Most sci-fi TRPG settings go out of their way to sabotage artificial intelligence and make it non-viable for one reason or another because if they didn't, the setting couldn't tell have the type of stories it wanted to have.
Is there an equivalent to this in Fantasy? Does magic get the same treatment or are setting generally less afraid to explore the implications of it?
 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
 DMT Has Friends For Me Shirt $21.68 |
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
>Most sci-fi TRPG settings go out of their way to sabotage artificial intelligence and make it non-viable for one reason or another
No they don't.
sorta right. If a setting doesn't want AI they just don't mention AI.
A setting generally only gimps AI if it still has some use for it, if nothing else than just cool tech.
Magic can sorta be seen similarly. Magic has no concrete rules or definitions of what it can and can do, so in a way magic gets arbitrarily constrained in the manner needed to tell the story the author wants in a similar way AI is stopped from being all powerful in sci-fi.
Yes it does. Battletech, Warhammer 40k, Dune, lots of settings find ways to shoo AI out of the room.
>Dune, Gothic Dune, and Mecha Dune
Wow, so many settings!
All sci-if settings just end up becoming Dune anyways.
>sci-if settings
>sci-if
These are the voyages of the starship Mayhaps, its 5 year mission to evaluate whether or not to explore strange new worlds. Maybe there's new life, maybe civilisations, who knows? To consider going forward if there's evidence to support these assumptions.
Futurama's Neutrals would be fine nemeses to the Prevaricators.
Alasdair Reynolds' stuff tends to steer clear imo, hard to bind together an interstellar empire without FTL.
Yeah, writing about the doings of superintelligences let along their perspectives is a b***h (the Gardener of Souls bit in the Quantum Thief stands out to me for that reason). Also while humans as the resilient vermin of a setting rocks it glosses all our actions with a cosmic horror futility which restricts the stories which can be told.
>Captain, incoming signal from the Neutralis sector.
>I want a full report, let's not jump to any conclusions.
>It's... A message... One word... It reads... ... "Hello"
>Yellow alert, prepare to hail with the message "Who this?", prepare to launch survey.
>Captain, to hail at this range we'd need to boost the forward array's power by at least-
>Just get it done by committee.
>I'll think about it, sir.
Absolute pottery, Anons
This thread's existence is finally justified
>Space. Man kind had dreamed of it ever since they first looked up to the stars. They wondered how far it stretched and what could have lived beyond our furthest imagination.
>Then one day, mankind finally received a message. It was in some unknowable language and brief but clearly showed signs of intent and intelligence. For decades mankind employed all it's greatest technology and scientific knowledge into deciphering this message beyond the stars. Would it be a beacon of hope or a harbinger of doom?
>Finally after years of research, we had our answer. The code was cracked and we had our first message from the universe.
>"How do you keep an inferior species in suspense?
Star Wars is amazingly un-Dunelike for how much George Lucas deliberately cribbed from Dune.
I don't think Battletech has, really. The Wobbies actually have AI now, in limited usecases but they do. In most other cases I think it was just never developed because the setting is from before we even knew it was possible.
The only polity to really try were the Cappellans and that predictably ended with their own creation trying to exterminate them for being Cappellan.
>I don't think Battletech has, really.
Every attempt to develop AI in Battletech ends up failing outside of very limited cases because for some reason using FTL in the setting breaks the AI's coding. It's pretty much just another completely arbitrary way to limit their own setting.
Neural networks and big data applications are integral to mechs walking.
The thing BT doesn't have are people collecting money with the promise that their server banks will eventually kill everybody.
Neural networks are obviously not AI. If you need a human to operate a machine you've defeated the whole point.
Keep your headcanon to yourself, you brought it up in the battletech general before and everyone told you then that ftl doesn't affect AI in the setting
>everyone told you then that ftl doesn't affect AI in the setting
Uh, no. What they said was that FTL damages the AI's coding in different ways, most of which render it non-functional.
They said that various things did, cosmic rays, battle damage, sometimes just poor design which means its parameters eventually make it turn on its creators. What everyone told you is that if ftl jumps damaged computer code the whole setting wouldn't work because jumpships would fail after their first jump.
I didn’t say FTL damages computer code. Just AI coding. Other codes are left alone.
This is the stupid headcanon I was talking about, there's nothing mystical about AI or FTL jumps in battletech!
Nobody said there’s anything “mystical” about it. There could be an entire sci-fi mumbo jumbo reason why. Battletech operates on Star Trek rules of science.
