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Title: Artificial Condition Authors: Martha Wells Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 19 Date: 2025-04-20 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.
āSometimes people do things to you that you canāt do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on.ā
Tags:persistence
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. āSo do you think thereās another reason Tlacey wants you to do this exchange in person, other thanĀ ā¦ killing you?ā
Tags:communication,problem_solving
āIn the creche, our moms always said that fear was an artificial condition. Itās imposed from the outside. So itās possible to fight it. You should do the things youāre afraid of.ā
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:ai,death,social_construct
I guess you canāt tell a story from the point of view of something that you donāt think has a point of view.
Tags:ai,perspective
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,anxiety,depression
Its function was traveling through what it thought of as the endlessly fascinating sensation of space, and keeping all its human and otherwise passengers safe inside its metal body. Of course it didnāt understand not wanting to perform your function. Its function was great.
The tension that had kept me down to 96 percent capacity eased; a murderbotās life is stressful in general, but it would be a long time before I got used to moving through human spaces with no armor, no way to hide my face.
I felt this would be the point where a human would sigh, so I sighed.
Tags:ai
And now I knew why I hadnāt wanted to do this. It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.
Tags:ai
If it happened, did you cause it to happen, or did an outside influence use you to cause it to happen?
Humans and augmented humans shift their weight when they stand, they react to sudden sounds and bright lights, they scratch themselves, they adjust their hair, they look in their pockets or bags to check for things that they already know are in there.
Iām accustomed to assisting my crew with large-scale data analysis, and numerous other experiments. While I am in transport mode, I find my unused capacity tiresome. Solving your problems is an interesting exercise in lateral thinking.
āI need to know if the incident occurred due to a catastrophic failure of my governor module. Thatās what I think happened. But I need to know for sure.ā I hesitated, but what the hell, it already knew everything else. āI need to know if I hacked my governor module in order to cause the incident.ā
It explained, When my crew plays media, I canāt process the context. Human interactions and environments outside my hull are largely unfamiliar. Now I understood. It needed to read my reactions to the show to really understand what was happening. Humans used the feed in different ways than bots (and constructs) so when its crew played their media, their reactions didnāt become part of the data.
That is irrational. I know, I said, if the humans were dead, who would make the media? It was so outrageous, it sounded like something a human would say.
Are all constructs so illogical? said the Asshole Research Transport with the immense processing capability whose metaphorical hand I had had to hold because it had become emotionally compromised by a fictional media serial.