Freefall

The Chief is an amazing people◊.

The robots may turn out to be more moral than humans...

Dr. Bowman doesn't halfass things up.

I kinda think they already are. Witness the repair gang, and Qwerty's statement that what robots want is "to be useful."

But maybe that's just the cynic^* with regard to humans, at least in me talking.

edited 24th Aug '16 7:05:16 AM by pwiegle

To some extent, I think we might just be getting a small sample size - who knows how many robots like Edge are running around?

I do like the Chief's realism here. Sadly, there might not be any way to ensure that Clippy won't destroy himself. But he can take every reasonable foreseeable precaution to prevent it.

Even Sam knows that sometimes, the less he knows, the better.◊

That, or he's thinking about how much fun it will be to find out.

Sam is like a living Opposite Day.

Sam's right, it's a good lesson to learn.

And then he'll teach that your boss is going to try and find out anyway. (and he probably will)

Direct orders are like an overbearing mother?◊ Florence, I feel your pain.

edited 29th Aug '16 7:15:06 AM by pwiegle

At least Ishiguro is putting in some effort.

Also, credit to Ishiguro here - he didn't march in with a direct order at all. Sure, I think that it wouldn't work (as I recall, only Henri and Raibert have that access at the moment), but I don't know if Ishiguro knows that yet. Even aside from his attempt to use humor to ease the situation, he's definitely making an effort here.

Ishiguro continues to be a class act◊. Frankly, it's got to be difficult to avoid giving direct orders, even in English where so much of the imperative has been blunted.

He's treating Florence like a sapient being with individual rights. That's a step up from a lot of EU personnel.

Honestly, I've been less than positive on Ishiguro in the past, and the last two strips are making me think that I seriously underestimated him.

He's on the side of money, but he has a good code of ethics.

The TVTropes character page states that his resumé boils down to "Practical, smart. A little bit evil", although I can't locate the relevant strip (my workplace bans the domain due to the "furry" association). My impression of him is that he is a fundamentally decent sort, but one who considers the shareholders to be his primary concern. He'll try to be ethical, but much like how many people are willing to do little evils for the benefit of their family, he's willing to do those evils for the shareholders of EU. With his need to keep the government under his thumb, I highly suspect that there's a strong degree of "I need the power to do what's best for them because people are dumb and venial". With Florence, who obviously understands the situation better than him, he is demurring to her judgment and trying to avoid accidentally impairing it with orders.

Suiting up for the clean room◊. Presumably, not following the steps results in a lunkhead alarm.

Oh, I bet this is similar to Van Halen's old "no brown M&Ms" clause. It's actually a Secret Test of Character - if you can't be bothered to do those relatively simple steps with the instructions right in front of you, they can't be sure that you did the potentially more difficult and important steps previously that ensure full safety and security.

Robots on Jean aren't fully Three Laws compliant. Especially not Dvorak.◊ If he had any sense of self-preservation, he wouldn't be quite so eager for this.

Well, while it is true that most of the robots we've seen aren't Three Laws-Compliant, I can think of an application of the First Law of Robotics that would guide an Asimov positronic brain model to willingly do what Dvorak has done. It's similar to what Edge already does - if it can be justified that not doing a given action will result in a human being placed into harm, then they can do it without orders. It's a bit of a labyrinthine thought process, admittedly - if nobody assists in trying to recover Clippy, that info may be lost, which could result in another attempt at Gardener In The Dark, which could resist in robots being unable to fully help humans; thus, putting humans at further risk. That said, Asimov himself wasn't a stranger to coming up with such byzantine applications of the Three Laws.

Of course, this is moot, because Dvorak isn't Three-Laws Compliant, and he can just reach the same decision by going "Doing something different and dangerous? Ooh, Shiny!"

"That said, Asimov himself wasn't a stranger to coming up with such byzantine applications of the Three Laws. "

It's kinda less "not a stranger to it" and more "twisting them into entertaining balloon animals was the whole point".

edited 6th Sep '16 7:01:07 AM by Adannor

Well, yes, but I figured the understatement was more prosaic. Also, some might call that a spoiler.

Maybe someone needs to explain chainsaws to Dvorak.◊

Also, Ishiguro's reaction in the last panel really is the most sensible to much of what Dvorak says.

Why does Dvorak need to wear a clean suit? It's not like he has any biological systems to contaminate or spread contaminants from.

It's not biological contamination they're worried about. The suits are superconductive fabric - basically a wearable Faraday cage - to block electromagnetic communication in both directions. Dvorak really needs it more than the other two, since Florence and Ishiguro are less vulnerable to attack by wireless communications.