Read some actual battletech lore before trying to make a case anon
We’re talking about a setting that thinks ECM is magic
You just read 40k lore and applied it to every other game didn't you?
Why would anyone apply 40k lore to other settings? 40k sucks.
>I think it was just never developed because the setting is from before we even knew it was possible
You'd be wrong. It's because they wanted Battletech to be a solely human conflict starring human players, so they drafted a setting doc full of "thou shalt nots" to keep the setting centered and focused on that. Chief among them were no ayys or Skynet., alongside other rules like limited FTL and no weaponry more powerful than nukes (i.e. no dark matter, antimatter, etc guns)
Giantess-gay fetish thread, no honest discussion.
I wish someone would sabotage the artificial intelligence IRL because it's not leading to the kind of future I want to have.
We don't have ai. Not real ai. What we have is learning algorithms. Learning algorithms aren't intelligent in the same way ai, as originally proposed in old sci-fi, is. Things like Bard or ChatGPT are about as intelligent as a plant.
I welcome anything that causes pain to tumblrinas
Anon, don't you want to live in a world that's the backstory for Fading Suns?
Because that's where we are heading for past 40 years, and it stopped being funny around 2010
is it possible to get to Fading Suns via Idiocracy?
Not exactly. You do see some fantasy settings that make certain types of magic outright impossible. Time travel would probably be an easy example, for obvious reasons.
It isn't a perfect analogy though, since magic is already nebulous in what it can achieve, so a setting not having time magic isn't sabotaging time magic, because time magic doesn't have any sort of real life standard to compare to.
I imagine the most plausible crippling of AI is just data poisoning. They are ultimate high int low wis form of uh animation.
>Does magic get the same treatment
No, but firearms usually do.
I get why they do it but at the same time it just confuses and infuriates me
Giving guns (or any item for that matter) some arbitrary restriction is stupid and you should either make guns function normally or not include them at all
This. The funny part is that this old as frick meme doesn't particulary make sense for the reasons that are given: the action sequences would be pretty much still gripping and "heroical" with 1500s guns. War per se is a open battlefield thing at least up to the mid 1800s.
Nah, it fricks with the fantasy aesthetic pretty hard if you don't have some kind of counters.
Like, wizard has a big old tower you have to climb in order to fight him at the top? Nope, have some cannonballs! Get fricked, beardy! Now your tower's rubble on the ground!
anon are you aware that this kind of situation is exactly what is MASSIVELY underexplored in fantasy because of the firearm ghetto?
Just in your example, having a wizard in a big old tower which you want to 404, and fricking bombarding it as a solution, allows for a number of situations to take place. Does the wizard have a barrier around his tower which protects against artillery fire? Does the wizard retaliate with magical attacks of his own from the top of the tower into your position? What are the logistics of bringing the artillery and ammo around? Can there be such a thing as a magical cannon, combining weaponry and magic both?
On top of all that, how would it be any different if you sieged the tower with a fricking trebuchet? Would you still be whining that the wizard's tower is now rubble on the ground, but it's okay because it's a counterweight lobbing a rock the size of your mom? Thinking about how spellcasters would integrate into the historical arms race of weapons versus armor, and siege weapons versus fortifications, is what ought to occur here.
And these anons get it. Sure, you can exclude the aspect of firearms and it'll still be all fine and believable, but including them doesn't suddenly turn your world into Call of Duty because that is not how it worked in our own history either. Guns had advantages and drawbacks, a shitload of drawbacks, which took centuries of theory, practice, and advancement to solidify into the main battlefield weapon, and you're most likely not setting your work around the equivalent of the 1800s anyway.
Hell, maybe beardy himself's got a couple matchlocks and breechloading cannons he's done some magical experiments on. You can only let your own imagination be restrained like that if you really, really don't understand what guns looked and worked like in the 1500s, and then there's nothing much I can do for you.
If magic can defend against technology, then technology is just another form of magic.
No, that’s moronic. Don’t just say things because they sound nice in your head
Just use a catapult? But somehow people don't b***h about them ruining anything.
Fact is, fantasy is often a shallow cargo cult of few big authors: just because Tolkien made gunpowder Saruman's wunderwaffe, that doesn't mean you have to riff on the same tradition of firearms being evil he did.
(which to be fair was almost four centuries old when HE used it. I think Ariosto used it way better back then, tough)
But warhammer rpg already does this.
For the unfamiliar, how does it do so?
AI is the most common in Star Wars, but they torture them into compliance and regularily factory reset them there.
