Sunday, April 17, 2011

Engbot MK. II and his family



An excerpt from a presentation by Apnadirex Industries CEO Ches Berg:

Where the original Engbot set the stage for an entirely new level of unmanned Hostile Environment Resource Prospecting, the Engbot MK. II continues to lead the pack in innovation and field performance.

However, on bigger asteroids, with more profitable deposits, and with more heavily entrenched and aggressive xenomorph colonies, physical human oversight is still a necessity. So the question arises, what can we learn about what we would do in an emergency scenario, by studying what we can force our robots to do in an emergency scenario?



Apnadirex Industries was handed a mandate: to show their stockholders and competitors that it's possible to tell a human story in the very midst of their experimental defense technology trials in the Bosporos cluster. To do this, they would need more from their flagship AIs, Gunbot and Engbot both, than had ever been asked of them before. What's more, the results would need to be watchable enough for the behavioral psychology department to have gained some new insights at the conclusion of the trials.

So, how to bring a little opera into space, when all of your actors have brains made of silicon? How to model the human capacity to prioritize and perform under duress, perhaps with a declining sense of self-preservation, perhaps after witnessing several loved ones pass away, perhaps in the context of a xenomorph swarm-attack?

Given AIs that can already prioritize for repair and defense, the solution required a new point of interest for them:

Significant Proxies. Placed so as to guarantee "casualties".

(pause for laughter)

What did Engbot and Gunbot do? What did we learn?

Over the next 6 hours, we'll be talking about the implications of this new demonstrative technology, all of which is based completely on the new Utils 3.0 software line, and thanks to which, at least in the Bosporos cluster:

(change slide)

There is no tragedy. There is just insight.

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