Re: Swarm Authors: ai question

[z...@tampaad.net]

(Man, right out of the gate, a canon question. I hope I'm not stepping
on any toes here.)

Han,

My view of canon has always been that the 'old' Confederacy doesn't
trust us monkeys, and any sort of FTL device can destroy a planet if
used, ahem, correctly. We have demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction
that it is impossible to construct a device that we can't weaponize.
Thus, every FTL device we build WILL be managed by a Confederacy AI for
the sole purpose of making sure we don't use it as a weapon. Since the
shipboard AIs are capable of it, we use them for everything else on the
ship as well, managing replicators, environmental processing,
transporters, fire control, etc.

What you are proposing sounds a little odd, but I don't think it's
actually against any of the rules. Out-of-the-box thinking like that is
what the Swarm Cycle needs! As long as the AI retains control of the
FTL device, there is no requirement that it do anything else. Although,
you have to come up with a plausible scenario that gets you there. I
will say that it can't be a Darjee AI; they inherited the bird-brains
values, and they simply can't stand to go without their periodic gossip
feed. Mike, would a Tu'ull AI support this?

-ZM

On 2026-03-16 13:01, Han van Meegeren wrote:
> I want the AI in my book to play a less prominent role than it plays
> in other books. It the omnipresent and omniscient source of
> information. No, more than that of guidance. So we are in this old
> ship, the Somnambulist. It tied with duct tape to keep it together.
>
> I need your advise : is it possible within the canon to have an AI
> that hasn’t been updated for years ? An AI that still thinks that
> WordPerfect is the current leading Word editor?
>
> Second idea: is it possible that all unnecessary tasks are stripped
> from the AI (eg monitoring and entertainment of children. Advising pod
> inhabitants what to do and not. Monitoring hallways for safety etc)
> and be used for technical matters like ???
>
> It would create a nice chaos but could help to keep this ship afloat
> with the minimum crew members available.
>
> I would love to hear from the canon gurus if the above is possible. I
> intend by the way to crash most of the replicators and use spare parts
> from the ones that are out of order.
> But that is of a whole different order.
>
> Thanks in advance, I appreciate you helping me,
> Han
>
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[thinkin...@gmail.com]

I like it! Might have to grow a third party willing to limit things.

Thinker

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[z...@tampaad.net]

Han,

 

   My original email to you about this was a quick note while wading through 6 months of spam.  Now that I've cleaned out my inbox, I can think a little more clearly.

 

   The Darjee are merchants, traders.  They negotiate the best deal they can, including screwing over the unsuspecting mud-dwellers if possible, but they go by the letter of the contract once it's signed.  They use Darjee-developed AIs as contract monitors.  Supposedly, the AIs cannot be bribed and will not lie, but how would us monkeys know?  We were 'hired' by the Darjee to serve as an armed force to stop the Sa'arm from destroying the Confederacy.  They knew they had no real idea what we would have to do, but they knew that THEY couldn't do it and turning us monkeys loose was going to end up a disaster, but surely whatever happened would be better than all being eaten alive.

 

   TH wrote a short story "Average Joes" introducing the Darjee, but the real story started a couple years before.  We really, really needed a 'how the human effort got started' story, and TH was being a jerk and refused to write it.  It took several years, but I wrote a pair of novels (*) which explained how we ended up with the current contract between Confederacy and Humanity.  The Darjee AIs enforce that contract.  The only way to evade that contract is to refuse to serve the Confederacy and stay on Earth.

   We're stuck with that contract.  We WILL be monitored no matter where we are.  We MUST either be accepted as CAP 6.5+ 'volunteers', as (any CAP) 'concubines', or as age sub-14 'dependents', in order to leave Earth.  It is _hard_ to not fit one of those three categories, but some writers have come up with a couple of fascinating exceptions.

   We cannot get away from the monitoring.  It's in the damned contract.

 

(* "The First Command" and "Squadron Command" which both suffered years of negotiation between all the then-current Swarm Cycle writers.  They aren't ZM stories so much as history documents of how the alliance was hammered out.  They explain why all those stupid rules.)