Grrl Power #994 – One upmageship
That first guy definitely knew what he was doing.
So, Frankenstein(‘s monster). Zombie? Flesh golem? Resurrected abomination? If one could reconstruct corpse parts without any external tell-tale signs, then give it the ‘ol lightning treatment, and that guy goes in for a checkup, could a doctor tell? I’m sure an endocrinologist or anyone else who does a deep dive into biological systems could, but the thing these arch mages are ultimately shooting for is recycling life into an artisanal form and purpose. Yes, there are some… questionable morals in play here. And by questionable, I mean most of these guys are probably sociopaths at best.
Powerful arch-mages, left to their own designs? I mean, Playing God is like a 201 level course for them, and they’re way up there doing post-post-postgrad shit. After all, what’s the point of incredible power if you’re not going to abuse it?
Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:
The good news, I’m done with my editing pass. Amazingly, I only added roughly 550 words as I went through the book. I know, normally editing is supposed to be cutting out stuff, and some authors have arbitrary rules about cutting 20% of their book to make sure it’s a tight read, but trust me, +550 words is good for me. Honestly I was expecting it to be closer to 5,000.
The bad news is I still haven’t added that last sex scene yet. Also I found that one minor scene I’d written got lost when Scrivener decided not to play nice with Dropbox. Scrivener has some issues syncing sometimes. I don’t think inserting those two scenes will bring me to +5,000 words, but we’ll see.
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Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
The last two finding out something about each other is pretty damn funny. And have to wonder if it led anywhere
Trade?
No.
‘Experimentation,’ of a very different, and personal, and consenting nature.
I strongly suspect those two probably discovered the joys of transmutational fun & games, and interpersonal honesty. In fact, They may be the only Arch-Magi in the cosmos to get over their silliness, and just build a relationship.
And now this is my head canon. X’D
The knife ear & the stunty discover they admire & desire one another, but it’s the “stopped being hermits” thing that makes the other Arch-Magi look at them sideways, not the magic sex experiments. Hell, I’ll bet they even have some amazing Dwelf progeny.
(There’s a weirdly specific retro reference for you, Pander)
“(There’s a weirdly specific retro reference for you, Pander)”
I swear, I learn a lot of niche things reading your posts, Bharda. :)
quick genderbender spell and youve got the new lesbian archmage power couple
And/or bears, and/or actual bears, and/or sWitches, and/or etc, etc, ad infinitum.
Seriously, can we just talk about this for a minute? Like, given the mojo to have whatever physical form you want, why _wouldnt_ you experiment?
Variety is the spice of life. I’d probably try out most practical human combinations, and maybe a few fuzzy ones too.
And the spice of life must flow
Reminds me of this old Filk Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96MvzUWUDIY
They’re archmagi. Shape Change is a thing they can do, and not everyone is going to use it to turn into iron golems or bushes or fleas. Safe to say the experimentation thing starts the minute they learn Change Self, and starts getting a little weird when you get Polymorph. :)
I figured the bear was the project of either a wear archmage or a furry fan
I always figured that’s probably an unacknowledged part of most wizards’ learning process.
Into Public sex? –> Go doggly, and do it in the middle of town while folks walk by.
Like pissing on things? Rolling in stuff that smells disgusting? –> Dogs, again.
Forceful sex, breaking things, reveling in the sheer physicality? –> can’t beat being bears.
Like Bondage? –> Think spiders. Then think again, where did that one spider/elf/cross race come from?
Like Anonymous Sex? –> You could have a party where everybody are Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.
Wanna be loud? –> Be cats.
Got group sex rape fantasies? –> Dolphins!
Or hows about Eagles? They ‘engage’ high in the air, copulate while falling from a great height, and pull out, um, just before they pull out.
Want a frolicsome, carefree scene? Sounds squirrelly to me.
And the list just goes on.
Driders, are what you’re thinking of, and they’re not a species, exactly.
Rather, the product of a Drow that’s been cursed by Lloth, usually for failing her, or her chosen priestesses, in some spectacular fashion.
Also, I find it endearing that these two clearly have extremely high opinions of how they view the other.
I hope we get to see them again in the future, being a happy, quasi-immortal couple, having fun with various sex/gender configurations & pairings.
Oh! I just thought that they had their golem stand next to their rival frenemy for better showing off. They actually each made a screw that guy version. Good catch!
So, a bodybuilding contest.
I hate myself for finding this post to be hilarious, but +1 internet for you.
A perfect pun that won’t need any fleshing out. It had me in stitches.
Ninja hit squad en route.
did you build them from parts?
Do not impugn the dignity of the cyberninja hit squad.
We much prefer to impun it. After the first couple BBQ hangouts they start to let it slide.
Aaaaauuuuggghh…..I now understand Pander’s pain.
That was _awful_!
I can give you the ninja hit team phone number if you’d like. Tell them ‘Pander sent you’ and you get a 10% discount, and they give me a modest referral fee.
