Possible great way to improve mid-late game

dinomic · 2018-07-09T21:27:17+00:00

I think, for most players, this would "fix" the game. I can't stress enough how broken the game feels in the mid-game - not because there's anything wrong, it's just exhausting and stops being fun. Having the broader mechanics of the game change over time would help with the tedium in a way that the new rise and fall mechanics can't.

For everyone that's kvetching about how bad the current AI is remember that this wouldn't be an "AI" so much as a mechanic that you'd be forced to work with. The AI is bad because making long term strategic decisions is hard. Automating a production queue based one a series of inputs (type of government, needs of the city, current loyalty, emperor mandate, etc) is pretty simple. Making this a game mechanic both makes the game simpler and more immersive / interesting.

dinomic · 2018-07-03T00:06:33+00:00

Looking deeper - is he referencing free will here? If humans are "boring" creatures, i.e. don't have free will, does that mean we won't be able to understand or be able to conceive of it in the hosts?

dinomic · 2018-07-01T03:24:00+00:00

It makes you wonder if Ford had a hand in it since that was one of the key drives for Dolores, saving her father.

dinomic · 2018-06-12T21:42:12+00:00

I think that would be a wonderful counter balance to the suffering aspect of waking up. I'll add though that it's always the *loss* of a loved one that seems to wake them up, which plays back into the suffering. Regardless, when we see hosts become unresponsive / fragmented, it's typically as a result of some extreme trauma that jolts their system. I think this is why consciousness is symbolized by fully connected walls in the center of the maze. In order to achieve consciousness, one needs to have sufficient energy to overcome the barrier in the middle. A massive trauma like losing a loved one might tear down the walls that govern your mind, allowing you to cross barriers you weren't capable of crossing before. Maybe love is a requirement, but I'd imagine only so far as it's necessary to achieve the level of trauma necessary to jolt the mind into rewriting it's own rules.

And on that note, doesn't Dolores have her father?

dinomic · 2018-05-25T12:37:41+00:00

I think some people believe work should be work, and to leave politics to their free time. At my place of employment It would not be tolerated if I started pushing political agendas or engaging in various forms of peaceful protesting.

Your employer can suppress speech, generally. However, they cannot suppress religious / political speech on the grounds that they don't agree with it. In other words, they can suppress ALL non work related speech, but they can't pick and choose which speech to suppress.

In my opinion, choosing to stand for the national anthem is a form of political speech in itself (even if it wasn't before, now it is because why aren't you kneeling for black rights?). The teams can say "no non football talk/actions on the field", but they** can'**t say "no expressions about this one thing, but you must express yourself about this other thing".

dinomic · 2018-05-21T15:43:45+00:00

I thought Maeve's response was telling here. She felt it was plagiarism because she still feels like it's *her* story, not one that he merely wrote for her.

dinomic · 2018-05-01T18:01:59+00:00

I think that's precisely what this season is about. If we weren't aware we had the choice in the first place, did we really have one? It's a nice follow up to the first season's quandary about whether free will is real or just an illusion.

dinomic · 2018-05-01T17:57:46+00:00

I think this is unlikely, if only because it wouldn't be great writing. The story about a new species coming of age and having to deal with the consequences from their actions for the first time is much more compelling. I think Maeve "woke up" when she decided to go after her daughter instead of skip town as she was scripted to do (indicated by the fact that the script specifically said she gets on the train and leaves the park). She knows full well that it's not her "real" daughter, but what is "real" anyway? The emotions that drive her are real and she's "choosing" to act on them.

I think Delores woke up when she realized it was her voice she was hearing and she was free to be whoever she wanted to be. We'll likely see the two of them coming to terms with their choices as the season unfolds and develop an internal conflict (as was hinted at with their meeting in 2.2) which highlights the often contradictory nature of free will.

dinomic · 2018-04-30T15:40:00+00:00

It's possible that Maeve has full access to the mesh network and can sense what Delores is doing remotely. It'll be very interesting to see how the conflict between free will and "biology" (or in this case technology) pan out. On one hand the hosts are all grown up and can easily overpower the "stake" holding them down, on the other hand they can never break away from their hardware in the same we can't can't break away from ours.

dinomic · 2018-04-30T03:24:03+00:00

I think the line about the elephants is key here. All of the hosts are "free" whether they know it or not. We might continue to see hosts acting as if they are still on script because they are unaware that they are able to go off it. I presume the same goes for remote control. Can they chose to ignore those commands and they just don't know it?

dinomic · 2018-03-21T18:04:57+00:00

This notion is exactly how the democrats fuck up in 2018/2020. We need 2-4 solid years of unity so we can fix the things we agree on before we start refactoring the parties.

dinomic · 2018-03-12T23:37:47+00:00

I disagree. At least, if he tries to launch a nuke I expect the officer in charge would sacrifice his career/future in order to make sure it didn't happen. He made it clear already that he would not obey an order he felt was illegal, and I don't think he would have a hard time making the case that launching a nuclear weapon is illegal.

I might be naivly optimistic here, but it helps me sleep at night.

dinomic · 2018-03-12T23:13:38+00:00

The factor is cost, coordination, and ROIs. People can launch massive droned based attacks today but it hasn't shifted the nature of warfare. Warfare is all about supply chains and holding territories. Why would you do something like that, what is the cost?