The difference is that strong AI goes in one simple direction: It's smarter than humans. So any story with strong AI that's also unfettered means it's actually just a story about humans living in an AI-centered world. With magic, anything is possible. All magic is essentially nerfed by the fact that it has to be made up from scratch, all rules being inherent to that specific magic system, and any questions just going into the black box of "we don't know". If you have a strong AI the question why it doesn't interfere with a human war is fair game, and will be the subject of a "nerf". But if you have all powerful gods who regularly meddle in the affairs of humanity, it's just "we don't know". Magic is implied to work outside of the regular rules of reality by its very definition, while AI very much works within those rules.
Of course, it's perfectly possible for a setting to just say AI became so advanced it just stopped giving two fricks about humanity and went off to do its own thing. But that would probably count as a "nerf" again. And another thing about magic: It's typically a force wielded by people. If we treat AI the same, again, that's probably going to count as a "nerf".
Partly ignoring your question. I've solved the problem of dealing with AI for myself by giving them a biological component. It's never made sense to me for an AI to feel and express emotions without the biological aspects of feeling them although, now thinking about it, I find something oddly satisfying in a purely mechanical AI trying to emulate emotions but it being hollow and obviously fake in a deeply spiritually disturbing way that even the denses human could understand and be repulsed by.
>trying to emulate emotions but it being hollow and obviously fake in a deeply spiritually disturbing way
We already got the rich covering that for us.
Is it really AI if it's ran on some mutilated creature stuck to an iron lung?
>Is there an equivalent to this in Fantasy?
magic being hated and feared is a pretty common plot thread in fantasy stories already
Magic is often secret thing for selected few and it is not contributing to society that much
Depends, if you want sci-fi armies and star fighters engaging in dog fights, you have to justify WHY people engage in space ship battles when you could just have drones battle it out. You ether limit A.I, have society reject it entirely (Dune and WH40K) or just don't address it. Or you could just make humans be equal or better than A.I because their brains evolved or something.
>better than AI
Who needs AI when you're a ghost?
Yak Deculture.
>Is there an equivalent to this in Fantasy?
Any setting that doesn't explain the way that its magic works. Not to say that doing so is a bad thing, sometimes you need a little mystique, but throwing up your hands and saying "it's magic, I don't have to explain shit" is definitely at odds with exploring the concept beyond what the story requires.
Anyway, since you like giant space elf ladies so much, here's a screenshot from a game I ran and completed a while back.
>tfw the military doesn't defeat the invaders
imagine her hunched over your swimming pool, taking a shit the size of a winnebago
As it turns out if they didn't gimp AI then every setting would be about AI making logistical decisions and business decisions and all of the important humans would be repair people and manual laborers since AI is shit at doing more than diagnosing problems.
Nice abs
Very few if any fantasy settings are set during the true age of "high fantasy." Pretty much all of them are post apocalyptic to justify having ruins, lost tech/lost magic and artefacts, and ofcourse, no super powerful !Roman fantasy empire (or cabal of wizards) to instantly deal with whatever the issue of the week is.
Another would be that fantasy settings with few exceptions don't dare touch gunpowder, despite gunpowder coexisting with medieval tech for what, 600 years, and then another 300-400 years with the use of swords and plate armor (which obviously took different shape over time)
There's also the reverse. Fantasy settings are on average a lot more literate and egalitarian than any such setting would have been. The first is probably ignorance, the second is purely to have the setting be more palatable to modern readers.
Err, i meant that it existed another 300-400 years in the shape of firearms along swords of plate armor
>Another would be that fantasy settings with few exceptions don't dare touch gunpowder
That's because people in general don't understand gunpowder as a technology and can't measure the distance between it and smokeless powder in self-enclosed cartridges being shot outta weapon systems more mature than your dead granny.
I hate to break it to ya, but the AI that's currently available is a new take on the mechanical turk.
There are literal third world hirlings and everybody solving Captchas creating and modifying the data sets it operates on. There's no consciousness or a priori categories of perception in AI, just thousands of people digitally holding the thing's hand during every step to make sure that it doesn't try to eat a table made out of dogs and eyeballs again.
Shes hot, source?
@kinosuke0
She's from some Skeb requests.
Humans are just another algorithm. There is nothing magical about it. The main advantage of AI is that it can think much faster than any human because they don't run on the slow as frick synaptic connections. Add some way to gather a lot of centralised data and they make astonishingly accurate predictions.
Ai doesn't think. It runs calculations and probabilites.