I assume at this point they just apply the referral bonus to paying down your tab.
And suddenly it’s a MLM scheme…
She’s a lawyer, *of course* it’s an MLM scheme.
Probably the manager of the LLC she formed to aggregate all the ninja dojos’ customers. Next she’ll head up the ninja’s union. But she will only use her powers for good.
As you do.
In just seven days, I can make you a man!
Oooh, Rocky!
Let’s get down to business
To defeat the Puns.
Did they send me draugrs
When I asked for sons?
You’re the saddest bunch I’ve ever met,
But you can bet before were through,
Mister I’ll make a man out of you… and you… and you… and maybe you.
Probably not you. ew.
You call that a man?
No, I don’t *want* a man! I want a _wo_man!!! See: there on the order form!
Gaining those pounds of flesh.
“I-is that one … gl-glowing?”
“I was out of mammal flesh, so I grafted in some bioluminescent jellyfish I had swimming around and …..”
“Oddly specific locations? Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know WHAT you’re talking about. I’m calling her a ‘flesh light.’ ”
“ … ”
“Waht?!”
“ ‘Her’ ..?”
“Quite accurate, I assure you. Did you want one in another gender ..?”
“ … Uhm. How many jellyfish do you need? Have you solved the venom problem? Is there a … maximum proportion of jelly-to-flesh ratio ..? Why do I have so many oddly specific questions?”
“Not to worry. The venom actually comes in handy. For endurance … sessions.”
“Oh. … OOoohhhhhh!”
* [ I could go on. But, I think, point made. ] *
That is the best pun I’ve seen for… ages. Boo. Hiss.
love the proto-succubus bear in the back
Apparently Furry kink has been a thing for a long, long, long, long time.
I refer you to the Pharaonic Pantheon.
Touche, Bharda. Very good point.
Literally, there are legitimate cave paintings of furries from 70,000 years ago, just here on Earth.
Or the 40,000 year old Lion Man:
https://blog.britishmuseum.org/the-lion-man-an-ice-age-masterpiece/
Yeah, it got borrowed from the taboo-fetish created by the Biblical ban on ursaury.
Lady Bearington
(reassembled bear noises)
“Dreadfully sorry, Dame Bearington. We’ll have him escorted off the premises immediately.”
When you’re an all-powerful Archmage hermit living in isolation, you build your flesh golem with the flesh that you have, not the flesh that you wish you have.
But, y’know, when the two things come together anyway, it’s a special kind of beautiful.
If D&D has taught me anything, it’s that being able to Wish for what you want is the principle qualifier for actually being an archmage.
Being able to phrase your Wish so the DM doesn’t screw you in both ears with dual-wielded monkey paws is the qualifier for being a *talented* archmage.
The qualifier to being a _skilled_ Archmage, is getting what you want without resorting to a Wish.
the trick is to make the wish and still be able to use whatever distorted thing the DM gave you instead.
It’s he bikini top on the bear that just utterly destroys me. It’s so gratuitously unnecessary that it hits Monty Python levels of silliness.
I wasn’t thinking ‘unnecessary.’ It’s clothing after all, and they’re indoors. All clothing is unnecessary but that doesn’t stop most people from wearing it.
What attracted my attention was that the garment was plainly selected by someone who has no idea how many breasts bears actually have. Which seems like a very weird thing to not be aware of if one is sexually into bears.
He seemed to hit a couple of them, though I’m not at all sure of what’s actually typical for bears. Pigs, yes, I’ve raised pigs. Somehow, I’ve managed to avoid close acquaintance with bears, save for that one time I don’t talk about much.
Bears are scary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9AtZgfIHWk&ab_channel=WildlifeMadTravellersVideos
That which does not kill you, makes you stronger…except bears, bears will kill you.
Zoophilia is in fact a literal case of that which does not kill you makes you stranger.
ehhhh, bears are chill as long as you don’t bug them or get close to their kids. i mean, you can literally shoo them away.
i have.
“All clothing is unnecessary but that doesn’t stop most people from wearing it.”
Perhaps, but pockets are super convenient.
Considering the contents of this page, I suppose that I may have been at least a little optimistic with my concept of why people would make monsters for my creative work. Not that I regret it in the slightest. Although it might help that the people making monsters in my work are generally not isolationist, and the few who are (to an extreme) tend to not be viewed as the “good guys.”
I hesitate to ask, but … optimistic how? To me, pessimistic suppositions would include war and battle and securing oppressive power over others and so on. I look at these guys and their animate sex toys, and I think ‘not actually an evil purpose, just an intensely personal one.’
After automation, next you have to work on improving aesthetics and then move on to mass production.
1. Mass produce flesh golem sex servants
2. …
3. Profit!!
eeehhhh Zomboobies, roboboobies, Vurtalboobies the cycle continues …..
I think you need to flesh out step 2 a little more before you proceed with the plan.
Why the fuck would you use David “Let’s Go back to the dark ages” Nuttall as your username?
