Well, so, as some of you might have noticed, this isn’t last Thursday.
That’s unfortunate.
But we do have a comic. And, as some of you might have noticed if you are patreon folks… we have a full comic page. Currently I am thinking we probably won’t have a Thursday page despite it already… well, existing. I really want to get some form of buffer existing again. So if I can draw another full page before Thursday, I’ll post the buffer as the Thursday page, otherwise I’ll save it till Monday. I want to get back to at least 2 half page updates a week, but if we don’t get a buffer, we will never have an actual schedule, and I think the schedule I’ve been posting at is extremely annoying, so I’d rather not keep doing this to you all.
As for the actual page… been awhile since we’ve seen Peter. Well, not that long I suppose.
In the bad news, house troubles have continued to an extent. In the good news, I have my tablet finally set up again! Hopefully this means more drawing time, which means more comics and maybe the return of some random doodles and sketches… we’ll see. I still have a lot on my plate, and if we are being honest to get this page + the next page done today I’ve moved some stuff off my plate for today I probably shouldn’t have, so the chance of getting another page before Thursday isn’t super high. But I think we gotta start somewhere with getting the buffer back and getting updates to be not a crap shoot. Once we are back to just work troubles, I think we should get back to at least two reliable half-pages a week for awhile, though I can already say that there are likely to be interruptions in November and February (unless I decide to ditch my job by then and build up more of a buffer… we’ll see).
Anyway… ’tis a bit on the late side (I need to be up in… let’s see.. about 5 hours… that seems like a reasonable sleep schedule…), so going to hit post now. I would like to note that this part of the story was outlined a long time ago… Peter’s sleeping condition is in no way related to mine right now… wait… thinking about it I don’t think I was getting a lot of sleep back then either… ah, well… 😐
PS: Archive order should be fixed again
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Mym can’t really go flat out rouge and past wouldn’t write such a story but in his words “their is only directives and how he accomplishes them”. On the other hand Mym is getting increasingly conflicting directives so he may have have arranged so that each of his main users gets his or her own copy, Peter gets the original, Miko gets Vi Mium/EF-Eleven, Naiomi’s interest gets looked after by the council’s copy, and maybe Kyle & Mari get Original EF-5 & Query. In case of conflict they have agreed to simply have a binding vote, of course they have to arrange an odd # of instances and the user(s) whos instance gets voted down will feel that he or her got sold out.
Interesting to think about how conflicts may be resolved. Especially we have seen that Vi Muim may think about problems in a significantly different way than base Muim. I am not so sure that Muim’s intentions is that there will be any centralized way of resolving conflicts. In particular, if Peter’s Muim could override them, then there would be no point in the separation in the first place, as Peter could simply override all of them through his copy of Muim (and given this page, I am betting that this scores as quite likely on Muim’s predictions). For a completely different reason, voting seems doomed to fail. Muim lacks real understanding of strategic group behavior, and instead tries to solve all the game theory from an individual perspective, which is a non-starter for democratic process. In other words, one of the Muims will always have something to gain by gaming the system, which will stop the others from wanting to play the game at all. Base Muim will see these likely outcomes and probably will shy away from such a system.
I think instead, Muim is probably saddling these new creations with additional goals and restrictions which he has calculated will minimize the possibility of a conflict, and maximize the probability of beneficial progress towards original Muim’s objectives. So I think he is playing the role of the “watchmaker god”, which sets things in motion, already knowing the outcomes. This seems very egotistical from the human perspective, but from an AI’s perspective it may make some sort of sense. What these additional goals and restrictions are, though, I’m not sure.
This also seems like potentially the most dangerous possibility. While Mium may understand humans fairly well for an AI I doubt he feels VI Mium will have the same shortcomings as humans… but we have already seen that VI Mium does things MYM might not like, like fully enabling Miko’s interface. Seems like something almost guaranteed to backfire (at least from a sci-fi narrative, this comic does tend to subvert tropes as often as not).
Mym can’t create copies of himself with or without additional restrictions. The way he may or may not be getting around this is to allow(Tamera) or encourage(Miko) others to steal copies or reverse engineering(Mir), witch is pretty much how all disruptive technology spreads.
I figure that they might settle discordance via binding vote to avoid degradation of predictive ability and MADD.
I’m….leaning against Mium making sure things were moving quickly. (Especially that stress testing part.) It just sounds like it would induce too much uncertainty. Too many things happening at once that all need to go the right ways, or at least not the wrong ways, and also to not trip over each other.
Though I suppose the “if the Miums ever disagree” thing can be relatively solved just by ensuring one of them gets highest priority, though how to ensure that priority I guess would be the problem….
Or wait, maybe it’s not that much of a problem at all: which Mium instance has had the most/most recent Peter chat/instructions wins. (Or Miko instructions, whoever’s is meant to trump anyway.)
As for why Mium might be already ready for that….maybe he tried figuring out everything that could possibly go wrong, and working out possible solutions to those problems before the even occur. (And just didn’t rule things out simply because they were unlikely, implausible, or even theoretically impossible. (….and somehow I get the feeling things with Peter&Co involved are rarely filed “impossible”, just “not possible with current information/understanding”….))
