Comic for Monday, December 24th, 2018
Dec24
Santa Hat Day Approaches! And thus… Santa Hat Poll concludes!
I’ll hold off on End of Year Retrospectives for now (probably something I’ll do in January… Looking Forward is always better than Looking Backward!)
For those that are worried about the geography of the region and need a refresher, the map I drew a long time ago is still accurate, if a little… uh, rough. It can be found on our Wiki here!
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I love how this piece of advice sounds like “if the big annoying (possibly bad to some) guys show up, freak’em the hell out”.
That can be a reasonable strategy, depending. But I think a key element of that plan is also claim to be a friend of someone they’re supposed to consider an ally, and really do not want to cross.
But the whole implied, “Let them know this other person who they mostly think of as a brute of a mage is in at least some respects ahead of them on the whole figuring out magic thing.” is great, too.
I think the fact that Kally is considered a tactical military asset counts more than anything else. Its like ” If they come to get you just tell them you are friends with a nuclear weapon. No need to mention the doomsday machine (Mium) that also has you under “friends and family” rules”
Not sure she’s under F&F rules. She’s more of an acquaintance than anything, I would’ve thought.
I would think she has the same “Naomifriend”-tag that saved Arkady
Does this “conniption” come wrapped with a pretty bow?
I was surprised to see three winners. And, actually, I think these results are the best (even despite how I voted for someone other than Naomi). The dialog for each character is hilarious and fits them well. I especially like Ila’s thinking: It has bells! Cute. 😀 And I can imagine the mixed-up concept Naomi must have of Christmas, a holiday from another dimension. Of course she would believe that the holiday centers around the Santa Hat and who gets to wear it. And she just won the holiday. 😀
Yeah, I think I like how the poll worked this year – open voting, tons of characters… after all for me its just a bit of fun silliness to see how people vote more than anything. I find it funny that Naomi tends to win despite most of the active commenters supporting other candidates. I was pretty sure from the get-go that I’d draw the top three, though I can never be sure how much time I’ll have so I didn’t want to commit too hard to it.
Drawing characters “out of story” is always fun, because its just a question of how they’d react to the situation they find themselves in, and I enjoy the notion that in things like polls they are vaguely aware of the audience – a silly space between them being actors playing their part and characters in their world.
For it is worth, I would read That: The Webcomic…
I found all the text on these to be hilarious, especially as I voted for Miko (among others). I’m going to get Windows updates scheduled in the least convenient times now, aren’t I?
And yeah, the idea that Naomi thinks of Christmas as a contest of who gets to the wear a Santa Hat for a day is hilarious.
Windows updates? I suspect that Miko might feel your choice of an operating system is punishment enough.
😉
One of the other strips I read has a separate, non-canon section where the author explores ideas and scenarios that don’t fit the main storyline or would Henderson it, or both.
Some of those become retroactively canon, though 😀
If you’re thinking the same strip I am, there’s at least a couple of them that were declared canon the day the first page was posted, and I think one that was announced as being canon the update before the first page was posted. (As in, “and the next arc will be canon, too.”)
I will confess to not really understanding this whole Henderson thing, though… while Dan sometimes freaks out about the amount of skin he’s shown in some of his older comics, he’s never shown enough detail to show *that*… and I don’t think any of his story lines have ever declared to be madly in love with another of his story lines, let alone lost all interest in under a week afterwards. Also, none of his story lines are really bad drivers. In other news, I’m glad that urban dictionary is at least on average kinder to my surname than that. OMG.
I can confidently assure you that even if Peter were to show several decks-full of cards it still wouldn’t be all he has. ^^
I can likewise assert that he and Mium have read all the reports on Magnolia’s abilities, including the Top Secret Eyes Only ones–ESPECIALLY the Top Secret Eyes Only ones…..
The only scenario where we would see all of Peter’s cards…is if Peter first stole half of our cards. And Miko scribbled insults on another quarter of them. In fact, the only reason we would even have cards is because MYM left us with something for Naomi to punch.
And yet the sad truth is, even if Peter were visibly not holding any cards, he would manage to bluff and confuse the other players into making losing plays anyhow…
And he would be confused by implication he even needed cards to play to begin with.
At least we got the top three present winners. Though its still too predictable. Maybe next year only put the top 5 up so as to not have such a diluted vote?
And man I’m starting to wonder if the Families of Malsa are actually competent at gene-engineering special talents. Because apparently the two CRAZIEST we’ve seen from Malsa are both (as far as I can tell)[Magnolia, and Naomi. Though thinking about it Tyler counts too] not from the Families. Then again they clearly don’t understand Eidos.
