The Genie in the Machine: Difference between revisions

Another common interpretation comes to us courtesy of the old days of MS-DOS. The computer prompt, not having any idea what your ultimate goal is, needs everything explained to it one step at a time. And heaven help the poor computer user who can't figure out what the correct command prompts are. [[You Can't Get Ye Flask]] is a common result of this kind of confusion.

 

 

The machine version of the [[Literal Genie]].

{{examples}}

* A good way to turn your AI evil is to give it poorly-phrased orders. On ''[[Knight Rider]]'', KITT's [[Evil Twin]], KARR, was ordered to defend itself, so it immediately locked itself down and refused to follow any other orders, since they might lead it to its destruction.

** Of course, this causes one to wonder why the Federation didn't use their holodecks to "Create an adversary capable of defeating our current enemy", since the holodeck must have that kind of magic power.

*** It probably helped that they were telling one absurdly advanced computer to out-think another computer.

** The discovery that any decent holodeck can effortlessly create a sentient AI renders the irreproducibility of Dr. Soong's positronic brain technology basically irrelevent, but this is never addressed.

* After working out three simple laws that would render all robots totally safe, just about every single [[Isaac Asimov]] robot story would show how a robot could stick to the letter of the law and still cause an awful lot of trouble.

** In the short story "The Evitable Conflict", this leads to the robots outright taking over the world, since the laws of robotics insist that they always take action to save human lives when possible, which precludes them standing idly by while we get on with the killing of each other. Mind you, the author saw this as a ''good'' thing.

** And the story about the mining robot who was supposed to be send offworld to Titan or somewhere, but its crate ended up on Earth, somewhere in the American mid-west. Being programmed for a different planetary environment, the robot went a little bit insane (while still following the three Laws of Robotics), and in an attempt to fulfill his programming ("use a laser drill to mine ore") it tried to build an industrial laser from whatever old stuff a farmer had lying around his shed.... and ended up building the world's first fully functional desintegrator cannon ''run by a standard electric torch battery''. Unfortunately, shortly before the corporation managed to locate the robot (a nearby mountain peak suddenly ceasing to exist gave them a clue), the annoyed farmer gave the robot an instruction (along the lines of "oh, forget it") that resulted in the robot first destroying its "laser" and then itself, taking the secret with it. When the cyberneticists found out, they nearly lynched the farmer.

** The Three Laws work pretty much perfectly most of the time for keeping robots obedient and safe. It's just less sophisticated models don't understand nuance of instructions or human tone and more advanced robots are often stated to work by differentials between the laws, so when a low priority law (such as self-preservation) is in strong effect but a higher priority one is invoked to override it , the "stress" can cause unexpected behaviors. The predictable, safe, everyday functionings just don't make for interesting stories.

* In ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] - Oblivion'', the "Radiant AI" for providing NPCs with aspirations and goals was much less impressive than originally hyped. Apparently, it proved far more difficult to do well than Bethesda expected. In one example documented during beta testing, one NPC was assigned to rake leaves and another to sweep, but the raker was given the broom and the sweeper the rake. Rather than trade their respective instruments, the one with the rake killed the other, looted the broom from its corpse, and began sweeping.

*** Not so much, they did have to be programmed with the option of killing to obtain the item to begin with. Now, blatantly stealing it on the other hand...

** Another problem they had was that the world continued running in the background at all times. So one plot that required you to talk to a drug dealer always failed, because the drug dealer was ''always'' killed by the addicts for his drugs before you got that far in the game.

*** Interestingly, this problem was never completely fixed. In the expansion, Shivering Isles, a certain quest was almost impossible to complete because the NPC was killed for stealing spoons before the player could talk to him. I think a patch made him immortal.

'''Castle Heterodyne''': "It'll be ''fun''!" }}

 

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[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]