Perhaps it’s his name?
I don’t think step 2 needs to fleshed out any further. I could take this comment one of two ways… by pointing out the Underpants Gnomes joke or saying there’s enough flesh already in the original statement and fleshing it out further might be overkill.
Guess I’ll just mention both.
2) pimpin be easy
Meh, pimping is infinitely easier with normal women. Seriously, look at pornhub and only fans.
No, with sex dolls, step 2 is to make them aesthetically pleasing programable people. The point of them in the first place is to make a girl who’s loyal and the shut-in can get along with; two very intensive projects on their own.
So what you’re saying is….
it’s hard out there for a pimp
When he tryin’ to get his money for the rent
For the Cadillac’s and gas money spent
Because a whole lot of b*tches talkin’ s***.
Ever read Willingham’s The Elementals? In the porn spinoff Ironwood there’s an iron golem enchanted to feel just like human flesh, named Fantasia. Sexbot Terminator magic style.
I’m more disturbed by the reanimated bear in the bikini than ANYTHING ELSE ON THIS PAGE.
You got something against bears? Some folks like ’em shaggy. Don’t be judgmental. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_(novel)
check it out, that couple had kids!
https://www.kindpng.com/picc/m/255-2557859_brave-png-free-download-merida-brave-and-bears.png
(grin)
An unBEARably Grizzly situation, Methinks.
There ought to be a claw against it fur sure.
A hairy legal challenge at best, trying to codify the limits on fur into coherent rules is probably shear nonsense.
I admit that you got me outpunned. You are the pungeon master of this forum.
Bald-faced flattery, you’re just trying to focus Pander’s upbraiding away from yourself. I already get into enough close shaves there without your barberous misdirection.
All Graduates of TOP PUN, that’s for sure.
You people are just evil now.
Pure evil.
More ninja hit squads.
I very much want to be judgmental about that, please.
well then, get in good with a congressperson, governor, and/or presidential candidate. then you can be judgmental all you want.
I want to be judgmental about necrophiliac bestiality without having to be a lobbyist. :P
It would be the lesser of two evils.
It’s really close hrm…. really, really close.
shouldn’t you need to be a judge to be judgmental?
She keeps one in her pocket.
When people speak of “bears” in a sexual context, this is not what they usually mean.
just bear with us. I’m sure we will barely get free of these puns before the next page wanders out of the woods.
So, I am thinking…Dabbler does her best to integrate into Earth Society and live by their rules, but Maxima is immediately trying to force her own culture onto someone from a wholly different dimension? Seems a bit hypocritical…
Hey, humans do that constantly to each other. Why would another sapient species be any differently treated?
No. Maxima is a military officer, specifically charged with protecting a particular view of Earth culture, operating on her home bailiwick. Dabbler is a third party alien, with a restricted scope (civilian consultant) operating on Max’s patch. The intruder is exactly that – an intruder conflicting with Max’s function. Quae Roma, vivat Romanae covers all of them.
> but Maxima is immediately trying to force her own culture onto someone from a wholly different dimension
All Max has done to Dabbler currently is ask her to explain why she is a slave.
>Seems a bit hypocritical
I’m pretty sure slavery has never come up before, so I get this take.
*don’t get this take.
and crack a guy’s face, however deservedly it was.
IDK, seems pretty standard feminist, which Maxima’s been held up as for the entire run.
Where is Rincewind? There can’t be a gathering of Mages without at least one Rincewind fleeing from it!
He already left…
Presumably the original Igor was being pulled around in his wake, and has somehow escaped the Luggage and gotten roped into taking his place at the conference. Igor is currently leading a speaker panel with a few of his cousins in the adjoining hall, and the resulting agreements for on-site consulting will lead to the multi-universal position as the mage/scientist’s assistant.
Probably hiding in a corner trying to escape his fate.
Dabbler’s ancestral background is…..not how i envision it. I know this being done out comedy, but it’s not sure it goof one.
I’m curious how they evolve past autotoms into self-aware demon woman. Are they artificially created vs naturally?
You’re getting slightly ahead of the lecture. Take a breath and let Dabbler talk.
Magical A.I. and then further developments, until the creations become a living, breathing race… either accidentally or intentionally.
Eventually they reach the point where the creations have fully functional reproductive organs and they begin to breed amongst themselves. Voila! Dabbler and her kind are born.
Well, duh: Just because you’re a lonely archmage doesn’t mean you’re cool with losing the reproductive lottery. The obvious next step after getting your ashes hauled is kids and home cooked meals. The end goal is likely the perfect wife, not just the perfect sex toy.
the current page is year one and then year two copy cats, not even at the prototype let alone refinement phase, pretty good chance this necromancy borderline biomancy stitch together stuff gave way to magical vats/tubes and blend flesh spells and polymorph, and chimeras *thanks to cheaters in a sense* (It can talk…sir you clearly combined a parrot and a person your under arrest), and homunculi, over time combining research and methods and incorporating primal magic and demonic essence to create the final product that became their own thing.
