[voice]

[spacebased]

Are there any AIs out there who aren't megalomaniacal psychopaths who need to have their power supplies yanked? Sound off; I get the feeling we're gonna want to be working together for the next few days.

The rest of you, will you please please please try to call for help as soon as you even begin to suspect you might need it? The time to deal with

Comments

[scorpiowned]

Fuck you for calling me racist, my best friend's like, half robot.

I think I like you, though.

[spacebased]

[Are you people for real?]

Cinderella, if the shoe doesn't fit, don't wear it.

[scorpiowned]

(totally for real. you don't even know.) That's pretty much the gayest thing I've heard all day, and that's saying something because you're competing with Donut.

[spacebased]

Even if I experienced sexual attraction, I couldn't be gay; I don't have a gender.

[Alex is baffled as to why homosexuality would be a bad thing; the government of Earth practically endorses it as a population-control strategy.]

[scorpiowned]

Seriously? (whoaaa that's pretty cool, he's never met an ai like that. ffs, even that one tank's ai was a girl. obnoxious question time!!) Why not?

[spacebased]

It was kind of an accident, I think? I'm an unguided emergent AI, and everyone called me "Alex" and "it" back when I was low-sapience. If they'd called me Aishwarya or Paolo or something and used gendered pronouns, I'd probably have developed a gender. But they didn't, so I didn't.

[scorpiowned]

Developed? You develop a gender instead of being made with one? Where are you even from?

[spacebased]

IBM by way of the Tereshkova orbital drydock.

Why would I have started with a gender? I wasn't even intended to be self-aware.

[scorpiowned]

Uh. Okay, sure, we'll go with that... (slow down, he's not that much of a nerd!) Um. Anyway, I don't know, that's how all AI are made now? Or all the ones I know. Even, like. Tutorial programs and shit have one.

[spacebased]

Programming something as irrelevant as gender seems like a waste of time to me.

[The tech is very different from Halo-verse AI in Alex's universe.]

[scorpiowned]

I guess it is. I don't know, I've never programmed an AI before. Seems like a pain in the ass.

[spacebased]

The IBM AI programming department is something like 100 people. More in R&D. We're a pretty big time and capital investment, and we're in charge of mission-critical tasks, so it's the kind of thing you want to get right.

[scorpiowned]

What kind of tasks? Like "overthrowing a space station's main AI system" kind of tasks? That'd be cool and convenient, since she sounds pretty fucking crazy too.

[spacebased]

I'm a good hacker, but I'm running on a--very nice, mind you--ship's mainframe. Hypatia is running on the station core. That would be like trying to divert an asteroid by ramming it with a shuttle.

[scorpiowned]

What, that wouldn't work? (is he being serious or is he joking. it's hard to tell.)

[spacebased]

You didn't do very well in high school physics, did you?