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Title: Artificial Condition Authors: Martha Wells Category:#supplementals Number of Highlights: 10 Date: 2024-02-19 Last Highlighted: **


Highlights

Young humans can be impulsive. The trick is keeping them around long enough to become old humans. This is what my crew tells me and my own observations seem to confirm it.


“Sometimes people do things to you that you can’t do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.”


I did it for the four ComfortUnits at Ganaka Pit who had no orders and no directive to act and had voluntarily walked into the meat grinder to try to save me and everyone else left alive in the installation.


I phrased it as a question, because pretending you were asking for more information was the best way to try to get the humans to realize they were doing something stupid. “So do you think there’s another reason Tlacey wants you to do this exchange in person, other than … killing you?”


“In the creche, our moms always said that fear was an artificial condition. It’s imposed from the outside. So it’s possible to fight it. You should do the things you’re afraid of.”


When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

Tags:#social_construct,#ai,#death


I guess you can’t tell a story from the point of view of something that you don’t think has a point of view.


Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.


I was used to taking orders from humans and trying to mitigate whatever damage their stupid ideas did to them, but I had wanted to work with a group again, I had enjoyed how they had listened to me, I had put my need to get to RaviHyral above the safety of my clients. I was just as shit at being a security consultant as any human.


So they made us smarter. The anxiety and depression were side effects.

Tags:#ai