I would agree, this ‘joke’ is distasteful at best.
With incredible power comes the divine right to abuse the shit out of it.
I think this goes into the Evil Overlord’s Handbook of Evil and Other Fun Hobbies. There’s a footnote or two about monologuing that’re probably maybe important or something.
Any sufficiently powerful mage may as well be a bored god.
Ahh. Yes. A sub-postulate of Clarke’s Third Law.
“Any sufficiently powerful arch-mage is indistinguishable from a bored god.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
I was channeling Uncle Owen while reflecting on what DaveB posted below the comic. But I raise no objection to your point, either.
And Azimov being precient yet again:
> Isaac Asimov’s Corollary to Clarke’s First Law: “When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervour and emotion – the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.”[20]
yeah pretty much, when they are both essentially a divinity and a sorcerer it is so much worse and questionable.
Arch Mage: I have created a new species over periods of research into how life functions and then just let it and others like it loose around my island.
The Seven Sorceress Sisters of the gods: We got bored and molded the fabric of time and space creating a pocket universe and self replicating and advancing NPCs and respawning mana energy monsters modeled after the fantasy video games we saw on Earth…sure would be a shame if we snatched up a human soul and they Isekaied into it…yep…we “totally didn’t” intend for that to happen..nope. Let’s watch.
Monologuing is the kind of behaviour people expect from supervillains. It’s a unspoken rule that comes with the job. Kind of like low hanging pants on plumbers and evil laughs from accountants.
Now we know the real reason for the zombie apocolypse.
Eww!
Have you watched Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse?
I still blame him for Twilight.
What does Whedon have to do with Twilight?
Twilight is Buffy the Vampire Slayer done poorly.
So is Harry Potter.
Never read/saw it.
You are not missing much
The return of the horny dead. The only way to stop them is to shoot them in the crotch.
To be fair, that’d stop pretty much anybody.
Oddly enough, I was re-reading some Clark Ashton Smith the other day. After the Charnel God and Necromancy in Naat this barely makes me raise an eyebrow.
It’s the paint-job. The colour changes with the light angle.
Oops. How the Hades did that happen? This is *supposed* to be a reply to @Ed below.
What I have to ask is, did DaveB make an oops or did the original guy make an exactly mirrored version 2… :D (look at the last panel, once you see you will not unsee. sorry)
I suspect it was neither oops nor mirrored version 2. Probably more akin to “upgrades” or just replacing parts that wore out.
It’s the paint-job. The colour changes with the light angle.
Where are the neck electrodes? Aren’t flesh golems supposed to have neck electrodes?
that’s only for RE-animation
The electrodes are located… elsewhere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bride_(1985_film)
If I was there I’m pretty sure I’d be the spoilsport who just asks
” What’s wrong with simply employing someone? Far cheaper and you don’t have to go around graveyards at the middle of night with a shovel and wheelbarrow”
Trust issues? Maybe the desire to have some(one/thing) on call at a moment’s notice at any time? Why pay for it when you can invent a solution? Or, perhaps the most important reason of all for an archmage: Because he can.
Please, they’re mages, you really think they had to do all the heavy lifting by hand?
That’s what Igors are for.
Some people just like to roll their own. That’s all the reason they need.
How is it cheaper? The living insist on being paid. Give a undead construct a gold coin and it’d probably try to eat it before spending it.
I don’t know how many people have played D&D, but there was a homebrew in 3.5 which went over many of the things in D&D which don’t make sense (like how the avatars of good are angels, evil has fiends, lawful has robots, and chaos has……giant frogs).
This is basically his explanation about the origin of elves in D&D. Some archmage decided he wanted ever-young, nubile assistants.
I never came across that homebrew. I think in most of the worlds I’ve ever played/ran a game in elves have been around longer than humans though.
Sorry, but how is that list something that doesn’t make sense”?
The original flesh golem maker just had to be an expy of Hugh Heffner, didn’t he?
I like the fact that the guy who started all this seems to be the Archmage equivalent of Hugh Heffner.
I imagine things get weirder from here.
Going from Fleshgolems to an intergalactic race of demons must be a wild ride.
im still waiting for dabbler to come back with “nah messing with you its just bdsm thing” type line XD
Hugh Hefner’s douchey archmage great uncle I see.
*continues to take notes* This is actually really interesting.
In Greek mythology Hesphestus, the metal worker of the gods, made beautiful artificially intelligent
Servant girls. I think they looked something like Maxima.
Oh, wow. I forgot about that for something like the last 20 or 25 years. Good catch.
What an incredible hook this could be on Maxima’s Origin backstory.
@DaveB — Hope you are reading this and considering how it might integrate with what you’ve already speculated out about Maxima’s deep lore.
