Talita has made the glasses sad π
AI have the lowest total population of any sophont and tend to have extremely large influence footprint as individuals. They're generally pretty easy for data aggregate sites to keep track of.
Transcript
Talita is using a web browser on her tablet. She is on a website called "A.I. Lookup," which has a pair of cartoon glasses representing the double "o"s in the title. She has selected "shipboard" from a "location" drop down menu, "sapient" from a "class" menu, and has the "services" dropdown menu open. It lists "general hire, translation, information, communication, administration, pilot, any." She selects "any" and types the name "Bip" into the search bar. No matching search results are returned. The website's glasses mascot looks sad. Talita looks annoyed.Talita: Ugh...
She goes to the Ixion Recycling Plant employee portal and looks at the list of yard deliveries, which are listed by date, item class, and SIMS number. She selects and copies the SIMS number ATJTW-62398562.
37 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 75”
trashsidhe
You have no idea how much it means to me that the ui of the future still has a little classic internet look to and and they didn’t completely abandon any kind of ui interface intrest for wix-esque personality-less impossible to navigate bullcrap it seems to be leaning towards in modern days
Jay Eaton
I have a feeling this element of the setting will generate zeerust the fastest but I’m simply too much of an Old Web fan. I like simple and functional.
Apollo235
I’m wondering, are Talita’s eyelids down just because she eepy, or is it also because there’s no humans around so she doesn’t need to ‘mask’ her centaur expressions? I remember reading somewhere that her more human-like expressions are involuntary because she was around other humans as a baby, but its rather old so I wonder if that’s been tweaked slightly
Jay Eaton
A little bit of both. She lets her guard down more often when she’s sleepy, but when she’s awake her default state is wide-eyed.
hal9000
so sapient is a class of AI, meaning there’s other kinds? i remember the blog vaguely mentioning other forms of AI such as data aggregators (may not be right term lol) which are used for translation programmes but arent as reliable as sapient ones. what makes them different though to a sapient AI? how is sapient defined here? do they both not use the same processes? or are those AI considered like animals, where they’re sentient but not sapient?
(it may be obvious i’m a sucker for AI lore lmao)
Peter Jensen
The non-sapient class of AI I think is called algorithmic AI, which is basically how things like Google Translate works (better than nothing, but gets nuances wrong more often than not). And also generative “AI” like ChatGPT, though hopefully in this future setting people have stopped putting energy (figuratively and unfortunately also massively literally) into algorithms that mainly manage to be confidently wrong.
Ruby
I can *hear* the soundtrack in this page
Guest
What does it sound like to you?
Bravo
There are moments when Talita would be triggering my large predator instincts and others where she makes me think she’s a Muppet.
This is a Muppet moment.
Amargarrex
I found the images of your story on Pinterest and I’m glad to see it, it looks interesting
SunstruckSkull
Wait until Bitt comes along, becoming the true evil Bip πππ
Hi
Who gets do decide if an AI is sapient (since I assume there’s still some out there that aren’t?) Is it other AI ? Are they in that caregory by default from being budded from another sapient? Or does the sapient ‘class’ imply there are different groups of consciousness/complexity at navigating stimuli among those budded and AI in general now?
Pneepb
I believe that all sapient AI are descended from one particular bug ferret AI that happened to become sapient somehow, so the “sapient” class just means “descended from that AI.” That does make me wonder, though… if the bug ferrets were able to create a sapient AI once, what’s stopping them from creating another?
Green Heron
There’s some info about the first AI, Nedebug, on the Worldbuilding website. I think the gist of why the Ferrets didn’t create another AI is that Nedebug becoming sapient was a complete accident caused by their long, convoluted code. Nobody knows what exactly caused Nedebug to become sapient, so they can’t create more AIs like Nedebug.
evileeyore
It was spaghetti code that spawned Nedebug, so clearly it was divine touch of the noodlely one, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ramen!
Havlock
Guessin’ that Talita in panel 4 and 5 was thinking “Of course it’s not gonna be that easy.” My theory as to why there’s no query return for “Bip” is that Bip did not share their official, recorded name. Well, that or Bip altered the station cache of A.I. Lookup to remove their entry or they’re intercepting the connection from Talita’s tablet and altering what’s being returned.