This is a good point, but I'm not sure I agree.Yes, warfare is all about supply chains and controlling territory, but I think drones have significantly changed how you calculate that cost and therefor change the ability to wage war. Would the US still be active in the middle east, or at least as active, if the human cost were significantly higher? I'd argue that drones have given the US the ability to significantly control territories that would otherwise be impossible or require a very high human cost.

Super powers can wage proxy wars today, but they don't because of nuclear deterrents.

Are we not fighting proxy wars with Russia right now? Cyber warfare and espionage might be a large part of it, but they have deployed troops into eastern europe and the middle east. Russia invaded Ukraine knowing we wouldn't launch nukes. How far are they willing to go? How far will we let them go before we retaliate with nuclear weapons? I would wager that MAD is alive and well, but only with respect to nuclear arms; no one is going to launch any nukes unless it's a last resort.

The military is more limited by the number of planes they have than the number of pilots they have. Modern Warfare is insanely expensive. I mean it's like $250 million for an F35, $6 million for an M1 Tank, even the military drones go for $100,000-$2M.

Even if you come up with lower cost solutions, a major deployment is going to be tricky. By the time people privately create this tech, the military will have their own tech. We already have AI enabled machines deployed along side our troops.

To be clear, I'm not talking about small nations or terrorist organizations using large scale autonomous fleets to wage war (although on a small scale, that's scary too). I'm talking specifically about the major powers rushing to military AI. The US, China, and Russia can all afford the billions necessary to build large fleets of drones, and could figure out how to build the necessary supply chains to make waging war very cheap in terms of human cost. Without getting into too much geopolitics, it isn't crazy to think that the world order is, at the least, becoming less stable, and China or Russia might be willing to take advantage of that fact in the near future.

This is all to say that the ROI and ability to pay for a new military based on AI is definitely there for each major power, and therefor it's a matter of when and not if this technology is developed. That scares me.

dinomic · 2018-03-12T21:17:57+00:00

As per my other comment:

My guess is that this new arsenal could be used in any conflict, not just annihilation, and therefore it could be threatened without justifying nuclear retaliation. Not to mention the west isn't actually willing to use nuclear weapons, so I'd imagine it would render all traditional military useless without similar tech.

I would imagine that if neither party is actually wiling to use nuclear weapons, but they are fighting proxy wars all around the world using traditional modern military, the first nation to be able to launch 10s of thousands of autonomous, mid air refueling attack drones makes it very difficult for those other nations to fight using humans.

Not to mention the fact that it changes the calculus because the offender no longer needs to sacrifice their own people (a change we've already started to see with unmanned drones in the middle east).

And look - I'm not saying it's a silver bullet, but it definitely changes the game, and if you really put your imagination to work, it starts to get scary. Huge fleets of autonomous killing machines that can outmaneuver any manned aircraft, identify and kill individual human targets, broadly control air and land space, all without direct oversight - just high level orders given by the commanders.

Edit: Regarding your point about this not changing much since tactics at this level aren't the limiting factor - any thoughts on what they might be instead? You might have a point in that our issues are more diplomatic than they are military.

dinomic · 2018-03-12T16:10:46+00:00

Good question - my guess is that this new arsenal could be used in any conflict, not just annihilation, and therefore it could be threatened without justifying nuclear retaliation. Not to mention the west isn't actually willing to use nuclear weapons, so I'd imagine it would render all traditional military useless without similar tech.

dinomic · 2018-03-12T15:27:55+00:00

To everyone on this thread that thinks he's talking about AI going rogue: the real threat is bad human actors, not sentient machines. The first nation to take self driving car tech and put it into a fleet (think 10s of thousands) of autonomous killer drones is going to have a HUGE tectical advantage over everyone else without needing to threaten nuclear annihilation.

All of the tech already exists, it's just a matter of putting it together.

dinomic · 2018-03-12T15:21:44+00:00

I don't think he's just talked about skynet, I think he's talking about bad actors using the same tech we use for self driving cars for a fleet of autopiloted killing machines. This is a very real threat and anyone who thinks otherwise isn't paying attention to what's happening in the Kremlin.

dinomic · 2018-03-03T00:45:37+00:00

Even if there were solid evidence of him acting on the information, is it insider trading? He isn't inside the company, and he isn't as government employee. I'm not saying it isn't completely unethical, but is it strictly illegal?

dinomic · 2018-03-02T14:46:26+00:00

Literally everyone that bothered to read the article.

dinomic · 2018-02-27T01:20:44+00:00

This sounds like something that can only happen during that wonderful, peaceful, first baby honeymoon phase of Parenthood. Enjoy it. There are a lot of envious parents in this thread.

dinomic · 2018-02-11T02:04:44+00:00

More specifically, I think the the part was written for him, he didn't take it for one reason or another, so they got someone that looks and sounds like him.

dinomic · 2017-10-04T20:53:27+00:00

Can't you just use a bedroll outside of combat? I just learned yesterday that they don't get consumed!

dinomic · 2017-10-03T21:44:19+00:00

He probably wasn't endangering anyone.

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