10/12/20 – An Experiment

Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, October 12, 2020.

|

2020-10-12-spacetrawler3b

|

Internal motivations are sometimes hard to know for sure.

6 Comments

  1. Pete Rogan

    As with the box-bot, we find ourselves getting tangled in how technology advanced enough to exceed our wishes actually exceeds them, and in what direction. Less ‘ring of Gyges’ and more ‘autonomic car in traffic at night.’ Chiphu can explain his shooting Tesfay as an expression of a will he didn’t want to admit he had, but we get into the issue of how the gun knew what he wanted since he expressed no desire to actually shoot Tesfay.

    And we also get into the issue into whether Chiphu’s aim was off and the gun corrected it for him. To what degree did the gun follow Chiphu’s desires versus its own proclivities as a weapon? Whatever answer you come up with has to balance those two forces at play here.

    I’ll only note in passing that this obviates the advantage of a weapon that doesn’t miss I mentioned last week. If intent at the moment is in the mix of decisions the gun is processing, then it’s that intent that the firer has to keep in control, not timing, and this changes the nature of gunplay again, but not in a direction that’s necessarily good. I have to wonder what Tesfay will say about intent when he revives.

    Dmitri learning how to shrug off ‘stun’ effects now makes a good deal more sense, by the way. With such immunity he can resist not just clumsy shooting, but actual intent — which is why he did it, isn’t it?

  2. Demarquis

    Probably, it works by locking on whatever object you aim at for some minimum fraction of time. Or perhaps you have to hold the trigger down, or both. Further, I imagine that it is programmed such that it continues to shoot at whatever you were aiming at the first time, unless you deliberately re-aim at another object, when it resets.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *