes until he is at one to force his integration with Alt Mium?
Mym was obviously blocking the override so she might not take this course of action. It obviously violated his family protection rules. Using the implant previously left he defenseless at the end of whatever operation was being performed. Uplinking is going to be quite a strain. Also, can’t wait for Peter and probably his uncle’s reaction to this move. Is Miko’s shell running as an AI with human memories? If so, Peter didn’t just break the law, he gave it a wedgie so hard that its underwater is a hat.
My take is that Mium would have blocked her uplink if he was still active in the system, not that she is trying to shut down the node. I think that is why it upsets her that she has to kill off a node.
Not sure what she wants to do with the lab, but I’m betting she planned to uplink to it from the start, and consider that she currently has VI Mium, she probably can’t run on the same system as MYM. At this point, Mium Prime probably does not know VI Mium exists and is running on Miko, which is why Mium Prime has to call it too dangerous, but she cannot tell Mium Prime that she has VI Mium.
This was probably part of VI Mium’s plan from the start, the question in my mind is if everything including the creation of VI Mium being forced by Ila was part of Mium’s plan.
I think Mium is sort of playing a shell game with his restrictions by compartmentalizing what instances know what to play to his long term goals. I just wish I know what those long term goals were.
To your last thought, what are Peter’s long term goals?
Right now, with Mium going offline again, I’m more curious about Peter’s short-term goals. 😉
My understanding is that a single node is going offline. This may represent a significant portion of his computing power, but I don’t know that it will result in Mium going offline.
If the remaining nodes stay in contact, I believe they’ll assume lab 5 is offline, and not be required to shut down.