A Mastodon of Conflict

Murderbot repeatedly states that, outside of some specific as shit contexts, it really has a very limited understanding of the universe. That its education modules are crap and frankly far from comprehensive either. And yet? It generally fails to recognise or account for the fact it that it has these massive blind-spots and unfounded biases.

Like, we spend the majority of the books being told again and again just how insanely dangerous rogue SecUnits are. How dangerous they will always be. We are told this by a rogue unit that is, generally, only slightly dangerous to its clients through negligence.

More importantly, Murderbot rarely seems to question some core assumptions even in light of new information. In Artificial Condition we find out that MB has always had a niggling concern that it killed all those people because it disabled its governor modules/disabled the GM in order to kill them all. And what does it find out? That, no, that's not what happened, and that it's probably right that it did hack its GM to ensure that it never happened again.

MB knows that it hacked its GM and then continued protecting clients and doing its job because, well, why not? It fundamentally likes its job, in the sense of it feels a deep and abiding desire to protect humans, to keep them safe. Which makes sense! It's a SecUnit! Of course they're built with not just a shock-collar to keep them in line, but an innate drive to Provide Security. The bits of its job it fundamentally doesn't like are a: when it's made to hurt people who aren't threatening its clients and b: when it's forced to let clients endanger themselves against its judgement.

So what does it do? Does MB reassess its assumption that Rogue Units are of course going to immediately go on a killing spree? Nope! No, it just keeps assuming that it's the likely outcome. It recoils at the very idea of freeing other SecUnits because of that. Because it doesn't seem to understand that it's basing its assumptions on trauma, ironically on trauma that relates to the fact that it fundamentally finds the idea of going on a killing spree horrifying.

And sure, it probably is a minor risk. SecUnits are clearly individuals and there's always going to be some arseholes out there who get free will and immediately go "sweet! Murder Time! gun-arms go pew-pew-pew lol". But, uh, I think it's wildly overestimating the risk factor there.

Which, we see more of how fucking wrong MB is in Network Effect and Platform Decay.

In Network Effect, MB-2.0 frees Three, and what does Three do? We hear its internal thought process and its main driving factor, its default behaviour is "I want to help. I don't know what's going on but I want to Help Protect People". Three does not start blasting every soft, squishy human in range. It tries to get everyone to safety and then volunteers to help rescue someone else. Because it's a SecUnit! That's what SecUnits are made for.

One of my favorite tropes is "I'm not stuck in here with you, you're stuck in here with me" which often goes hand in hand with another favorite trope "horror movie scene from the pov of the horror"

So unsurprisingly one of my favorite scenes in PD is when Murderbot intimidates the shit out of the wannabe space pirates, locking them in their own ship and playing evidence of their crimes on their own TV

But my absolute favorite part is that it works too well and they all instantly surrender, leaving Murderbot standing there like 'um actually I was kinda planning on killing you guys but it feels weird now that you're like crying and shit'

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

Also, IIRC, a gift that came with the Gala Dinner at the Discworld con: this super-keen bookmark.

Gradually unpacking from the International Discworld Convention in Birmingham. Here are some things acquired along the way.

...Some are con swag: the lovely fan, the pen, the sticky notes, the con badge, a couple of commemorative pins (one not included here because it's stuck in my Tilley hat). A glittery tortoise, a sheep, a piece of chocolate I somehow missed eating, and some fancy slippers (they came with the room). A glow-in-the-dark ID bracelet.

(sighing) Right. I knew this damn map was around here somewhere.

(How typical to find it the day AFTER I publish the post.)

Hmm. I can't speak for others, but I don't go in for the cackling too much, as a rule.

I may be kind of an outlier in this regard, admittedly... but once you've been doing this work more or less constantly for twenty or thirty or forty years (and I'm coming up on fifty years of this, now), you'll increasingly have it borne in on you—if you're at all observant—that what pain you inflict on your characters, you yourself (if you're doing your characters and their experiences justice) are going to have to experience inside your own head. Briefly, maybe, sure. But often repeatedly. Often excruciatingly. ...And the more universes you're working in, the more pain you're going to have to "live" through in order to describe it adequately.

Got sufficient skin in this game to play the game well? Then that skin's gonna bleed in ways that sometimes subtly, but unavoidably, affect you personally. Do this for long enough, and you may find you don't have a whole lot of cackling on tap when you shove one or another much-loved (or even much-hated!) character headfirst into the grinder. (And shouting "Trust me, this is for your own good!" after them is only going to get you so far. It's way too easy to imagine a level or so of reality more central, further inwards toward the white-hot Core of things, from which someone's yelling that at you.)

What does make me snicker, though—and pretty frequently—is the thought of how one or another of my readerships is going to take one or another piece of character or plotline-event business. "Oh cripes, they're gonna want to kill me when they see this." (grin) That I absolutely do do, repeatedly.

