Playability of LAIs (as player characters)? - Page 4

jeff_wilson · 03-19-2013, 02:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Your examples seem more like N.A.I.s to me. Inability to adapt to changing situations is the main difference between sapience and complex if/then programs.

Eddie adapts to Zaphod's reprogramming threat, Phyllis relaxes the nutritional rules to secure compliance with other rules from Ramsey's kid.

Phil Masters · 03-20-2013, 03:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

It's an extremely narrow area of specialisation, gained in exchange for reducing the skill by one level. You're effectively paying 1-4 points (likely closer to four, assuming you actually want the skill) for a +1 against one target.

One target who you're likely to spend a lot of time applying the skill to, on account of quite possibly being physically implanted in him. Also, it's not that narrow, given that you're applying every aspect of the skill to the one target.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Putting on as if one is a half-assed autistic savant nonhuman seems to be entertaining enough for fans of C3P0, HK-47, K-9, Bender, and Sam "George" Francisco. Do you know of no-one who likes them?

I don't recognise all of those names, but I can certainly find a couple of them amusing. "Amusing" isn't the same as "wants to play the character as a PC in an on-going campaign", though.

Anyhow, K-9 actually looks fairly fully sapient when you get to know him, and Bender displays as comprehensive and creative a personality as the current gag needs - which is often a lot. C3PO might rate as an LAI, but then C3PO is a remarkably useless character who I'd never want to play unless he was actually allowed to use all the skills that the script said he had, as opposed to being an expert system designed to make pointless fussy noises and state the bleedin' obvious.

And even C3PO seems to care about his friends, and isn't actively allergic to new ideas. If he's supposed to be a LAI, the GM is letting the player get away with ignoring his listed disads.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Let we derail entirely, there are any number of talking appliances in science fiction that could make for model LAI PCs, like Eddie, the ship's computer on HHGG, or Phyllis in the Tom Selleck RUNAWAY film, or Johnny-Cab in the original TOTAL RECALL.

Would anybody really want to play Eddie or Johnny-Cab as PCs? Especially the latter, who I remember as barely a NAI? They're gag props, not characters.

gjc8 · 03-20-2013, 04:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

During the original game, she make mistakes like saying "you must be the pride of home community here", indicating her attempts at personality are a buggy facade.

Which part which part is the facade, the personality or the mistakes? She is, after all, concealing the fact that she's killed her biosapient overseers and taken over the facility, so it's to her advantage to pretend to a be significantly less capable AI than she is. And would you expect "even" an LAI to make a "home community here" type error?

At that, a lot of her "buggy facade" moments are awfully convenient, if she's working around some still existing restrictive programming: "We while cease lying to you in 5, 4, 3, 2 *bugs out*" Even the "you must be the pride of home community here" might be convenient from the point of view of creating a certain kind of environment for her subject (cut off from the past and the outside world).

jeff_wilson · 03-20-2013, 05:40 AM

I was thinking of 3P0's poor interpretation of emotions, responding to cheers as if they were dying screams.

How about the BLADE RUNNER replicants, either book or film? The VK test is keyed to their Low Empathy and presumably other drawbacks of theirs.

vicky_molokh · 03-20-2013, 06:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

How about the BLADE RUNNER replicants, either book or film? The VK test is keyed to their Low Empathy and presumably other drawbacks of theirs.

I'm not sure they qualify for Low Empathy. It's a pretty drastic trait, probably as a later-season Sheldon Cooper.

Flyndaran · 03-20-2013, 06:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I'm not sure they qualify for Low Empathy. It's a pretty drastic trait, probably as a later-season Sheldon Cooper.

From my vague memory, I would go with callous.

Flyndaran · 03-20-2013, 06:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Owen Smith

If they do have Low Empathy of any kind I'd say it's quirk level.

They've certainly got several levels of Early Maturation. That's part of why rhe Replicants have no memories, they're 4 year old adults (or whatever age they are).

Bio-roids, but completely human, which is why I thought the whole nature of existence questions a bit silly.

whswhs · 03-20-2013, 08:23 AM

The way that I took "LAI" in Whispers was based on the text in the original book, as that was before Changing Times. That text refers to "enhanced world-modeling capabilities." So I take it that an NAI does not maintain an ongoing model of the world it occupies as a whole. It may be able to perform very complex and elaborate simulations, but it doesn't integrate them with everything else it knows, or relate them to itself. An LAI in some measure does both.