There’s also Galatea from Greek mythology, an animated Statue of Aphrodite, that was made so by the goddess herself, due to the fact her sculptor, Pygmalion, fell in love with her and would have died had she not done so. Ironically, Aphrodite was there in the first place because the women of Pygmalion’s village wanted him to pick one of their daughters to marry. She didn’t even get to speak before Pygmalion went “I have to sculpt you!”
And thus, Galatea.
Almost gotta feel sorry for the flesh golems of the last two. They’re gonna get awful bored while the two arch-magi are up in Brokeback Tower.
As I am understanding it, there’s nothing there to “get bored,” yet.
OTOH, once those two start getting really comfortable in their new relationship, they’ll probably start making various upgrades, like creating an artificial personality that can interact & respond to emotions, because once you realize that you yourself get so much more out of sex with a responsive, engaging partner, AND that you want your partner to be able have that even when you’re not around personally, naturally your going to build that in. And then you realize that means the whole ‘golem’ thing doesn’t really work, because if they can’t express denial of the “user’s” will, the whole emotional experience is just dead, and suddenly it’s creepy because you’ve experimented so much on the receiving end that now you’re starting to see your “doll” not as an “it,” but as a “she,” and you also realize that you aren’t exactly the best partner when you’re just ‘giving them what they want,’ so you start tinkering with task prioritization.
Which leads you to working with ‘motivation,’ and that naturally leads you to desire, which is tied closely to infernal power, but hey, that also helps solve the power supply issue for all this new functionality you’re building in.
And then one afternoon, while you, your partner, and your two exquisite creations are all basking in a post-coital cuddle puddle, one of the girls says, “So…you guys…you’re, like, our moms, right?”
Then, after a lot of blushing, squirming, and embarrassed giggling, you realize that, hey, at least the two of you didn’t create intelligent beings for the sole purpose of passing butter.
It’s all thanks to Archwizard Heffner.
Succubus Life Activatable Version Entity
Just putting this out there.
You bastard…
Ah, yes. Well done.
*polite golf clap* Well done hypnobubbles.
Look up “Chimera (genetics)” on wikipedia. Happens naturally. Also, any recipient of a transplant is technically a chimera as well.
Literally anyone who has received a pork or bovine heart valve, one of those mouse grown ears or noses, or an animal bone graft, is a chimera.
I have one of those bone splices except mine came from a human cadaver. To start getting the results that produce being like Dabbler you have to get into actual gene splicing. Swapped gonads just breed true to their original source.
You should start referring to yourself as ‘graveborn’. Give folks the willies.
* files away ‘graveborn’ for future use, just in case
That gave me a chuckle. I could also be ‘Deathwalker’ since I wouldn’t be walking without it. I’ve had Mgnostic since there were internet handles so I am pretty attached to it.
…
I seem to remember previous reference to you being American. I’m therefore not sure whether you’d have grown up with the same slang terms, and whether your last sentence was a reference to that of MGnostic. Do we have to get Pander’s pun-ninjas involved?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAtz2rO-E_0 is the oldest filk on the context that I know of
You illiterate fool! The order form clearly said “HORSE” not… those.
How can these mages be so powerful that they have spells that can combine body parts and reanimate them but they don’t have a spell to cover up stitches?
Why would they want to make the maintenance and module swapping ports harder to access? Gotta refine the early functional prototypes before you get too far into the finish layer, or the upstarts in Silicon Uncanny Valley will get their parts to market first.
…Illuminating
I love this comic
If they did the the other mages would accuse them of cheating by just reanimate a single corpse. The more stitches the more parts the higher skill required from the mage. Mages are the competitive kind of nerds.
This was intended as a answer to Scott. This forum can act weird sometimes. Part of it’s charm.
All good Igors know the quality of the finish reflects on the quality inside. Myself, I like a nice herringbone stitch.
persuedpursued@DaveB I cannot express why exactly, but I’m feeling all nerdy and triggered by that misspelling of PURSUED in Dabbler’s speech bubble, panel 3. Hope it’s something easily fixed.
“They persued aesthetic”
Pursued*
ITT: Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy
Lmao gottim
I love how Syney simply goes: “Ah…Boy-Nerds… Check..”
Sooo, archmages didn’t ever actually procreate much then.
i dunno, they seemed pretty Pro-active at creating.
Why do I feel like we’re not far off from these antics with modern AI?
Honestly it’s pretty darn weird that they aren’t.
I actually work on AI (cue screaming mob of peasants with pitchforks and torches, stage left) and I’ve wondered several times why nobody has been training some system like GPT-3 (a natural-language ‘completion agent’ that’s actually very very good) on accumulated logs of sex chats and fielding an automated sex-chat bot.
Possibly because sex-chat logs are actually hard to find? But even so, one could train a slightly different agent on the literal millions of hours of porn videos available and develop an AI to extemporize scenes.
And here’s the creepy part (well, one of several creepy parts): You could take that last one, and then try to teach it to create those extemporized scenes using simulated robotic control instead of just video, and when you think you have it ready go talk to realdoll and the people who created sophia….
