Grrl Power #1490 – Maybe the ship computer is the funny one
The trying-to-come-up-with-a-page-title me of right now as I’m posting this comic really wishes that writing-the-comic-page-in-the-past me would do better at sticking to a single theme per page. This page goes from explaining the prank from the previous page to computer voice gender preferences to ship AI’s of pop-culture to betting to trope-aware arguing. I spent an hour trying to think of a title for this page and I bet most of you only pay attention to them when you’re looking through the archive to try and find part of a story segment. And honestly, the page titles aren’t always super helpful for that. There are times I’m looking for a page to link in reference and I just don’t remember where a certain page appears, and the page title is something like “Flibbity Gooberly” while the page itself is Dabbler trying to draw the Orb upgrade interface or something. It probably made sense to me at the time I posted it, but it was some obscure-ass reference that I, myself, have now forgotten/disassociated.
You know, the Enterprise-D’s computer was just about the perfect kind of advanced computer. It was something resembling an AI, in that it could parse natural speech and extrapolate contextually, (especially when they were talking to it in the holodeck) but it wasn’t the sort of computer that was anthropomorphized in any way, and didn’t ever seem to have any ambitions of its own. Unless there’s an episode I’m not remembering where it went crazy. The closest I can recall was when it created Moriarty, and that was just based on a badly worded request from… Jeordi? It’s been a while since I saw it.
Actually, by far the worst kind of computer techno-fear episodes they ever did were all the Holodeck’s fault. Every season had an episode where the safety protocols got disengaged and people got trapped. Hey geniuses, maybe make it so the regular holodecks can’t have the safeties disengaged under any circumstances. Like the whole thing shuts down if anything goes awry. Have the first thing every single line of code does is check to make sure the squishy meatbags inside can’t have their noggins cracked open because the rocks are too hard or whatever. Like how post-Otis elevators can’t fall if the cable breaks, because the weight of the carriage pulling on the cable is what holds the emergency brakes open. If the cable snaps, the spring-loaded brake returns to its original shape, jutting out past the carriage to catch on the rails.
So then I guess maybe you’d want a smaller holodeck that can only be used by the redshirts… er… I guess they were gold in TNG. They shouldn’t have muddied those waters by making an unnecessary change. But I suppose that could have happened because the “main” actors didn’t want to do a lot of close up shots with their yellow shirt reflecting on their chins, making them look jaundice? Pure speculation on my part. It was probably totally arbitrary. Anyway, at least in that security focused holodeck, you could be reasonably sure that random crew members >cough<Barclay>cough< weren’t side loading custom mods or rootkits or whatever.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
No one thought of Helva, from “The Ship That Sang”?
Okay, technically she’s not an AI, but still, no one thought of her?
Correction, “The Ship Who Sang” :(
Cuz it’s been a long time since I read the books about ship people. I can think of evil AI as being the berserker class ships who are wildly homicidal
It’s been a long time for me as well (last century since last read a proper novel), but still remember some things :P
That’s because here, the ship’s computer is very specifically called a >computer< … Helva and her ilk are called "brainships" and she is referred to as the "ship's brain", which is more open for interpretation. Even a universe where silicon computation is outlawed, like Frank Herbert's Dune, the very term "computer" is not used at all, or if it is, it becomes synonymous with the wetware version in use, namely "mentat", Then, in the Freefall webcomic universe, it kind of goes the other way, where you have "Bownan's Architecture", which is kind of like Linux because it runs on almost literally anything, from robots to 100% organic genetically engineered wolves.
Did acknowledge that she is not an actual AI
“Have the first thing every single line of code does is check to make sure the squishy meatbags inside can’t have their noggins cracked open because the rocks are too hard or whatever.”
That is like saying “you need a circuit breaker every 1 meter of cable”.
And since the holodceck safety malfunctions always came with the inability to turn it off, more automatic shutoffs would not really have helped.
@DaveB I think the closest the got to “Evil A.I.” on TNG outside of the Holodeck was probably when the Bynar’s high-jacked the whole ship because they needed to backup their racial memory, and only the Enterprise had a powerful enough computer to hold all their consciousnesses while they rebooted. Or some such.
Most of the Evil A.I. is going to be on Voyager. Between the “Biogel memory cells” and the resident Borg, they had a lot of opportunities to have the computer go over to the darkside.
You’re forgetting Professor Moriarty on the TNG show. Also Voyager had those Holographic AI on that enemy ship as well.
And afai recall, Voyager was the first Trek series to give a hologram a “mobile emitter”. If that tech had been available to the many other holodeck “AI” entities mentioned in this week’s comments, the disasters could have been much worse. But they did talk their way out of it with Moriarty, who agreed to go to sleep until something like the mobile emitter became available.
I got a good laugh out of the EMH appearing as Abraham Lincoln because the other holo-people thought he was the only real life-form on Voyager.
And in response to Christopher, why did they never just make the holodeck exit unconcealable? That would be the equivalent of the big, red, emergency shut off switch I’ve seen on virtually every piece of industrial equipment that was at all dangerous. What, the UFP has no OSHA?
If we’re talking evil AI ships the berserkers from the ships who sang would be pretty darn close.
I wonder if the evil AI ones have counter commands to keep them from going good
If memory is correct (showed up as a youtube ‘Short’ couple weeks or months ago), they tricked Moriarty (and his holo-girlfriend) into thinking he had managed to escape the Enterprise, but instead, they moved him to a portable holo-deck computer
Abraham Lincoln was NOT the President of Earth!
For some reason, I always liked shows like Andromeda and Cleopatra 2525 scifi genre, even though the acting was generally… pretty bad, and the plots were usually worse, and extremely repetitive. :) Not sure WHY I liked them, but I did. As opposed to something like Firefly or Babylon 5, which were both just generally awesome PERIOD and it’s obvious why anyone would like those shows.
Well, Cleopatra 2525 was a fun parody.
Yeah, Cleo 2525 was meant to be not taken seriously
Believe there was another similar show at the same time, remember watching them both at the time
Some of the best ‘underground’ (as in… not seen much by ‘mainstream’) tend to have Kiwis or Aussies as either the main character or featured prominently: Defiance for example
Shipboard sexy AI exposition.
I’m with Sid. Andromeda/Romi was there first, and is arguably far hotter than Cortana.
Game or TV version?
The first place I ever saw a largely immobile “brain” remote-operating a humanoid service unit was Anne McCaffrey’s “The Ship Who Searched”, in the same book series/universe Guesticus mentions elsewhere.
Come on Sydney, In the first game Cortana is explicitly a ship’s AI. For about ten minutes before evacuating the ship on the toughest set of legs available, whereupon the series promptly forgot her job.
I only vaguely remember Andromeda as that show my dad used to watch.
Whomping the competitors in under two minutes. You have to figure the entities putting on this shindig aren’t too thrilled. They probably had enough advertising lined up for a half hour of combat. Now their AI’s have to scramble to come up with enough post fight analysis to fill the airtime.