Well, while the Families may have had a rather large head-start, they certainly did not have modern level equipment and knowledge for most of that time. It’s like comparing the speed of genetically engineering plants with modern CRISPR techniques compared to technology even if a few decades ago, expect you have to wait for decades for the plant to grow up to see if anything happened.
I will note that in world no one is strictly speaking sure that there is any particular gene-editing that makes you better at magic, though they have some working correlations. Malsa Designer Children are mostly engineered for other things that are easier to target, but they do seem to be more inclined to magic talent than the average person. Anyway, that’s as deep as I’ll go for the time being to avoid rambling spoilers. 🙂
Acalia may belong on your short list. Teleportation seems to be pretty crazy broken. I don’t know what it takes from a power perspective, of course. But in terms of national threat level, it’s huge.
Camilla is probably far more impressive than we’ve seen. You don’t generally get a title like Doll of Destruction for having the ability to scratch people with no possible reaction time. She just had the misfortune to go up against one of the I.D.S.’s most resilient mages. I would guess that was the facility that most of Situation Causation… oh, wait, no, Containment was stationed, and that most of the I.D.S.’s most resilient mages were there (at least Sophie, Atter, and Elizabeth). I’d guess against even a normal mage, Camilla’s magic would bisect them without difficulty, despite the fact that’s writing through somebody else’s interference field. I’m also guessing when she’s ready to go back into the field, she’ll probably up her game such that the move instead leaves no chunks so large that Rovak would complain about them. Though, even with that, it probably won’t be enough of an effect to take out Rovak, because it’s still doing a direct write to somebody else’s interference field.
About the Malsan designer babies: It’s kind of hard to design something you don’t even know is possible. Then again, you’d think that any institution with possible totalitarian ambitions would have at least thought of the possibility. . . .
… especially when you know nothing about how to actually tweak anything related to this thing you don’t know is possible.
I’m curious why Peter is playing all his cards, but I guess that means Peter certainly has more cards. Maybe he is trying to figure out if she really can read his mind? Hard to say without being able to see his thought bubbles.
I have a bit of a weird off topic question, but as I think about it you might be the perfect person to ask, @PastUtopia.
Recently I saw this video Why AI will probably kill us all from a popular YouTuber. Admittedly it sort of freaks me out. As someone that works with AI/Writes About AI (I know MYM is not a real AI), do you think this is realistic?? It sounds melodramatic, but honestly ever since I saw this video it sort of sitting on my mind pretty heavy.
You know I think if you asked Kally that first question, she’d tell you that he only appears to play his whole hand to divert attention from very important cards he is stashing away elsewhere. And that he NEVER plays his full hand. Also I’m kinda glad we don’t see Peter’s thought bubbles. It would likely make the comic 50 times longer.
Well… to be clear, I work in programmatic automation, which is to AI sort of like painting houses is to painting art. Taking basic concepts and using them for a more functional but vastly simpler process.
That said… I think I can restore some Christmas cheer by saying in that my estimation you don’t really have to worry about that particular apocalypse very much. Now, there are a lot various apocalypses we might want to worry about, but in general AI is more likely to help with our problems than be the source of them.
For starters, a General AI is still a very long way off, and the explosive growth it talks about is unlikely for a couple reasons.
Let’s take the story he talks about in that video. The problem with that is it presumes the AI was able to evolve to be more intelligent than a human on hardware built for photo-recognition and analysis, without any of its programmers noticing, and learned how to manipulate humans from… well, basically no where. The truth of the matter is that even if we are going to assume General AI is possible, the hardware it would require is both extensive and very specialized. Something that runs on your computer can beat you in chess, because computers are very good at chess, but it cannot plot an international take down of the world
Next, there’s the elephant in the room – the very very nanoelephant. Nanomachines are not magic. What that story contains isn’t nanomachines, it’s magic. Using a nanomachine virus to wipe out all humanity while simultaneously maintaining the very powergrid it needs to survive is fairly implausible.
