Instant AI, Just Add Water: Was once true in the old days, back when people were quite often using mental modules scanned, compiled, and tweaked from brain-scans of biosapiences in their AI architectures. The logos/personality organization algorithm is pretty damn resilient, and often such inexpertly designed modules carried at
Itâs question-answering time here at the Eldraeverse! A reader writes: Two questions- 1) Is there a food item for the Eldrae that has assumed the same memetic status as bacon for humans? 2) What do the Eldrae find funny? What human comedians, if they were to go on tour
In Space Everyone Can See Your Face: Averted, for all the practical reasons mentioned. In practice, augmented reality v-tags â actually, the standard public identity tag â tell you who is who, and those who want to can use supplementary v-tags to indicate their current emotional state, etc., and perform other expressive
âAcademician. Academician.â The foundry master wiped his hands on his leather apron, and waved at the looming bulk in the back of the workshop. âYour sky-tubeâs coming along to plan. Just got the wire-wrapping on today. The woodwrightâsâll be here tomorrow to get the quarter-boards on her,
Insistent Terminology: Happens fairly often, because nomenclature (among other things) is Serious Business, and one therefore â when dealing with people â should know that people earned those attributions, dammit, and that therefore not using them (or misusing them) amounts to a deliberate insult. They would not, after all, presume to insult
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Insignificant Little Blue Planet: We already really handled this under Earth is the Center of the Universe, but I bring it up because of a discussion at TV Tropes of the problem, religiously speaking, of being a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of something incomprehensibly large with regard to theologies that
An interrogation room on GĂĄlish (Sullen Wildlands): The local agents looked at each other, then back at my aquastor. âSo, your perp has stolen this, this -â âSixteen-petabit colonial tangle-channel ansible.â âWhatever, this trillion-exval widget, and according to your numbers heâs now running a negative-frequency trading scam with it
Inside a Computer System: Well, yes, this is how virtuality works; the computers simulate the entire environment in full fidelity â which, I hasten to add, means even more when you have to come up with appropriate outputs for all possible sensory ranges of your polyspecific clientele â and then your sensory-link
From an unpublished extranet interview with Sev Tel Andal, seed AI wakener/ethicist: âWell, Iâm a libertist. But you know that, considering where Iâm from. Not that I was born to it â I grew up in the League, and moved to the Empire for my research. They donâ
âSelfish? You try livinâ in a world where persuasion and trade and generally makinâ nice with folks are the only ways to get anything, and see how long you can pull that kind of attitude off. âSpecially if youâre fond of eating1.â 1. Or, in the limiting case, breathing.
Innocent Aliens: Not very many, no, and certainly not the full extent of this trope. Evolution is rarely kind enough to produce a planetary environment that lets anyone this wide-eyed and innocent survive for long. And even on the rare occasions that it might, the greater Galactic community includes plenty