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.
Rommie was one of like, three good things about Andromeda. I wanted to like it so much, the premise of rebuilding civilisation , returning not so much law and order but something more like decency to the galaxy, all of it seemed so appealing. But alas. Went off the rails harder than nBSG.
I feel like it started going off the rails once Sorbo became an Executive Producer. Turns out the man has a Shatner-level ego…and some not-great political opinions to boot.
I still hold that he planned that scenario for Star Trek and I still shudder at the possibilities.
You do recall they went with the same notion towards the end of Discovery, when they flash-forwarded Heart of Gold…excuse me, USS Discovery, to the 31st century?
Personally if I had to pick a sexy ship AI, I would have said EDI. And that’s coming from someone who never played Mass Effect.
Also, Maxima’s outrage in the last panel is hysterical.
Mass Effect is worth playing for more reasons than EDI.
Well, she’s not really sexy, but for a female ship’s A.I., I’d choose Nell from “Battle Beyond The Staaaaarrrss…”.
My vote goes for Estelle from AI2U.
I like how it was noted that she was sexy, before she got a humanoid body too
No one here has seen The Dark Side of the Moon (1990) or it wouldn’t even be a debate. The ship AI was literally Camilla More in a catsuit sitting in a swivel chair.
Connections!
The movie Event Horizon was basically a big-budget remake of TDSotM, and Sydney’s comic shop is named Event Horizon.
EDI in ME2 is hoot. I haven’t got to ME3 yet.
Other (sexy) ship AIs I know are Canal Volfield in Lost Universe, and Sabrina in Aeon 14.
Is Lost Universe the anime with Gene Starwind? That would make Volfield the cute artificial woman who turned out to be the special ship’s AI when the two were brought together? Or have I got the wrong title?
Outlaw Star is the anime with Gene Starwind, and his super sexy spell casting pistol.
Coolest weapon ever. All others pale in comparison.
Lightsaber? Phaser? No matter, that’s just Gene Starwinds basic weapons.
I’d say Zora from Star Trek Discovery, but Star Trek Discovery was a genuinely terrible show.
Although there was RepliCarter from Stargate SG-1….
STD wasn’t that bad, just had to ignore the Mary Sue MC
While Michael WAS a Mary Sue and genuinely the worst part of the show, even without her, it was a truly awful show, including every single character in it. It was just painful to watch and did not feel REMOTELY like Star Trek.
This is why I gave my sorceress character an active exposition spell. Aside from getting opponents to monologue their plans it’s also handy for hand waving in universe exposition for the reader.
Me: ah a fascinating subject, characters being called out for doing exposition in-universe. Some like myself have tried to write in an umbrella statement to excuse it, instead of doing the “as you all know” that no one in universe needs to hear.
The entire rest of the comments sections: ship AI in other science fiction.
Do they know they’re in a webcomic that updates twice a week? That we the readers would occasionally need clunky exposition for information not naturally presented or occasional refreshers for plot clarity? I mean maybe I’ll give that to Cora but Max knowing is a step too far! I don’t buy it! Sydney can say and do whatever she wants tho. She special.
Sydney and Deus have a level of nerdyness that bring them close to the fourth wall. Nerdyness may be Deus superpower, that might explain why he is always two steps ahead of everyone.
I mean if your holodeck can spontaneously create an AI just by phrasing your request in an interesting way you’d think someone would be doing just that a lot to generate kind and helpful AI based on very kind historical characters left and right to then install as part of an entire population of ship-AI (so that one of them going nuts can’t override everything).
It also makes me wonder why she doesn’t have a small host of AI crewmembers to manage the ship in those scenarios where it needs to move with person-like intuition and computer-like reaction speeds.
Well, personally, I would add power consumption and computer resource restrictions to the Holodecks. When the ship did that, the Holodeck pulled more power than normal and demanded extra computing power from the computer core, to the tune of it showing up as an anomaly on the Operations panel. In-universe, I do not think it ever occurred to anyone that the ship’s main computer could generate a full AI entity if asked to do so. Which was why, when it occurred, it was just an anomaly and not something that should be canceled when it occurred.
Given the scale of the setting, it feels a bit like saying “it never occurred to anyone to try to see what the limits of the entertainment technology was”.
This seems to suggest that the concept and even personality type of “power users” or “modders” have completely vanished – arguably a complete shift for all of humanity to so complete erase curiosity. And I haven’t really seen other signs that humanity went through such a curiosity-wiping genocide to accept that as a believable explanation, any more than I’d accept “nobody tested firing the phasers at max power before” or “nobody ever tried to see how fast the engines could go”.
@DaveB, you title made me think of Holly/Hilly from Red Dwarf. An AI so old they’ve gone peculiar (or maybe just senile) in one of the best Sci-Fi comedies ever.
And if you want sexy male AI try Queeg 500, played by Charles Augins, also from Red Dwarf.
P.S. The reason TNG switched the Red and Mustard Yellow shirts around is because when they screen tested Patrick Stewart in the Yellow costume under studio lights it looked wrong, yet Red looked right in every way.