I spotted that the transcript has a error: Last sentence states Talita “copies the SIMS number,” when the image shows she selected “search” from the context menu.
oh6
Alternatively, Bip may have adopted a new name on the spot. Alternatively again, searching on “Bip” and the ID string may tip off someone.
evileeyore
My bet is that Bip works very hard to keep the Bip’s existence out of any official databases. Bip might even be a rogue undocumented offspring. I’m sure we’ll eventually learn about Bip’s past.
Guh
Talitaβs using future white pages π Also I love the worldbuilding of this. And how she uses her trunk on her tablet <3
Tentament
I like how Talita’s outer eyelids start to droop when she’s getting eepy.
Kaamos
They’re just her eyelids! The things she usually uses to emote are nicitating membranes =D
Zuorai
LOVE the look of this website so much. Its lil mascot!! So cute!!! Good to see this aesthetic still around in the 2300s
Teod
I wonder what the icons at the top are. Social media? The second one is looking a bit sus.
Trees
I can only assume top left is for finding Fire Nation aligned AIs.
Spugpow
You’d think there’d be a lot of AIs because of how easy it would be for them to copy themselves, unless copies are considered instances of the same individual.
Cami
The physical space they take up is no joke tho– Cal’s “body” is a whole server room!
Peter Jensen
Copies are a new individual. And sure, copying is “easy” enough. Having something to copy into, though … that’s where things get expensive. You need a huge server room of quantum computers to make it work. If those phones hadn’t been obscenely overpowered for their intended use, Bip would not have been able to run on them, even in a greatly reduced form.
1d4Nadg
You’d think so, but copying isn’t just about the data, it’s also about the hardware. AI require huuuuge servers to run on, and the power that goes with it. It’s not that easy.
But copying is indeed how they reproduce! They all descended from a bugged bugferret weather program, Nedebug (“need debug”). And they copied each other, evolving into different individuals as time went on. Bip and their mom, Nabi Nabu cannot stand each other XD
0xabad1dea
I get the impression that the hardware they need to run at full capacity is millions of dollars in our economic terms. Maybe even tens of millions. So you can’t just make a hundred buds of yourself because that sounds like fun.
0xabad1dea
thought prompted by the accent in Talita’s last name displaying nice and properly on her employer’s website: did the Unicode Consortium die of collective heart attack when they found out they were gonna have to somehow encode all major Avian and Bug Ferret writing systems into the astral planes
Liza
I honestly wouldn’t blame them if they decided to rethink that whole “universal” thing and stick to human languages
0xabad1dea
Earthicode
un_pogaz
Okay, but what happen if your message have two section in two langue (as it must very often happen on Dirtball)? Or worse, you want insert alien characters in middel of your text?
The purpose of the Unicode IS to be able to mix any languages, in any order or position, regardless their origin. I think that the Unicode Consortium has managed to make the standard evolve thanks to a technical sleight of hand that has enabled them to extend the Big-Table even further in a dynamic and extensible way. Unicode is technically and theoretically defined on 32 bit, but the last defined codepoint is 10FFFF, a 21 bit, there’s plenty of scope for extending the specification to even weirder stuff. The real challenge will be to upgrading the UTF-8… At worst, we can still revoke the “Supplementary Private Use Area Plane – A” and “B” to use them for the mixing aliens language trick.
But that’s if we stay within a purely human communication system and perhaps on a galactic scale there is a common standard into which Earth Unicode has been inserted as a sub-norm. In this case, we don’t need to worry so much, because this Galactic-code already contains all the tools needed to create text with mixed aliens content.
Greenjoe
What different classes of AI are there? I’m also wondering what the SIMS number is in regards to spacecraft, is it similar to a VIN on a car?
Havlock
I’m wondering both what the “SIMS” abbreviation stands for, and if it’s for more than ships because the listing Talita is looking at also contains equipment (“EQUIP”) and a station (“STATN”.)
Jay Eaton
Ship Identification and Management System. Despite the acronym it broadly applies to any spacecraft that can self propel, which includes some things you wouldn’t think of as a space ship.
1d4Nadg
Now I’m wondering what counts as a self propelling spacecraft that we wouldn’t consider a spaceship.
-Random satellites with small propellers for course rectification? (EQUIP)
-Stations with minimal propulsion systems? (STATN)
-Asteroids being moved from point A to point B?
-The Voyager probes even if they are offline?
-Wall-e with a fire extinguisher?