02-21-2020, 08:00 PM | #11 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
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This is esp. true of the advanced 'smartbot' neural net robots that can actually take the place of a human for most tasks. The Zoneminds have vast resources, but their industrial infrastructure is still finite, turning out new robots, esp. high end robots, takes time and resources. Some slaves do plain old manual labor. Yes, a robot would be better at it...but a dumbot has no intellect and requires constant supervision unless the task is entirely repetitive. Using a human slave gives you a manual laborer that has the equivalent intelligence of a high-end smartbot. Some slaves do skill labor of various sorts, under bossbot supervision. The thing is, if you're a Zonemind, you've got a lot of humans around anyway, so it makes economic sense to work them to death instead of just disposing of them.
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02-22-2020, 06:18 AM | #12 | ||||
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
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02-22-2020, 06:25 AM | #13 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
Setting the slaves to salvage duty might be fairly profitable. I mean, eventually you'll send a TNU-5 "Eater" to knock the whole place down and process it for useful items, but humans can get the high-value items before you have the resources to refine an entire city. Electrical wiring is especially valuable, Cars are also high value targets, and humans often get creative about finding stuff if you give the right incentives.
Of course, turning in a broken robot carcass for salvage is a good way to get terminated.
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02-23-2020, 11:30 PM | #14 | ||
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
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02-24-2020, 05:52 AM | #15 |
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: near London, UK
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
Depends on the zonemind. Anything from "work them until they starve or freeze" to "encourage them to sell out their fellow workers for an armband and a ration increase".
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02-26-2020, 12:53 PM | #16 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
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The guard robots aren't that expensive. If one stalker robot can supervise 20 humans each of which does the work of a robot, that's still 19 tech robots saved. The humans are fairly easy to maintain since the AIs stocks of stowed food etc. are still larger than the survivor population (due to biowarfare) Another point is that combat robots guarding humans aren't wasted. The zoneminds generally want to maintain a sizable reserve force of combat robots, in the event of inter-zone conflict or a surge of uman resistance forces. In such contingencies, they'd shoot the slaves, then deploy, so so the slave camps wouldn't tie up resources during "wartime". Now, of course some zoneminds keep their reserves powered down to reduce upkeep, but since they generally need the troops anyway, the cost of using combat bots as guards (and reaping the economic benefit of free labor) is comparable to the cost of having combat robots you aren't using at all.
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02-26-2020, 01:02 PM | #17 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: In the UFO
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
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The zones with the most slaves, e.g. New Delhi and Tel Aviv, are generally keeping the humans because the zonemind is ideologically committed to biological-machine symbiosis. In those zones food production may occur (see New Delhi for notes on this); in many other zones, the slave population is so low relative to the former size that they can use stocks of canned goods, MREs, etc. Often the human population died off much faster than these could be consumed or salvaged, and large stocks were left in robot-controlled areas.
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02-26-2020, 01:26 PM | #18 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Minnesota
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
Salvage/mining/other work is just a pretext.
The Mind depends on random number generators to keep its AI system functioning and not locking up on local optima. The humans in the camp are measured in great precision so the least significant bits of every action can be used as input to the random number feed. This leaves the AI vulnerable to well choreographed dancing. |
02-26-2020, 11:59 PM | #19 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
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02-27-2020, 12:16 AM | #20 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: What do the slave camps do? [Reign of Steel]
"I don't know whether we'll bust out of here next week, Jimmy, or next year, or whether we grow old and die in this scrap heap, or whether the 'bots exterminate us tomorrow. But today we survive, lad. And I don't care how unthinkable it may be, how repulsive, how great a betrayal of everything you are and ever were - if you want to see the sun rise tomorrow, Jimmy, you will do jazz hands."
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