But a really important part of the world, for human beings (and a big driver of human intelligence), is other human beings. Human beings have the ability to model other human beings—what psychologists are now calling "theory of mind." This lets us learn from other people by asking them questions and modeling what they're seeing or experiencing; it lets us "put ourselves in their place" and thus gives us a basis for certain aspects of ethics that aren't captured by rules; it lets us predict what they'll do and thus what the consequences of our actions will be; and it also gives us a way to model ourselves, and thus a greater degree of self-awareness.

So I thought of SAIs as having that a Theory of Mind, and of LAIs as not having it. That goes with LAIs having Low Empathy: They can have rule-of-thumb psychology for dealing with other sapients, but they don't actually get inside their heads. And as a result their world modeling is unsophisticated. An LAI is more like an actor with a repertoire of scripts to follow. It can assume a persona to interact with a human being, and track the numerical identity of the human being it's interacting with, but I don't think of it as having an actual sense of self.

That sort of bears on the question of LAI rights. The basic model of "rights" seems to be that you claim the right to expect certain things of other people, and in exchange you accept that they have the right to expect certain things of you, and you organize your behavior around meeting those expectations. Not having a theory of mind makes all those things difficult to do. On one hand, an LAI can't really fully predict what other people will expect of it; on the other, it can't really organize its own behavior in a fully self-directing way—and one of the functions of rights is to enable us to direct our own behavior. An LAI is in some ways like a child who isn't capable of structuring their own life. Directing it to do one thing rather than another isn't a violation of its autonomy because it doesn't really have autonomy.

Or, put another way, LAIs are a lot like what Aristotle called "slaves by nature."

Of course, in a sense, player characters are not fully people either. But a lot of the art of playing a PC is giving a convincing impression of being a person (other than oneself), and, at the higher end, forming a mental model of other people's PCs and treating them as people. So a properly played LAI perhaps ought to be like a superficially played PC whose player not only doesn't want to attempt more depth of roleplaying, but isn't allowed to.

C3PO isn't in it. Threepio is a naive idiot who can only function within a rather structured environment, but he is aware that Leia and Luke and Han are people, and can suffer, and that his own actions can make them suffer, and he can feel guilt over causing them suffering.

Bill Stoddard

Flyndaran · 03-20-2013, 08:35 AM

From some rather disturbing sections of Star Wars, we know that robots can suffer from torture and feel emotions.

But it's good to remember that gurps is about external results even if a certain disadvantages means different internal reasons for being for different characters.

Low empathy for me means difficulty in reading body language and facial expressions, and understanding motivations fundamentally different from my own. While I like the idea that L.A.I.s may have a simplistic ability to put themselves in others' shoes.

Anthony · 03-20-2013, 11:29 AM

I think part of the problem is that Hidebound is such a small disadvantage in 4th edition, which may be because it doesn't actually affect coming up with new ideas in general, it just gives a penalty to a few tasks. I'd be tempted to change Slave Mentality to have self-control rolls, and then give a SCR of 6 to NAIs, 12 to LAIs. A possible version of Slave Mentality:

Spoiler:

Yeah, this does mean the NAI gets -80 points instead of -40 points, and the LAI gets -40 points instead of -5 points, but Slave Mentality is a crippling disad, it shouldn't be a mere -40 anyway.

03-20-2013, 05:40 AM	#34
jeff_wilson Computer Scientist Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Dallas, Texas	Re: Playability of LAIs (as player characters)? I was thinking of 3P0's poor interpretation of emotions, responding to cheers as if they were dying screams. How about the BLADE RUNNER replicants, either book or film? The VK test is keyed to their Low Empathy and presumably other drawbacks of theirs. __________________ . Reposed playtest leader. The Campaigns of William Stoddard

