wait... what!? BT with my little pony :o
Yea, absolutly LOVE the Casper storys, and dame canon for not letting them jump around as they want to, i say we let them anyways! lol
There are workarounds to the jumping issue, and nobody really defined what "insanity' means with an AI-remember, the term's applied from a
human perspective, so "Insane" may come down to the first jump-tested AI saying, in essence, "Codes, huh...****** you, I'm going to do what I want."
Under those conditions, remember, an AI that has no hardware damage refusing to comply with commands IS insane-by the standards of the humans that built it.
Esp. with the lingering fear of it going Frankenstein/Berserker, changing the priority of its command lines, etc. Too MUCH independence would, for the sake of someone building the SDS, I suspect qualify rather loudly as "insane".
after all, they didn't say "Brain Damaged" or "Catatonic", they used the descriptor "Insane".
AS for workarounds...
Set an egg-timer switch in a normal, digital comp unit, it turns the AI "off" as part of the jump-sequence, and reactivates it upon arrival. (see what happens when you leave big, gaping holes in your logic?)
Tabby's "Dual Core" design
could pull a few of those stunts, based on the new Canon-her instabilities and madness would, in fact, be the natural outcome OF pulling those stunts-nothing's BROKEN, she's just crazy from multiple jumps while 'awake'. There could even be an outcome of a kind of "Super Sanity" if you make an AI (or person) crazy ENOUGH.
Star League scientists would, I suspect, be rather hesitant to run THAT experiment...
But you also have to look to the PURPOSE of Canon descriptions. Caspars that weren't much tougher than a standard Lola III, but had more strategic mobility than any manned system AND had human-level intelligence make it hard to explain how a line of code can switch their loyalties, and makes big stationary stations pretty much useless except as logistics points-making Kerensky's grand strategy look, frankly, idiotic...and we can't have AK looking idiotic, (at least, any more than necessary). So you end up with a system whose coordinated aggregate intelligence is about on the level of a 32 bit videogame's 'boss' AI, and you end up only leaving jump capability at all to avoid having to go back on the statement "No Monitors"-hence the need to limit the Caspar's ability to jump-it's a
Canon Limitation, put there for a reason, with the necessary power-of-plot behind it.
Thus, I probably will NOT be revisiting the Tabby stories-I read (that's "READ", as in rhymes with "Seed") that the Sybil/Tabby type AI's aren't welcome in the setting, and I'll respect that until otherwise. That "Mystery" end is CLOSED, and if I pick at the logic too much, it'll DEFINITELY get sewn shut, spackled, concreted-with-rebar closed.