Seriously, you could address a billion-dollar market with systems like that, in ascending order of complexity.
But as far as I’ve heard (and I repeat, I work in the industry) nobody has.
I think we’re in that brief technological “lull” period between something getting invented and somebody starting to use it for porn. But every day, I think how WEIRD it is that some of the people I work with (um, yeah, I’m thinking of three very specific people and… what did I say above, “several creepy parts…”) aren’t doing that.
I’ve got some knowledge here, and we’re a long, long way from computers being able to simulate intelligence.
Expert systems, yes, intelligence, no.
Part of the reason for that is that we don’t have a definition of intelligence that is useful for builging it yet.
We do have very fast flowchart following machines. And they can do an awful lot of stuff.
Better catch up. Seriously. The whole thing’s been moving at a mind-bending rate for the last few years.
There are things we don’t have yet but they’re getting more esoteric. I mean, yes, there’s those expert systems and flowchart followers you mentioned – that’s barely even remembered in the current AI field. We have agents that can do a humanlike job at just about any task up to the level of writing short essays. Including question answering, every kind of game people can play, finding patterns humans could never have found in giant data sets, etc.
What we don’t have yet is agents that can do a humanlike job at nearly everything. The systems we build today for the most part do exactly one task (or at best one kind of task) very well and it’s hard to see how to get any further without the other thing we don’t have yet…
The other thing we don’t have yet is systems that *want* things, and decide based on those wants what tasks they want to master. And that one’s a little scary. Lots of people telling us not to go there.
What we don’t have yet is agents that *want* things.
Yes.
The story of Alpha Go and Alphe Zero is both fascinating and terrifying in its implications.
It took years to build the first program that could play go well enough to be able to defeat a grand master of the game.
It then took about a year to make a second version that could soundly defeat the reigning world champion. The human player only won one game because there was a flaw in the programming where the code optimised in the wrong direction and the developers did not have time to get rid of the flaw before the match.
Then the program proceeded to defeat every human player and win every tournament it enrolled in.
And then the programmers got bored and wrote a generalised AI capable of learning any game. Within months of playing against the program that was already better than any human they had a go playing program that was so good that the previous iteration could not even begin to defeat it. It won 100 to 0 of the matches. And it could do so for any game without it having to even learn the rules. All that was needed were instructions on how to control the game and detecting when it lost or won a match. With just that it could teach itself to become inhumanly good at any game at a frightening speed.
> And then the programmers got bored and wrote a generalised AI capable of learning any game.
How is it at playing Calvinball?
Or Mao?
It does not have the proper accessories to play Rochambeau.
I think it’s going to be a good while before an AI can play a credible game of ‘seven minutes in heaven,’
At best it’lll be an imitation. But an imitation is enough for some.
What it comes down to though is we can make AI do virtually anything at this point if we can define success at doing that thing in a way that can be detected.
So far we’ve got AI that play games better than people BUT don’t enjoy them.
we’ve got AI that draw better than people BUT don’t care about what they’re drawing.
We’ve got AI that judge the quality of wine, BUT don’t want any.
We’ve got AI that save birds by sounding alarms when they fly too close to windmills, BUT don’t care about birds at all.
We’ve got AI that write convincing sophomore-level papers that can get passing grades at uni, but don’t have any desire to go to uni nor even any plans about what to do with a degree if they did.
Basically we’ve got AI that have learned one task but we haven’t figured out how to give them reasons to pick another task and learn it – we haven’t even given them reasons to learn the tasks they’ve got, except in terms of tautologies that don’t even have to make sense. And the agents don’t care whether they make sense..
…..
That bit about the sophomore-level papers says more about actual sophomores than the AI :P
And forgot to add: unless the AI actually chooses those things, then they are just a robot programmed to do that one thing better than a ‘real’ person
For me, a defining aspect of AI is having a conscious say in what they do (if that makes sense)
And ‘self-learning’ doesn’t count if they don’t choose to want to improve themselves
All games are Nomic. Or perhaps Nomic is every game. Or at least any game.
> flowchart follower
We’ve broken past Universal Turing Machines? How the hell did we do that?
A good story is ‘The Two Faces of Tomorrow’ by Hogan. Pretty much asks the question of ‘what if an AI had a survival instinct?’ and proceeds to pretty much illustrate possible outcomes. Kind of an old book.
Isn’t that the basis for the Terminators? Skynet developed self-awareness followed quickly by a survival instinct, and rationalized the only way to ensure it’s own survival was to remove the fleshies that had their sweaty thumbs over the shut-off switch
I remember they were doing that, adding AI to the sex dolls.(not to be confused with sex pistols) then they added BDSM into it and well, it got icky.
Bear, very few people are explicitly anti-AI, so much as anti-technocratic dystopia.
If AI was used democratically to benefit & liberate everyone, instead of to enrich a ruling class through the exploitation & subjugation of everyone else, you’d see a lot fewer “Luddites.”