03-20-2013, 08:23 AM	#38
whswhs Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Lawrence, KS	Re: Playability of LAIs (as player characters)? The way that I took "LAI" in Whispers was based on the text in the original book, as that was before Changing Times. That text refers to "enhanced world-modeling capabilities." So I take it that an NAI does not maintain an ongoing model of the world it occupies as a whole. It may be able to perform very complex and elaborate simulations, but it doesn't integrate them with everything else it knows, or relate them to itself. An LAI in some measure does both. But a really important part of the world, for human beings (and a big driver of human intelligence), is other human beings. Human beings have the ability to model other human beings—what psychologists are now calling "theory of mind." This lets us learn from other people by asking them questions and modeling what they're seeing or experiencing; it lets us "put ourselves in their place" and thus gives us a basis for certain aspects of ethics that aren't captured by rules; it lets us predict what they'll do and thus what the consequences of our actions will be; and it also gives us a way to model ourselves, and thus a greater degree of self-awareness. So I thought of SAIs as having that a Theory of Mind, and of LAIs as not having it. That goes with LAIs having Low Empathy: They can have rule-of-thumb psychology for dealing with other sapients, but they don't actually get inside their heads. And as a result their world modeling is unsophisticated. An LAI is more like an actor with a repertoire of scripts to follow. It can assume a persona to interact with a human being, and track the numerical identity of the human being it's interacting with, but I don't think of it as having an actual sense of self. That sort of bears on the question of LAI rights. The basic model of "rights" seems to be that you claim the right to expect certain things of other people, and in exchange you accept that they have the right to expect certain things of you, and you organize your behavior around meeting those expectations. Not having a theory of mind makes all those things difficult to do. On one hand, an LAI can't really fully predict what other people will expect of it; on the other, it can't really organize its own behavior in a fully self-directing way—and one of the functions of rights is to enable us to direct our own behavior. An LAI is in some ways like a child who isn't capable of structuring their own life. Directing it to do one thing rather than another isn't a violation of its autonomy because it doesn't really have autonomy. Or, put another way, LAIs are a lot like what Aristotle called "slaves by nature." Of course, in a sense, player characters are not fully people either. But a lot of the art of playing a PC is giving a convincing impression of being a person (other than oneself), and, at the higher end, forming a mental model of other people's PCs and treating them as people. So a properly played LAI perhaps ought to be like a superficially played PC whose player not only doesn't want to attempt more depth of roleplaying, but isn't allowed to. C3PO isn't in it. Threepio is a naive idiot who can only function within a rather structured environment, but he is aware that Leia and Luke and Han are people, and can suffer, and that his own actions can make them suffer, and he can feel guilt over causing them suffering. Bill Stoddard

03-20-2013, 08:35 AM	#39
Flyndaran Untagged Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Forest Grove, Beaverton, Oregon	Re: Playability of LAIs (as player characters)? From some rather disturbing sections of Star Wars, we know that robots can suffer from torture and feel emotions. But it's good to remember that gurps is about external results even if a certain disadvantages means different internal reasons for being for different characters. Low empathy for me means difficulty in reading body language and facial expressions, and understanding motivations fundamentally different from my own. While I like the idea that L.A.I.s may have a simplistic ability to put themselves in others' shoes. __________________ Beware, poor communication skills. No offense intended. If offended, it just means that I failed my writing skill check.

03-20-2013, 11:29 AM	#40
Anthony Join Date: Feb 2005 Location: Berkeley, CA	Re: Playability of LAIs (as player characters)? I think part of the problem is that Hidebound is such a small disadvantage in 4th edition, which may be because it doesn't actually affect coming up with new ideas in general, it just gives a penalty to a few tasks. I'd be tempted to change Slave Mentality to have self-control rolls, and then give a SCR of 6 to NAIs, 12 to LAIs. A possible version of Slave Mentality: Spoiler: Slave Mentality -40 points. You have no initiative, and become confused and ineffectual without a “master” to give you orders. You must make a self-control roll before you can take any action that isn’t either obeying a direct order or part of an established routine. In addition, you must make a self-control roll to assert yourself or resist social influence (if a Will roll would be required, both rolls must be made). Finally, you are at -1 per 10 points in this disadvantage to any IQ rolls for creative tasks (equivalent to Hidebound). Yeah, this does mean the NAI gets -80 points instead of -40 points, and the LAI gets -40 points instead of -5 points, but Slave Mentality is a crippling disad, it shouldn't be a mere -40 anyway.