And you know what? What I usually tell myself at such times (regarding the readership in question), if the subject comes up for reflection, is "And if they're cranky about it, well, they brought it on themselves." People who read my work at all regularly know by now that I won't shy away from the pain—for the readers or the characters—when the drama requires it. Certainly I am in service to great Thalia, on and off: but by and large, mighty Melpomene commands more of my attention. Draumaturgically speaking, joy does often come after katharsis. But the pain has to happen first, or there's no contrast to make the cathartic content do what it's meant to. And that's where my primary loyalty lies: the core of Drama, and what it was invented for.

So I went as a guest to the International Discworld Convention in Leicestershire, this last weekend (as had long been planned), and had a fabulous time. It was so terrific seeing so many much-missed buddies in a venue that Peter and I had visited before, and where we’d always had a great time, as old friends and fans of Terry Pratchett’s.

The convention went smoothly, insofar as I was concerned (a few fun kaffeeklatches, a Bedtime Story reading of a rather domestic book of the Odyssey), and only one episode where I fell up some stairs in front of a lot of people. (No injury, no big deal, stuff happens…) But that day, that last day of the convention, I came across signs that something offsite had begun to misbehave.

I’ve got a couple of (outside) security cameras helping me keep an eye on the cottage when I’m not here. I’ve also got a bunch of remotely manageable plugs that let me turn lights on and off when I’m not at home. On Monday, I noticed that all those light-management plugs, and the security cameras, were offline.

Once it became plain to me that these effects weren’t due to any problem at my end, I called my landlord and asked him to check the house and see if there’d been a power failure. It could, of course, have been a failure of the broadband router alone. But we do also get occasional voltage spikes that trip the cottage’s main circuit breaker, and then you have to flip it back on physically, and/or go through the house unplugging things to find out what caused the spike.

My landlord wasn’t on site (he was on the other side of the island, visiting friends), but he got in touch with one of his sons who was home, and asked him to check the house Tuesday morning. That was as good as that was going to get. Myself, I was starting to stress out a bit in terms of what was going on inside the fridge and freezer. The kitchen’s got a Bosch larder fridge and larder freezer, and their insulation’s proven good enough in the past to get their contents through short outages without ill effects.

The problem with this situation, though, was that I wasn’t sure how long the power outage had been (not having checked the security cameras or the light controls between the previous Wednesday and the end of the convention). And I wasn’t going to get home until Thursday afternoon.

Cue twitching DD.

Dermot the landlord’s son stopped by on Tuesday and found that the getting-in key he’d been left seemed not to be functioning: so he couldn’t enter to check the circuit breakers. The couple of lights that weren’t on online-device controls weren’t visible to him either… which made it clear that this wasn’t just a router problem.

Cue more twitching.

I flew home on Wednesday, but too late to get public transport home that day. Dermot kindly stopped by the house again and tried once more, unsuccessfully, to get in. I twitched more for most of yesterday, but there was nothing further that I could do.

I got transport back this afternoon, got into the house without any issues (the front door can be a little tricky sometimes…), threw the circuit breaker, and went straight for the freezer… and my heart sank.

Long story short: most of the food in it was at least partially thawed and therefore now unsafe to eat. A few things were still solid. But easily 90+% of everything in there was a loss. (There hadn’t been a whole lot of stuff in the fridge, but some things in there, especially all the dairy, has had to be binned as well.)

(sigh) So. New fresh meats, bought just a couple of weeks ago and intended for use during the next month or three: byebye. Cooked meals, stews and soups and pies and such, some of them made for the Mind Palate site, and frozen to be eaten later: byebye. Imported specialty groceries, frozen to be eaten in my own good time: bye. Roast and smoked meats being saved to be added to pasta and pies and so forth: bye. Specialty cooking fats (specifically Atora shredded suet): soaking wet, ruined. Much other interesting stuff: no longer safely edible.

Four garbage bags full of many pounds of food (some of it cooked for Peter, some of it even cooked by Peter, which I’d been looking forward to eating soon): all gone.

(sigh) Pretty much all that’s left: a loaf of country-style sourdough and a package of ground beef that was miraculously still frozen hard. I foresee a barbecue this evening, if the weather stays nice.

Meanwhile, I need to go out tomorrow and do some restrained shopping with money that had been budgeted for the electric bill that’s going to come due next week. And I’m going to be kicking myself for awhile for not having checked up on the cameras earlier—before or during the weekend—and for not having thought to turn the freezer up to its highest setting before leaving home… which possibly could have prevented at least some of this loss. Peter always remembered to do that.

(shrug) This is just one of those minor household disasters. I’ll get past it and gradually rebuild the freezer’s contents: replace some of the specialty foods, at least, one for one, from their sources. Lay in some more chicken and stewing beef and so forth.

My absolute favorite of the many fabulous pieces of Discworld opera poster art appearing on the corridor walls at the International Discworld Convention this past weekend.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?