Comic for Monday, September 10th, 2018
Sep10
I suppose we are calling these double comics now? Don’t worry we will get back to this being regular at some point, but not quite yet. I should be able to build up the buffer in the next couple weeks as I’ll have some time off work, but next week will be a pain in the arse, so not quite over the hurdle yet.
Loading ...
Hope this doesn’t take too long, I doubt Mr. Warmage is going to be polite and take a long time to properly break Ila or kill Arkady.
Anyway, Mium, you’ve mentioned that her brain works a lot like a person’s does, so the “built for a person” protocol working shouldn’t be too much of a stretch…(should it?)
This seems to be occurring on AI time, so everything so far has taken a fraction of a second.
I don’t think he finds it a stretch, but curious as in “this furthers my suspicion they shoved a human into an android.”
So… anyone taking a crack at where there appears to be five Ilas in panel 2? I think it has been the commonly accepted theory that she is probably a copy of a human rather than a real AI, but 5?
Not to mention the speech bubble placement seems pretty deliberate to obscure the two on the end, and we see Ila with a full range of orange, brown, black, and white hair across these panels.
And then there is panel 6. Something about these cyberspace pages.
I don’t see it as 5 Illas in panel 2. Rather, I took that to be merely an artistic style to depict her consciousness (i.e., main process) being transferred from her F-series body to M.Y.M.’s server. The difference in hair color, etc., could symbolize feeling disjointed from herself or her becoming de-synced with her body.
Wouldn’t it be hard to depict what an A.I. would sense/experience in cyberspace with a 2D illustration? Think of it as a form of motion blur to give a sense of motion or translocation. I’ve seen something similar in anime and other art. Look at the intro for the Death March anime, for instance.
Well, yes, I did notice 5 Ila’s on Panel 2. And yes we see Ila’s hair changing colour over the panels.
I kind of interpreted that as Ila’s “deeply irregular process” running on M.Y.M. (Ila’s self-image is unstable), eventually Mium stablizes her process (the “Error” and “System Integrity Exception” go away), but because Ila is highly irregular, there is still a little variance (her hair changing colour).
Why 5? Well if we’re going to read meaning into it, then maybe the current Ila is Version 5? When me first meet Ila F-10 (she is being deployed by Doctor Mir for a field test with the Avon team retreiving Jayce Myer), she has white hair. When Peter & Naomi first take the newly recruited Ila out (shopping with Mione, Arkary, and Lisa no less!) she has yellow hair. The problem I suppose is eye colour… Ila has always had yellow eyes. Don’t know where those blue eyes come from! I have no problem with the hair colours not being in chronological order… if anything they should be in order of “stability”… i.e. the most stable version of your self image SHOULD be your current actual image, but maybe your most next stable version is you as a teenager (ah – good times).
As for copying a human to create and artificial entity that can alter eidos (cast magic for the newbies), Peter covers this when talking with Naomi about the Shinoji Project (start here: https://pastutopia.com/?comic=comic-for-wednesday-may-13th and read the next few). That doesn’t mean it’s NOT possible… just that it’s already been tried, in what I inferred to be a big industrial project (https://pastutopia.com/?comic=comic-for-monday-january-12th).
Panel 6 is a doozy… Ila’s process is similar to Miko’s!!! Rather than assume Ila is a copy of a human… maybe Ila is a excellent simulation of a human!?!?!
I saw Illa F12, an unnamed F11 model, MIUM F10 (the newest MIUM), and what is likely the F9 and F8. Notice that the F11 is completely different from the others, and is even dressed and depicted different than Illa, who herself is very different. The third in the line looks like the F10, and there are subtle differences between that one and the F8 (which is the one who is usually with the scarf). Seeing as the model changes so abruptly I would guess that we now have something of a timeline for Dr Martin’s disappearance, or at least Dr. Mir’s decision that the direction of AI needed to change from autonomous to… something else. Specifically, we would know that one of those two events happened after the commissioning of the F10.
I think the sudden shift from ‘Query Logo’ to ‘White Robed, White Haired Mium’ was the most interesting aspect of the stabilized process to me.
That and the fact that it is “process”. Not operating system, not environment, not hardware, but process.
If it were a different comic, I’d ignore it as technical ignorance. Here, I ponder what exactly that implies in the grand scheme of a multi homed, fault tolerant AI.
My guess is that the answer borders on questions of “self” is that MIUM has a sense of self but then it is questionable if Querry, the F8, or the F10 do. Most likely not, but then would they still be able to operate independently on occasion (hence the “process” language)? Or is this more just referring to the process that changes the perceptions of the person accessing his system?
I do wonder how long this is taking in real time. We know Mium can process incredibly fast, even for a computer.
Mium is very calm right now. I look forward to his calm reprisal for harming his sister.
By Word of Author part of the reason we see Mium taking pauses in speech here is that this is most definitely not happening in real time.
According to Mium, he is incapable of being angry. I have a suspicion we are going to see that like with most of his limitations, he finds a way around it. A very calm and collected vengeful annihilation.
“So you are telling me the entire country vanished, and was later found to have just somehow ended up in Kor’s world?!”
Like Data and many other “emotionless” AIs, Mium has repeatedly demonstrated that, despite lacking some of the overt signs of emotion, he acts in accordance with it (in a calm, collected, deliberate manner) fairly frequently. Up to and including how he prioritizes his requirements and manipulates his restrictions to “compel” himself to do what he wants to, anyway.
Peter openly warns people that Mium has emotions, and not to annoy him because he will get even. And his interactions with Arron show he can be deeply sarcastic and does not appreciate being considered less than human.
