Official Derailed thread... Wait, what?

Well of course if we assume the AI is in fact intelligent though it will inevitably come to the conclusion that no order can be of an indefinite nature. Now, whether it realizes this within 5 seconds 'Are you still busy now?' or 50000 years later is entirely up to how high of a priority the AI places the interaction with the individual. Of course, there's also a scale in which the AI would simply not bother to retain the command if the individual was of low enough priority, at which point catching sight of the individual again might prompt a new query 'Are you still busy, now?' This of course assumes the AI uses a priority logic chain which is generally how we program computers and robots currently. But none of them are truly 'intelligent' simply following instructions to simulate it.

 

That's also why Asimov had folks studying robotics, not just to make better robots but also to be better at employing them.

Even supposed fully sentient robots would be built around logic and certain design choices and paradigms of the designers that fall into the field of robotics.

While it is possible for anyone to issue orders to such a robot, the books themselves describe situations where the average artesan or so becomes frustrated with the interactions with the robots.

Better understanding of robotics includes the understanding of how robots process information and also of the syntax of issuing orders and queries. This leads to more efficient and rewarding interaction and more precise wielding of the robots, including understanding their limitations and advantages to a point where the issuance of orders in the proper form becomes subconscious effort, not requiring any additional thought.

Any notion of robots themselves coming up with subjective chaotic evaluations of appropriate time span for a given mission would quickly lead to very unrewarding interaction and employment of robots.

But yea, this is one of the issues with the interfaces of robots. For more precision you cannot allow for an input function to proceed without sufficient parameters, such as a meaningful end condition, one of which can be "for now"/"indefinitely"/"until interrupted". Such added precision slows down the issuance of orders.

Solarians dealt with this by simply building a class of robots of a supervisor class that understands higher levels of abstractions such as "set up a heat transfer pipe industry and operate it to meet our own demand and that of from trade".

 

in other words, they built a smarter smart robot to control the more job specific smart robots and reduce the interface between individual robot types and people. Effectively hard coding in a caste system into the robot heirarchy.

 

And because no one coded a separate yearning for right to vote or cry for freedom into the robots but instead hardwired the laws of robotics into them it is not possible for the robots to conceive of existence that doesn't involve human masters for to merely try and comprehend it would lead to devastation of their positronic brain.

If the human operator merely suggested a robot to conceive of a way it could by negligence for instance accidentally deliver a package that was actually a bomb to a human that might already cause on the level of thought that the robot might begin to stutter and experience buildup of heat in it's positronic brain.

For robots are not humans. They do not have a couple million years of biological legacy hard coded into their cells. They don't have cells. They can have complex software but it's still 1/0 switchboard and a meaningless weighed choice from an array of meaningless contents mixed with resulting behavioral choice tree again with weighted choice making based on weighted input.

Merely changing the weights on your decision tree does not result in soul or sentience but it can be built to imitate one. For that sense you can just make a 'rolodex chat bot' that picks up keywords from input and passes Turing test as an angsty teenager and if you give the device a face and a text to speech function eventually someone will start insisting it is sentient and campaigning for it's rights through this anthropomorphic fallacy thing that people have, such as feeling disgust and anger when looking at a strictly navigational robot trying to maintain it's balance while the human engineers try to unbalance it by kicking at it.

While sympathy and empathy are some of our best qualities they are also easily projected unto soulless things such as a steel box that has a couple of gyroscopes and actuators.

 

"Why is the asking price so low?"

-"You'll figure it out..."

 

https://babylonbee.com/news/tragic-footage-of-epstein-suicide-found-hanging-in-cell

Tragic: Footage Of Epstein Suicide Found Hanging In Cell

 

It's not low, it's askew!

 

I can so see it with my soul's eyes!

GM: "Giant stone falls out of the sky crushing your rifle and dealing you serious wounds"


PS: First rifled barrel was invented in Augsburg in 1498.

PPS: Girandoni produced pneumatically operated muskets in 1779 for Austria which had the normal power of a contemporary musket but also a magazine of 20 rounds and a pressure reservoir capable of providing pressure for 30 good shots, with the ability to switch the reservoir (up to three times) and refill the builtin magazine from tin tubes each containing 20 rounds up to four times.

 

Mass and momentum are still things, so you either have to increase the mass as the ball leaves the barrel, lowering the effective range to like 5 feet, or you have to pack enough gunpowder to blow the gun apart when you fire it.

 

The ring would explode.

 

Or in Europe. Or the US. And I think Canada. The wording their is confusing.

Legal in most Canadian provinces. Liquor laws are regulated provincially, while the federal government has laws about taxation and importation of beer, wine and other liquors.[citation needed

In the US a single person household can brew 100 gallons a year (6 gallons is 30 750ml wine bottles). Any household with at least 2 adults can brew up to 200 gallons a year. And that is anything that is not distilled. So cider, beer, mead, wine. All good. It's around those amounts in most countries I think.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrewing#Legality
100 us liquid gallons=
378.541 liters

 

This would be one of those amusing 'what he expects to happen, what actually happens' images I can't seem to find. He expects a cannonball to fly out at 12ooft/s obliterating anything in it's path. What would actually happen is the gun would fire, the cannonball would expand to full size for a moment after leaving the barrel and then fall to the ground a few feet from the barrel shrinking back into a regular bullet size. XD

This said, the method is flawed, but the theory could still be actualized. Instead of firing a cannonball from a rifle though, miniaturize a cannon with magic. Apparently the shrink spell itself actually solves this problem by being cancelled by 'tossing on any solid object' meaning once the ball hits the target, it becomes a cannonball XD. Since it was fired from an actual cannon, presumably using the correct amounts of powder it could then be assumed that returning to it's natural size would not change it's velocity. This is further supported by the spell 'Gravity bow' which effectively performs the same action of doubling the mass of the arrow upon impact.

Restrictions? 2ft cubed per level of the mage casting shrink. A 1ft diameter cannon 10ft long could be shrunk by a level 5 wizard (roughly). Of course this is just to cover the cannon itself, which would only need to be done once since you could then apply permanency upon it. You would then also need to invent something equivalent to a shell, because you would need to have the cannon proportion of gunpowder shrunk to be fired from the miniature cannon, though that could be performed many days in advance (depending on the wizard). You would also need to consider the size and shape of the cannon in it's construction, because shrink reduces to 1/16 of the original dimensions, which means at 16ft long you're going to have a 1ft barrel, so if you want something even vaguely resembling a rifle you're going to need some really monstrous starting dimensions.

According to the ring description, it is unbreakable, so even if the bullet were not travelling fast enough to escape the muzzle the ring would be fine. It might however, be permanently embedded inside the cannonball. Which in and of itself might make for a looney toons ending to the trial run XD

 

East Europe has almost no alcohol taxes. If we had their taxes here we'd be the biggest drinkers in the world, alas we have one of the world's highest alcohol taxes. Hence when the virus hits us we will be almost defenseless, all because of govarnment greed yarrrr!