I liked the interactions with the AI. I'm with ElectricPaladin about the utter horridness of just going ahead and making complicated and secret arrangements to get pregnant without mentioning it to one's partner first. And yes the explanatory stuff was sufficiently dense to make it hard to parse.
Is having a personality a necessary outcome of a very intelligent AI? Or is personality just a side-effect that we will be able to avoid in our AIs?
In Star Trek, the ship's computer was very smart inasmuch as it could understand commands in colloquial English and give intelligent responses. But it had no personality.
But I wonder if that is really possible. Is there a point where the level of intelligence and human understanding required to interact seamlessly with humans necessarily involves having something that humans will perceive as a personality? That's what the ship's AI got me thinking here.
Interesting question. There are some who theorize that for a fully intelligent decision-making machine to be fully functional, it would also have to have something like emotions, because one function of emotions is to add weighting functions to shortcut decisions that would otherwise be arbitrary. Otherwise an AI would spend all day dithering over a trivial decision. I don't entirely buy that--if the choice is truly trivial, then a random number generator can give one way or the other, if it's truly not trivial than there are fuzzy logic methodologies to make decisions that don't have an obvious binary decision. It's an interesting idea anyway.
If they have emotions and develop them individually, then that probably means they have personality. The question is whether they're allowed to SHOW personality in any overt way. I think that, at least for AIs performing vital functions that may have life-or-death consequences, letting them show personality is probably not too likely because it would get in the way of the function. As opposed to, say, a customer service bot or companion robot or something.
I liked the way that Ancillary Justice handles it. It that universe, AIs do need the emotions to be able to function for the reason stated above. And they aren't allowed a great deal of freedom of expression. But if you've pissed off your ship AI, even though it can't disobey your orders and won't tell you what it thinks of you, you will be able to discern its mood toward you by secondary interactions--whether it volunteers information that you might or might not want instead of just keeping it to itself, whether it goes out of its way to prearrange needs for you or whether you have to ask for them explicitly. The difference between a happy AI and a grumpy AI is the difference between having a personal assistant who predicts your every need and having a personal assistant who just wants the paycheck and then go home--sometimes the latter can end up making more work than having no personal assistant at all.
I found this episode sufficiently annoying to finally create an account.
I had the same reaction! I had to make an account to call out how bad I thought this story was, as well as the incorrect interpretation of it by Merl. In my attempt to salvage something from this heap I conclude that it has nothing to do with an uppity or incomprehensive AI. Rather, it seems that the human characters were the ones doing both. The pilot is raging against everyone and everything because of her own inadequacies as a pilot, the science officer as a reluctant “parent” (weakest plot point ever by the way) and incompetent interpreter of the alien ecosystem, and the human race in its slash and burn approach to space exploration.
Really though, I have no idea what the author was trying to do with this story. It’s a messy amalgam of tired plot points. Too little time was played to any single one in order for me to give a fart about the whole lot of it. Hats off to the narrator though, her performance was the one thing that kept me listening.
Friendly suggestion--if you feel moved after listening for a long time to comment on a story you hate... sure, do that. But maybe could you also make a comment on a story you love? There has to be something you love, otherwise you wouldn't still be listening, right? It's just... kind of a recurring theme for long-time listening one-time commenters to only express dislike.