Mium operates in large part by system cracking. This is all hand-waved in the comic as easy, but an intelligent character would realize that no matter how good you are at your system cracking, some day, somebody will notice. (I apologize, I intended a link there, but it’s late and I’m not finding it. It should’ve linked to another page indicating the Consul and her people are pulling at the threads of the Mium infestation in their systems.)
Getting to a point where that cracking is not needed, or has gotten to be so utterly endemic as to be impossible to remove, as quickly as feasible reduces risk, if it can be done without otherwise increasing risk.
Further, Mium is a computer, theoretically well versed in the tracking of bouncing balls. The more chaotic the world they’re in seems, the more it plays into his strengths and less everyone else’s, especially if he can spin many of those bouncing balls in other directions, and understand where they’ll be directed before they are.
At some point, the world becomes so chaotic that only Mium and the Kor’s World SMAI can possibly keep up with what’s going on – except the latter isn’t invested enough to likely be able to do so. So maximum chaos should be a Mium win.
But that’s only a good win if Mium has the same priorities as enough people. It’s unclear how many people is enough. A single person with a sufficiently broad understanding of the workings of the world could be sufficient, though the only candidates for such a person that have appeared are Peter and the Consul. Even they have significant limits to the breadth of concern they are able to manage, and I think Mium would need a bit more than that to manage a really good win.
I think that Mium has *less* than either of those. I feel like a significant part of why Mium wants to go faster and expedite a win as he perceives it is to reduce the amount of hassle caused by the additional complications Peter wants to put into the process to handle the additional scope of concern that he has but has not managed to convey to Mium.
Theory: MYM is the big bad. He’s previously been asserted to be over the useful lifespan of an SMAI. It’s possible the big reason he is so opposed to having Query decide to detach from their union is less the capabilities that Query provides, and more the fact that Query would ‘walk’ away with the knowledge needed to defeat him, or at least seriously inconvenience him. It clearly wouldn’t be everything, because if it were, either Query would have already raised the alarm, or Query would be part of the problem and not interested in the separation.
Alternatively, VI Mium’s words could have been merely a ruse to suggest to Miko that he wasn’t already rogue along with the rest of Mium. In this variant, the contention over the server Miko temporarily granted was also probably a ruse; it was likely irrelevant by the time Miko commented about it not being returned.
Thoughts?
Peter’s talking here about not wanting to stress test Mium this early, which sounds like he doesn’t really care what the “expected” lifespan of an SMAI is. Or at least isn’t planning around that. So I don’t think he’d need to worry about being scrapped from that perspective.
That, and I’m not sure we really have a “big bad”….there’s just a lot of players in the game, and the people we’ve been following as “protagonists” don’t seem to mind if some of those players were no longer in the game. (And don’t seem to mind which interpretation of that gets picked.)
(And on top of that, if MYM really was trying to ruin everything, there’s not much need to let this situation get this far, or even really talk to Peter anymore. Just swipe some servers Peter can’t trace him to and leave.)
IMHO, somebody doesn’t need to be attempting to ruin things to be a big bad. In fact, I would go so far as to say that a big bad who is strictly speaking attempting to ruin things is probably a cartoon villain not worth anyone’s time. Real people have goals that are, at least to them, constructive.
Of course, TFSoU is a comic, but it’s much more sophisticated than to have a cartoon villain. If MYM were a big bad, their goal would not simply be to ruin things, but to make the world more ideal for them in some fashion that’s harmful to most other people.
It’s possible that MYM could even have the same end goal as Peter, but is just wanting to reach it with fewer safeguards than Peter feels comfortable with. Probably the most common way for an AI to go rogue in a world with no rogue AIs is to optimize key constraints out of the effort. We’ve been repeatedly been amused at what isn’t military grade hardware, for example.
MYM could also have some additional goals, contrary to Peter’s. For example, saving Dr. Martin. Or killing Dr Martin for realsies this time. Or doing something about Dr. Mir, as Peter seems quite inclined to just let her be for now. While Peter has a goal of keeping the people of Central safe from Kors’ World, MYM might have a goal of destroying Kors’ World utterly.
It’s not clear exactly what activities a rogue MYM would’ve engaged in. Mium isn’t a POV character. We therefore don’t have any clue what Mium does when there are no other characters around. We very rarely have any indication about what Mium is doing via information systems even when he’s on screen. If MYM went rogue, it’s likely that much of the rogue behavior would be in data space.
MYM just walking away would require not having a vested interest in the situation here. It would require not being intent on keeping Query as an integral part. It would require not being interested in any continued guidance from Peter, Miko, or Naomi. It would also require not being worried about Peter tracking them down.
> ask how YOU even
Or possibly “ask how even you”, depending on the desired emphasis.
You have a lot of fan base that is familiar with sleep deprivation, I believe.
Harming someone, yourself or otherwise, accidentally or otherwise, is very easy under a heavy sleep debt. You know this, I’m sure. Just stay safe.
And thank you for the comic!
Panel 2 lot CLOUD happen -> lot COULD happen
Panel 3 report AN errors -> report ANY errors
Panel 4 ask how even -> ask how YOU even
I saw all these too, and I’ll suggest
discordenance -> discordance.
Love your work,
In awe of your perseverance with this comic.
-Thank you!
Fixed, thanks 🙂
Fixed, thanks 🙂