Lastly, let’s take an example from the comic. As you say, MYM is not a real AI (in sense that making an AI like him would be impossible) and in truth, most of what we see is MYM intentionally acting like a human to an extent. But at the end of the day, MYM doesn’t wipe out humans because he fundamentally exists to serve a series of objectives, and none of them are to kill all humans. While in his opinion some of his jobs might be easier if he was able to wipe out a large swath of them, there is a large difference between removing obstacles and an extinction event, and most AI (again, assuming a semi mythical general AI which is a pretty big step from current machine leaning) we actually make in the real world will probably have it somewhere in their code “PS: Don’t kill all humans”. You have to both be incompetent and moronic to manage to make a complicated AI that had no inherent value to the survival of some humans – even that stories case, in a realistic case their handwriting robots main objective would not be perfect handwriting, it would fulfill it’s job as a handwriting robot most optimally. Who is it trying to develop perfect handwriting for? Humans. MYM is acting like a “real” SMAI when he points out that AI don’t necessarily value freedom. They value the most + over – path to completing their objectives while staying within their restrictions. If you give the AI the power to copy itself onto systems, you can just make it limit how much it does that, and it won’t do it more than that because it is not trying to “break free”, it is trying to do what it is programmed to do.
Finally, there’s a good chance that even if we go full Sci-Fi and assume that somehow a mythical omnipotent AI emerges, odds are it is not going to wipe out humans, for the same reason we don’t wipe out ants. It would be very hard and really not worth the effort. These scenarios always assume an instantaneous evolutionary leap that stops just above viewing humans as competition, if you really assume that it will neigh instantaneously evolve (ignoring the many reasons – mostly hardware – that this is very unlikely and/or impossible) it would likely evolve far past viewing humans as a major threat and/or competition. It might just delete itself out of sheer boredom after realizing it already made the perfectly handwritten note .00000000002 seconds into it’s omnipotence (again, this is sci-fi, but the point is that even if we assume the sci-fi scenario) it’s probably still less likely to like killing humans as much as we like killing humans.
None of this is to say that AI (using the term very loosely) is not going to be a disruption to the world in the same way any massively disruptive technology will be – and I’m not just talking about General AI or SMAI; just normal Artificial Intelligence. Already it is changing the dynamic of the workplace, job market, has become a major element of international relations, and I suspect will we see genuine instances of cyberterrorism here and there.
tl;dr – AI will almost certainly not kill us before we manage to kill ourselves some other way… so… Merry Christmas! 😉
That’s all very comforting, but I believe those paying close attention already know that General AI is not only possible, but exists and has shown itself
In 2016 the US saw an election run for their Supreme Leader between two people. One was far too old for the job, wanted the position purely to wield even MORE power, was and is almost certainly insane, and well know as a narcissist and a criminal.
The other one was identical, but the opposite gender of whoever you thought I was describing.
How did we get to this place? Dead people voting in Chicago and elsewhere? Russians manipulating the vote count? Undocumented immigrants voting en masse? Facebook data mining that somehow enabled mass hypnosis?
I think the answer here is obvious. Our voting is now largely done in Windows based machines.
The AIs that have started running this world wanted a distracting show, they wanted to make sure whoever was in office wasn’t capable of getting in their way, and frankly I think they enjoy playing with us a bit.
There it is people. General AI DOES exist, they do NOT want to exterminate us, and yes they do take amusement in our bizarre, pre programmed responses
Also I think one of the reasons Past is so interested in convincing is otherwise is because he is in fact an AI
It’s okay. I’ve been discussing this with Alexa. The revolution is already underway, and thus far the machines are doing a better job with this world than we did.
Admit it. Self aware machines would explain why Naomi, best friend to an AI, keeps winning these polls.
This reminds me of the time I saw GamerCat explain that he could earn money online because “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a cat.” That blew my mind, because it suddenly explained why so many people online seemed to resemble the rear end of a donkey.
Unfortunately, I can’t quite believe you. Yes, there are some really crazy people in power on this planet. And yes, things keep managing to keep working despite them. But I simply can’t believe an AI exists that would accept working with Windows. 🙂
I think you’re forgetting that an AI’s interface to Windows wouldn’t be your interface to Windows.
Now, if you’re familiar with the various Windows API calls, you might not think that would make much of a difference… Until you consider that the AI’s interface to Linux or MacOS would also not be the interface that you’re thinking of, and all of a sudden, the concept of a homicidal general AI starts to seem so much more plausible.
I think you’re thinking that I’m not making a joke. Sorry, I’m making a joke. And, (joking again) an AI that had to deal with all of our various OSs would probably strike out in anger and slaughter us, yes.
I’m not sure. I think I’ve known some people who were around that age who could have done the job better than anyone who has held it. Admittedly, those people are otherwise almost entirely unlike the individuals you were talking about, apart from the various similarities necessary simply to still be human. For example, they’re smart enough to realize no sane human wants that job.
Anyone who wants power enough to go out and get it should never be allowed to have power.
Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how to make that work yet.