So it seems pretty obvious Mium does have emotions, he just does not display them the way a human would. (His emotions likely work differently than a human’s as well, but it’s close enough.)
I am sure he wouldn’t think of it as a reprisal – simply removing the threats to miss sister (currently one warmage and one magic-enabled walking tank)
“How… curious. It seems that Dr. Martin must still exist. This is a problem.”
Seriously?! Well, so much for the theory that Peter posed as a “Dr. Martin” while working at Avon. At least it still sounds almost certain that Peter did work at Avon for a while in some capacity.
Also, back on that page a while ago where Rovak Stas seemed to be talking to Dr. Martin: Most of us assumed that he was hallucinating and not actually talking to him. (He’s rather insane, after all.) But… if Dr. Martin is still around and getting involved in things, maybe he wasn’t hallucinating after all?
My current guess, which is a total guess, is that Dr. Martin found the secret to “immortality” (whatever i-code Rovak has) and, once immortal, changed his perspective on everything to become Rovak. If one were to become immortal, blowing things up and not really caring about the consequences might seem more fun than sitting at a desk researching AI. But in his battle with Mium, he realized that he’s not quite perfectly immortal, and it brought back a small piece of his former self to his mind.
There is definitely something that strikes me odd by how Mium says “exists”. While both Mium and Ila have demonstrated a fuzziness on “alive”, neither have used “exist” before, usually referring to something as “functional”.
This could lead creedence to your theory that Mium was aware that Dr. Martin is a split personality or subroutine of someone that he knows is alive.
Of course, this means that we can also technically not rule out Peter, though that does seem increasingly unlikely.
We do know there is at least some connection between Rovak and Doctor Martin, not only was Rovak apparently hallucinating talking to him, but Rovak is the one that gave Kardus the shutdown remote to deal with Ila. Why would Rovak Stas of all people have that? This is a good mystery, so many clues to put together yet so many possible answers.
My personal theory is that Mium uses the word “exists” because he has strong reason to believe Martin is dead, and the evidence obtained is insufficient for the stronger claim of Martin still being “alive” and not some other form of questionable existence (like data on a computer for example).
When I combine this with the fact that Martin seems to be helping Rovak a lot, I end up with the idea that maybe Martin did die, and Rovak fixed him. (He’s gotten rather good at fixing people.)
Additional ideas on what Martin could be (as far as Mium is concerned) might be an ID code that is not supposed to be known by anyone, and which has sufficient authority over Mium to be a concern. In this case, anyone with the ID code would be “Martin”, and thus Martin would exist as long as someone can still use it.
Immortality, yes. In much the same way as I suspect Atter is immortal.
I think there is some sort of deep Eidos manipulation happening here, and Dr Martin and Atter are more alike, but originating from different sources, than we’ve seen.
I think we’re going to finally see someone that can out-plot Peter.
There were non-conclusive hints regarding Dr. MIR’s dislike of Peter & Dr. Martin that they were different people.
@SMAI – Dr. Martin also might’ve implanted a communication device that only the implantee can interact with, or have a better method of being undetectable than what Aaron & Tom use (I think ellipsis is the wrong spelling, but phonetically similar) that Rovak can pierce.
I’m right here for the moment. I’ve always thought that Dr. Martin was different from Peter. I’m also not buying the Rovak used to be Dr. Martin angle because of how old Rovak claims to be (when you live as long as he has, what we call insanity is just him trying not to get bored).
Also of note: Everything we have seen of Rovak, up to this point, has been perfectly sane. Odd, eclectic, unusual, capricious, and many other adjectives aside; Rovak has completely lacked any depiction of disconnected thinking, incomprehensibility, or denial of reality that are the hallmarks (or possibly the partial causes) of true insanity. The worst we can really say about him, not counting his conversation with the invisible person, is that he has an unusual point of view. And even that talk seems to be verified to be more than just insanity if it resulted in Rovak having an item that could only have come from Dr Martin.
I also agree that there are a number of explanations for Rovak’s friend not seeing Dr. Martin, beyond insanity on Rovak’s part. There has been the modified or similar to the elipsis spell, as someone has mentioned. Or the doctor could have been using a projection, or hacking into one of Rovak’s implants. Or for that matter, he could have just gotten up and left just before she turned the corner to see them, possibly even letting Rovak ramble a bit. We just don’t know.
The real question is why Rovak passed off that item in the first place. He is friendly with that faction, as shown by his involvement in the situation that took down Tyler, but this seems like a bit much help for someone whom he is just friendly with unless he has some further aim. Maybe he plans to have his ally collect Mrs. Sister to use as collateral against her brother?
@xpacetrue Not necessarily, the key word being posed as. The timeline (from what we know of it) has always cast some doubt that Doctor Martin is just an alias for Peter, but I think it is still pretty plausible that Peter did pose as Doctor Martin to work at Avon.
If we think about it, the F series of prototypes was at 8 by the time Peter left, but there is almost no way he created the other 7 in the time he was missing, he just wasn’t gone long enough. It is very feasible that he killed Doctor Martin and took his spot though. There are several ways that could work – most people may not even know what Dr. Martin looked like. Prior to Ryn taking over the labs, no one really seemed to be paying attention to what they were doing.
Another thing mentioned was that Martin had an assistant that “betrayed him”, and Peter explicitly mentioned having “betrayed Avon too”, so Peter is probably that assistant.
More curious is that it sounds like Mium was actually Martin’s instead of Peter’s. Though the lower down processes of Query are still in Mium, so still sees Peter as a higher “authority”? (Not sure what all that works out to. “Whatever happened at Avon while Peter was there” is still rather….unknown….)
Panel 5: there are 2 “the’s”. also, this looks like something from “The Matrix”.