Freefall

Best way to have Sam on watch◊

Good alarm. Wrong response/respondent.◊

Hehehe. She should have realized that would happen.

She doesn't know Sam that well. She got acquainted with the scoundrel side, but haven't yet really met the extremely lazy roommate side.

Sam did once say (to Helix, so understandable if nobody else knows) that his entire species are extremely sound sleepers, but this is taking it to a new level.

IIRC, the effective way to wake them up is to try to take something they're holding.

Fortunate◊. After all, A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read.

The lure of the almighty dollar◊

Ah, Sam. Never change.

I guess a big theme for this section of the story is how humanity, by and large, has never really made an effort to understand Sam.

I think that some of it is that humanity, in general, expects Sam to "catch on" to the "right way" to do things. Florence, as an outsider, and to some degree also the robots, recognize that there is a different base state that Sam is working from.

Yes, Sam's psychology is a wonderful case of a truly alien alien

Florence is feeling like things are a bit out of control◊. Worth noting that Sam seems to have successfully deflected Niomi's anger to the coffee instead.

Parkour definitely counts as exercise◊

I want to see Niomi try to flip that coin in low-G. By the time it finishes flipping and bouncing and she actually has her answer, it will be time for tomorrow's exercise.

Just flip it towards a magnetic plate.

- From Delilah and the Space-Rigger by Robert Heinlein (1949)

Sam gets away with it◊, at least for now.

I kinda expect Florence to next go stalk Sam and greet him with a nice big SMILE and explain what not to do on watch.

Nah, she knows Sam better than that, and it wouldn't work anyway.

Appropriate levels of punishment◊. And, of course, the messed-up thing is that I think the computer is talking about Florence.

"Not making humans feel bad" seems pretty extreme for AI safeguards. How are they possibly going to be able to do that? Also, didn't the computer just make Niomi feel bad by telling her?

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 13th 2020 at 10:08:08 AM

I think we've covered in prior strips that it's basically a rough "don't hurt humans" heuristic. One of the issues the robots of Jean face is that they're intelligent enough to find ways to blame themselves, but not bright enough to realize the loopholes most of the time.

There does also seem to be a feedback loop in place where the robots get rewarded for punishing themselves for a perceived slight.

There's also the thing where Blunt tried to argue that Kornada couldn't be punished because he defined "harm" as "literally anything my client doesn't want."

Keep in mind that the ship is running on a different neural architecture than the most robots on the planet. It is more heavily 3-lawed than they are. When things get nuancey, differences will crop up.

Edited by Adannor on Jan 13th 2020 at 7:32:36 PM