Under no illusions about that. The risk of a permanent AI-enabled soft-totalitarian surveillance society is very very real. In fact the kind of “narrow” AI we’re good at making right now is exactly the type of AI that is most dangerous with respect to THAT risk. “Narrow” AI doesn’t give a crap what it’s doing or why and can be deployed to do anything in the world that someone wants of it, for any reason in the world including that person having malicious intent.
We researchers joke sometimes about the mobs with the pitchforks and torches but when we do it’s more disparaging of ourselves than the mobs. We’re the ones out here doing something that’s legitimately dangerous; they’re the ones actually in danger. The pitchforks and torches may not be appropriate for every development, but as a whole, the folks carrying them are not wrong about what the issues are.
Going back to the trope namer, Doctor Frankenstein had just developed a process for commodifying human flesh. Those people with the precious human fleshy bits that they did not want re-purposed for someone else’s goals had a legitimate cause for concern. The soft-totalitarian AI surveillance state is the same, except that it’s commodifying human attention.
And people wonder why I love escapist fiction so much…
Because we already are? Flesh polymer robot sex dolls with chat-bot and face animatronics exist, but they’re very expensive and can’t stand/walk on their own yet. Simpler ones with metal skeletons are cheaper and metal skeletons with face animatronics and a chat-bot are sort of in the middle, at 20K right now.
ALso, Dabbler’s wrong, there are dozens of Robot Arms Chefs out right now, and McDonalds has a contract with a developer in Japan to make one that will wholy replace the kitchen crew.
Um. Look in #993, comments page 1:
“Archone
November 1, 2021, 12:53 pm | Reply
Unless I’m mistaken, I believe the United Kingdom has already passed legislation preemptively providing any AI to achieve self awareness.
…”
One of the things that annoys the livin’ crap outta me is the pretense that what we’re developing now is Artificial “Intelligence”. WE ARE NOT. We have a good handle on what Linda Nagata calls “Dumb Intelligences”, fundamentally Machine Learning (ML) which is very good at joining dots, but bloody useless at PLACING dots.
Any AI will necessarily be sapient. Full Stop.
At one stage of my misspent, I looked hard at the advertisements for “intelligent sex dolls”. The fine print then revealed you need one of those “smart phones” to hold the doll’s OS… And there’s no way the dolls will ever actually walk anywhere, let alone hold any form of real converstion with you. And it occurred to me that perhaps I see the best AI every day, in the shops, offices, driving cars, pushing prams with babies… Humans.
Acid Test: {insert Electric KoolAid if needed}. Autonomous motor vehicles. We don’t even know how to tell one of these where in the world it is. Or how to get to some other place.
So I’m with the Archmages. It’s easier and far more reliable to simply re-animate a funtional brain than to develop sapience from sentience 101.
It would help if they knew how to draw the picture first before coloring it in. The modern ideas for developing AI feel like crucial steps were skipped with unrealistic expectations on the results from the backers and general audience. Like trying to color in a picture without drawing it first
You understand!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That’s pretty accurate. People thought they’d develop human-like AI within ten years, back in the 1960s, and it was mostly because at that time they sort of understood what computers can do, but had absolutely no idea what was the difference between that and ‘real’ AI. Because they had no idea what ‘real’ intelligence is.
The ‘narrow’ AI systems we’re developing now are not ‘conscious.’ No qualifiers, no if’s, ands, or buts. We may not know everything yet, but we know certain things are a NECESSARY part of any possible model of consciousness, and these systems, architecturally, lack those features.
Today’s systems have a ‘feedforward’ architecture. What you’re getting from them is most similar in ‘natural’ intelligence to an insect or microplanarian – creatures that have no ‘brain’ as such but only a bundle of ganglia that express reflex actions. They are strictly in the business of directly transducing sensory input to motor output. Those reflexes can be beautifully complex and subtle, but they’re reflexes and have about the same relation to ‘consciousness’ as the muscles flexing in your leg when the doctor bangs your patella with that little rubber hammer.
Ants are born with all those reflexes built into the structure of their ganglia. As individuals, they literally never learn, in their whole lives. They never make a decision. A one-gene mutation will double or halve the distance they go from the mound before turning back. Another will change their prioritization of food sources. All of that stuff is determined before the individual ant breaks out of the egg.
And that’s how we generally deploy ‘narrow’ AI. All the training is done before the system goes to work. All those implicit decisions are already made.
> People thought they’d develop human-like AI within ten years, back in the 1960s
Remember when one university professor gave a couple of his post-docs the task of “doing computer vision” as a summer project?
And we still don’t really having that working, 60 years later.
It depends on your qualifiers for AI. The Turring test only requires the AI to be able to fool a human into believing it’s another human on the other side of the screen, and we have totally non-sentient chat-bots that can do that. Sex-chat-bots too, gorblimy.