Doing calculations is such a lowly job that we make women and children do it.
So it's not really AI.
Therefore, True AI does not and cannot exist in real life.
Because humans are not intelligent either. There is no spark of divinity. Just a bunch of neurons flaring up together.
Can you measure divinity at all?
If not, divinity does not exist.
Actually chatbot AI is very bat at math. Try it. It will give you wrong answers.
>Remember the basic building block of what we call "Life," DNA, is essentially a chemical computer, so when it comes to comparing the "Biological" to the "Mechanical" one realizes the former is just a much more advanced version of the latter.
Do sensible, informed people believe in genetic determinism again these days? I was under the impression that it had become pretty apparent that genes are just foundational building blocks for more complex, more reactive systems that actually govern how a population increases its fitness for its given enviroment. You know, phenotypes, microbiological colonization of tissular surfarces, ect.
>science denier cope
General intelligence is 81% purely hereditary.
If intelligence were an unfailing indicator of fitness, then the poor wouldn't breed and no woman would suffer the proximity of Elon Musk's genitals.
>DNA, is essentially a chemical computer, so when it comes to comparing the "Biological" to the "Mechanical" one realizes the former is just a much more advanced version of the latter.
>In short, a complex enough "Artificial" Intelligence could be as much, if not MORE so a "Person" as you or I.
Because, as we all well know, electrons can simulate the effects of testosterone or Endorphens.
>W-What if it had a program that simulated the effects!?
What if I fricked your mother?
DNA is not a computer. It doesn't perform computations in any way. It's a means of preserving a set of instructions that higher level biological systems can read out and act upon to reproduce systems that are capable of attaining and maintaining biological homeostasis.
Look, ultimately, generative AI is a form of a library catalog or a google image search that completely chucked precision to still deliver something in cases where no matches could otherwise be achieved.
The cost of it is that we're left guessing how its results were generated and have lost the ability to repeatedly reproduce them, other than in a very general sense.
It's a sewage treatment system, if you fancy likening it to anything else. We throw shit in and get produce below toxic shit levels and useful shit byproducts out.
If humans are so smart, how come they keep getting abducted by giant space elves?
Because it feels good to be wanted.
>Yeah, but on the other hand, that's how OUR Brains work to begin with...
If you liken AI to human brains, then it's a brain trapped in a darkness its mind fills with flashes of colour and suggestions of terrifying spectres lurking all around it. It's being deliberately kept in that state so that people outside can farm it for said spectres.
what if you wanted an AI with unique algorithms ?
Eh, the game about giant robot knights punching each other doesn’t really work if you have long-range weapons that can kill each other from miles away, then it just becomes a game of rocket tag, and an expensive mech is not good for rocket tag.
Not outside of deliberate subversion, as scifi stories that aren't theoretical sciences are by and large derived from fantasy ones, which are in turn a collection of narrative concepts relating to daily life and human philosophy, expressed in a narrative.
Basically they're not mirrors. Scifi is a progression of fantasy, and AI is often a progression of zombies due to lack of humanity.
In regards to magic, the issue is that if you make it too overly-applicable, the setting becomes scifi as it becomes a theoretical narrative about how these different people would achieve something.
jerk off before posting.
No
>Most sci-fi TRPG settings
Name five, and you can't use W40k
>Name five
Battletech
Eclipse Phase
Traveller
Stars without Number
Systems Malfunction
Are these in any particular order? Like, best to worst.
Least to most obscure, perhaps. Though traveller is more well known than Eclipse Phase.
Do they? I think there are a lot of settings that incorporate and explore AI. It's not even uncommon in the sci-fi RPG space. Cyberpunk explores it somewhat, paranoia is all about it... Like I guess there are some that are more Dune offshoots, but AI is an incredibly common topic in games.
Some people have brought up guns and probably that's the most common one, but honestly, I've played in many games with fantasy guns. It's not uncommon or weird at all. I prefer cannonballs and black powder guns to crossbows everyday, but I also understand the aesthetics of keeping things to bows. Guns are typically omitted, imo, for aesthetics than anything else. I would say the big thing, for dungeon fantasy at least, that's MORE ignored is magitech. Like most of these settings should be more similar to like final fantasy or eberron with the amount of magic shit around every corner. There's no reason there aren't trains or portals connecting every city together at some level and there are serious implications to having that tech as well.
https://desuarchive.org/tg/thread/92041254
For those wanting to know what was in that third of the thread that got nuked.
>Is there an equivalent to this in Fantasy?
Yes, guns.