Whereas, with Data, they just came up with an excuse not to have him in blue when the makeup clashed despite bring the de facto science officer (he’s “Ops”!) rather than do a full circuit and have science/medical yellow and engineering/grunts blue.
I’ll never understand why they just didn’t keep the TOS-movie era costumes. Those were the coolest.
I could see something like those for “Formal Occasion/Dress” uniforms, but the unitards were better for comfort and daily wear.
Sorry, but those unitards were not more comfortable.
They switched to uniforms with separate trousers and jackets about Season three, leading to Patrick Stewart adjusting his jacket with a tug every time he got up from the Captain’s Chair (apparently the crew nicknamed that ‘the Picard manoeuvre’).
The reason was that those unitards were made small with stretch for a particular look, only problem it started giving the cast back problems through spine compression.
(I believe there was a second Jumpsuit used which wasn’t made from stretchy material, yet wasn’t used for long as it didn’t look good enough for the main characters.)
They considered having the minidress unisex
Now picture Riker doing his patented Riker-Stand wearing one of those :P
In fact, a male background extra walked by in one during “Encounter at Farpoint”
Should have used “but Cortana did enable the Chief’s gambling.”, In reference to both the “not a *ship* AI” text, the fact she chose the chief because he is canonically lucky, and scenes like “what if you miss”.
If you want sexy AI the Culture series can probably knock all competition out of the park. A typical Culture ship is run by / commanded by / is an AI several hundred times more intelligent than any human, with ample time to entertain the fleshy meatbags aboard via avatars, remotes, simulations etc. etc. The tiny fraction of processing power needed for that is basically a rounding error.
When you speak of ship a.I computers my first thik is the Culture series by Iain M. Banks General Systems Vehicle.
Imemse ship operated by multiple artificial intelligences.
But for the voice , I don’t know.
Perhaps beacuse I’m an european.
Ian M.Banks was an UK citizen *, he writes in english and the Culture series is a must read for SF fans.
* he died in 2013.
One episode DID anthropomorphize the Enterprise from TNG to a degree, when it for no known reason it suddenly spontaneously generated nodes throughout the ship that gave it a desire and ability to reproduce. It created something in the Holodeck and once it was born and disappeared into the depths of space the nodes disappeared as well and it went back to normal.
There was also one where Geordi use the Holodeck to create a simulation of the ships designer (an attractive female) though it wasn’t really her but the representation for the ship. It ended with a speech about how she was glad that it was Geordi that was taking care of her and it had a lot of romantic inuendo. And of course later he meets the actual woman ship designer, she discovers the recording of the holodeck simulation and gets pissed… like they do to Geordi.
I think you’re thinking of the ST:TNG episode “Emergence”. Which had a couple great Star Trek inside jokes in it as well (Worf shoveling coal and the ship goes faster comes to mind).
Statistically speaking in order of most likely to buy the farm… Gold, Blue, Red. And honestly 99% of those were ‘just part of the job man, little timmy stepped out of cover/walked into an obvious ambush.’ And TBPH, that trope was maintained except then it was the Red shirts buying. Now, I’ve got some clean up on the lower levels of this ‘lair’ and by levels, I mean the old villainesses root cellar.
p.s. actually this is a union job not contract work. Then hench union looks after older villains and such. Well, you know. More like looking after an elderly neighbor kind of thing. (and to quietly safety their residences because of old gear) And being a hench, it’s not just bad guys. ;)
Besides, anyone who’s managed to make it as a villain long enough to become elderly on the job? Not someone you want to get on the bad side of.
Yes well, that can be a thing I suppose. I just don’t end up in places where the life insurance has to inevitably payout. I ain’t special by any means. Pretty average to the point of boring and dull, but I never stop looking. Be amazed what you learn just cleaning up around the lair permanent or temporary. Also, time to think when not readying gear, transferring loot, handling the hand offs and money washing etc. Mind, I draw the line at cleaning and polishing the boss’s personal gear… especially the N00bies. Those kids gotta learn that if they ain’t cleaning their own stuff it can’t be relied on. heh, getting old.
Obviously GLaDOS is the sexiest A.I. There’s no way a woman as witty, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, manipulative, and overall psychotic as that isn’t drop-dead gorgeous to balance out Karma. Sexy even as PotatOS.
I can fix her.
She can’t match the domme energy of Shodan.
I respect your red flag attraction.
She can make me worse.
but GlaDOS wasn’t a SHIP a.i. she was in charge of testing and manufacturing and… neurotoxin deployment? someone made a mistake there…
for a Ship a.I. i have to say… there aren’t actually that many mainstream ones that are specifically sexy women, most just have a female Voice.
Didn’t the crew disable holodeck safeties a few times in order to spring a lethal ambush on some intruders? If so, its not an entirely useless option to have.
If you can’t think of a good title you could just name it after the most distinctive outfit, which would also be helpful for people searching the archives. “Max peels off the catsuit” would get a lot of traffic.
But each specific title of that type only works once, before having to think of modifiers to distinguish every instance.
Sydney Scoville – Exposition Lampshade
I’m pretty sure they did a AI getting to big for its britches thing in the original Star Trek. Kirk basically confused it to death. But I also remember the way they differentiated between the old computer and the new was the old computer had that female voice and the new one had a male voice. Nothing good seems to come with a Male AI it seems. I’m looking at you Hal…
It’s not like female AI are any better. Glados, Shodan and Cortana for example.