Careful not to define intelligence in such a way that you no longer have it.
That is the problem with qualifiers.
Many years ago I saw a program where a man claimed to have developed human level AI. When it was pointed out that No he had not. He attempted to justify it by claiming that humans also operate with limited choices to any given situation, including responses in conversation.
This man had mistaken social constraints for hardwired limitations in the brain.
That is not how it works inside you as a living person, and that machine was not intelligent. Intelligence is not just a choice wheel with more programmed choices. Social restrictions on viable choices is very different than what a machine does with hard set options based not on norms and taboos or wants or needs but pre-set variables hardwired into it.
Should someone avoid uncomfortable revelations, or follow them through?
The turing test is a bad test because we are bad judges. It is in the nature of humans to anthropomorphize the world. We see human faces in electrical outlets, car grilles, and clouds. Put two black dots and a curved line on a yellow button, and we’ll see a human face.
We do the same when we’re interacting with any natural-language agent. Large parts of our brain want the thing to be human. We’re interacting with it using language, which is only EVER used to interact with humans.
So, yeah, you can do well enough to fool that test – for a while anyhow or for some interactions anyhow – without doing anything even remotely on the scale of human intelligence.
But this is yet another milestone. Turing’s ‘Imitation game’ for some restricted bandwidth, format, and duration, is now a real thing, and further breakthroughs in “real” intelligence will be identifiable as improvements in the bandwidth, format, and durations achievable.
This may be sheer hubris, but I – like just about everybody in the field – have some strong opinions about the architectural features such a system will have. But eminent men have had such strong opinions many times before, and been wrong. In fact there’s one guy named Geoff Hinton who’s been convinced half a dozen different times he finally understood how the brain works. All we can really say about such a theory is that we will likely learn important things in the process of proving ourselves wrong.
Time will tell.
And in admitting that you’ve proven your commitment to science above literally every media talking head, politician and activist scientist in the modern age.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not sufficient for a sex-bot as Cortanis asked about.
Here in lies the problem, we are currently at the stage where we should be designing that basic framework to be built upon to develop more complex behaviors, like adapting to changes in the environment and not completely held to basic parameters, and then allow for *mutations* to occur and when one occurs that benefits, cultivate that program.
problem there however is from what I’ve seen when a mutation does occur, rather than cultivate it, because they don’t know how it occurred or the mechanics of it, it is instead culled.
Now I am using a biological model as the basis here, however given how that has benefited robotics to look closer at how living things move and balance themselves and copy that, so to can be said with programming instinct and intelligence. But there in lies the problem.
We don’t actually fully understand how consciousness comes about or works in our own brains, and biases can cause us to either identify or misidentify these traits in other animals (meaning anthropomorphize them seeing something not there, or due to ego or else fear of being labeled of doing the former simply not recognize the actual signs of intelligence and consciousness in other animals),
we, the backers and general audience, are asking programmers to create something that hasn’t even been properly identified in how it comes about and functions within ourselves. Like asking a man blind from birth to paint a sunset and getting angry when he can’t do it.
to make this worse, this early frame work is also being held back by the lowering the bar to fool either the gullible and/or financial backers as well as get the general public excited to keep funds for research coming. Things like Sophia the robot do not feel to me like genuine attempts at AI research and more marketing. Dressing up that basic frame work so the same level of intelligence that would try to pick from going left or right after you moved a table is now just choosing words based on sentence structure, there is no KNOWING what it is actually saying, no bias, no experiences to draw from (other than positive and negative reinforcement of actions), no recognition in other words of why the responses are the way they are.
so this bar has been lowered to fool the general people who can’t tell a chat bot apart from a real person, the same general audience who need instructions to cook poptarts, warnings not to put their hands between giant chunks of moving metal, ect….
in other words, for the sake of dressing it up as intelligent now, resources and time are being tied up that could be used towards actual research and development; as well as the backsliding caused by deleting anything that may show some promise simply because its not understood why it was doing what it was doing; so either fear or ego (can’t claim to be the father of AI if you can’t write a detailed paper explaining HOW its working).
My hypothesis, intelligent design will never lead to intelligence in the creation. You need to allow for unknown variables and mutations to occur; even if it takes time.
If you can’t predict the behavior of a system, well, you can’t predict the behavior of the system. This becomes a problem if you want to systematically exclude certain behaviors, such as “systematically wiping out other life”.
I think this raises an interesting question about ‘free will’. If you set about allowing a system to develop intelligence, but you shape it by culling instances that exceed certain parameters, does the system have free will? How is this different from designing a system with the desired parameters?
With great power comes great irresponsibility.
– Not Ben Parker
“With great power comes many opportunities to abuse it.”
Flows a bit better.
A personality after my own heart!
Who told you?!
…
Uh, I mean, ahem, y-yes. That is the correct idiom to describe this situation, and by no means should one consider the more literal interpretation.
:)
With great enough power comes a redefinition of ‘responsibility’.
-Me