You have enough spatial awareness to not drive over your toes with chair, would be weird if raharrs wouldn't be aware of their tails. Though yeah, sometimes it happens.

While the bandwith between the thing they used to connect to the internet and their spaceship may be near-infinite, you have to remember that they are still limited by the internet itself. I also doubt that a self-conscious AI wold even be able to function inside our networks. You have to remember that while their technology is vastly more andvanced, right now they are essentially just using our primitive computers.

You're right; and AIs of LTC aren't software-based. Quantum won't be able to upload himself even in the Alliance's network.

So Quantum is less artificial intelligence and more artificial brain then?

Is there a difference though?

Quabtum being an artificial brain would imply he himself is somehow tied to a physical object, whereas if he were an AI inhabiting a dedicated machine, it would imply that he can somehow transfer or copy his being into a totally different compatible machine.

He is tied to a physical object, right, to his quantum computer core. But is he inorganic? Yes. Is he artificial? Yes. Is he intelligent? Yes. Therefore, he's an AI. =P

OK, but not a true AI of the sort that writes up a new horseman or two. This isn't a Skynet or rogue self developing piece of software that flies off somewhere and ends civilizations because the numbers add up in a particular way.

Oh, thanks for validating Quantum's opinion on humanity, I guess?

Sure, let's go with that.

So in your mind, a "true AI" is defined by a particular type of pathological instability resulting from incompetent design?

@Lord Eric
I'm looking at it from a hard scifi sense, of an AI capable of producing singularity. We've lack the IQ to figure what that will result in, besides generally bad for us fleshies. Something that will become smarter than us progressively, to the point we lose any ability to fight it after some point. A monkey can't trick a human into a cage afterall.

I enjoy the stories of soft scifi AI as much as any other, but, there is a distinction between the two that is meanignful. Most fictional AIs like Cortana and Quantum here, don't fly off and start doing their own thing, because that has cataclysmic consequences. Most of which detract from the story the author is trying to tell, so it gets brushed under the rug. Or some other explanation arrives by which the AI retains some attachment to the civilization and people it arose out of.

Setting aside for the moment the question of why you think a human-level AI would automatically be capable of feats of self-improvement that an equally knowledgeable human isn't...

Being bad for normal people doesn't necessarily follow from achieving a singularity. There's no particular reason an AI god would be evil, unless the programmers who created the original AI were stupid enough to give self-upgrading capabilities to something that doesn't have a sense of morals.

Skynet, Friend Computer, assorted paperclip maximizers, and all the other "hard scifi AIs" have a flaw under the skin. They all assume that the AI develops the extremely sophisticated capability of making themselves more intelligent (which goes way, way, way beyond just more processing power, they would have to be making their own advances in computational and cognitive science as they go) while also keeping an extremely simpleminded goal system that doesn't include any moral or ethical codes. This doesn't follow. It's quite likely that we'll figure out how to make an AI moral and sane long before we figure out how to make them smarter than we are, let alone capable of autonomously becoming smarter still.

Forbidding an AI from self-upgrading, on the other hand, is something you can do just by leaving stuff out of the build. Seems like a pretty basic precaution if the AI you're building isn't already a trusted friend.

singularity

Which is based on a bunch of unproven assumptions, some of them forgetting that things like laws of physics exist? Singularity is unreachable.

Even without trying to migrate his own psyche, it does seem like Quantum should be able to write bots to do some of the work without waiting for speed-of-light lag though, even if the bots aren't very bright.

Then again, we're only seeing the results. Maybe that's exactly what he is doing, and his complaint is that he can't write more sophisticated ones or manage them more closely.

Their fleet is flittering around Jupiter AFAWK, which is at 5-5.5 AU from the Sun, so, less than an hour of signal lag from Earth. That's vital if you want to RC a spacecraft over the distance, but for bulk data transfer, signal strength+dispersion is more of a concern.

Signal lag definitely does show its ugly face if you try to follow hyperlinks, though.

Only if the prefetching is done from all the way behind the RTT, like our browsers do it.
[invites the fleet to do a "case study" presentation at the next IPNSIG meeting]

Time lag for one. The poorly integrated and disjointed nature of the infonet on this planet makes it difficult even for we dirtlings to do things. with one little game I get regular DC's, often buffering even with text pages. It's something a fractured people like ours does. Easy to beat, hard to reconnoiter before you leap. And one always examines the prey before you scream and leap.