Are you thinking of Nomad, M5, or both?
Well, the counter example is how hard Jarvis worked to keep Tony Stark alive.
Small typo, I think. “Dominating the semifinal in…”
I think that should be “Dominating the semifinal is…”
Yup, whoops!
I don’t remember which TOS episode it was, but there was one with a subplot where the Enterprise computer had acquired a personality (accidentally or deliberately, I can’t remember), and Kirk repeatedly asked Engineering to remove it, as it kept flirting with him.
“Tomorrow is Yesterday”. If course it requires a full overhaul of the computer to get rid of it.
“Recording… dear.”
Keetle? English aint my main language, is that meddlesome or noisy? Or whistle blower?
Old English slang: “pot calling the kettle black” is a commonly used phrase for when a person seems hypocritical by complaining about a second person doing something that the first person often does.
A reference to the “Pot calling the kettle black”. Pointing out a foible that you, yourself, exhibit.
I do have a soft spot for the temporary one they had in TOS after the off-screen visit to a planet of Amazons for emergency repairs. She would have been nice to stretch out for the rest of season 1 instead of just “Tomorrow is Yesterday”.
Someone please explain “KETTLE MUCH?” in the last panel. I’m guessing from context that it’s at least adjacent to breaking the fourth wall, but I’d like to get educated.
TIA
“Pot calling the kettle black” is a phrase in English which refers to a person who displays a particular trait calling out another person for displaying that same trait, apparently being completely clueless about their hypocrisy.
Just to be particularly pedantic; it refers to a time when people cooked over an open wood or coal fire. The soot from the fire would cover both pot and kettle alike.
Pedant war!
I’m pretty sure it’s from when pots and kettles were both made of cast iron, which is given a black oxide coating all over to reduce corrosion, so soot has nothing to do with it.
Oh, on elevators it’s even safer: if the carriage exceeds a set speed threshold, the emergency brakes are applied, and it’s a mechanical trigger, so even if someone hacked the elevator controls to command the elevator to drop, it can’t happen.
Enterprise D computer is more like what Mass Effect calls a Virtual Intelligence, not a true artificial Intelligence. Andromeda was a true Artificial Intelligence. The cartoon Galaxy Rangers featured ships with AIs that did not have humanoid forms. Their visual depiction on a screen was that of a digital eyeball. The show also featured robot horses.
I don’t know, I was in a really cool hotel at an SF convention in Chicago, the Swissotel, and every time somebody hit the fire alarm, the elevators went straight to the bottom floor, free-falling halfway down, then crushing you to your knees at the bottom.
So that speed threshold must be pretty darned high.
Best part was the elevator announcing that you shouldn’t be alarmed, it was experiencing technical difficulties.
Back in the early 1990s BosCon did a panel titled “The Holodeck and Product Liability Law”
She did get fairly lucky that Kaboomoid could be dealt with by (well, using) Eat Chicken, given that she flew right through him with mo apparent effect, and that it didn’t inherit Kaboomoid’s seeming intangibility. And that no-one else had any really esoteric powers like teleportation, time distortion, etc. that she couldn’t just punch out.
I think a big part of it is that supers tend to have a suite of powers, not just the one. So Max isn’t JUST strong, she’s ALSO tough, AND can fly, AND has energy beams, AND is incredibly fast. Sure, a teleporter is dangerous, but as Max has shown, she’s fast enough to catch one. Sure, someone who can put her in stasis is dangerous, but it has to be incredibly powerful stasis – and even then she’ll probably get out fast, as she’s done before. Sure, someone who can banish her is dangerous – but as we’ve seen, she can super-speed-super-kaboom her way out of that, too. She’s not IMMUNE to these dangers, but she’s really hard to shut down unless someone has more than one massively-powerful ability that they can deploy simultaneously.
So even if she couldn’t punch, throw, or blast Kaboomoid, she could just, say, fly above them, and blast away the ground beneath their feet. Eventually they’ll be in a deep enough hole to be out of bounds, and she wins. There’s a reason that even someone as seasoned as Cora figured that Max wouldn’t just be competitive, but a ringer.
The anthropomorphized TARDIS from “The Doctor’s Wife”.
“Did you wish really hard?”
Huh… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blatant typo in this comic. And why is Max overreacting like that? Gonna be honest… During this arc, I have see a whole bunch of “Why is,” “Why are” type comments. I’ve had a few myself. It’s kinda like this arc is a swing and a miss. Or, yo know, this arc can only exist with blatant, overreaching plot armor.
The number of holodeck shenanigans versus ship computer general lack of same tells me that the holodeck must have had a separate computer. Probably much higher powered, and vaguely experimental.
Likely only available on the larger Starfleet ships, both for power requirements and also because Starfleet personnel seem to be selected based on having more self-control than the typical Federation civilian.
Not to mention they had duty shifts, which meant they couldn’t disappear for weeks on end into the holodeck. I assume that they couldn’t spend their leave on ship, so that would limit their access when they didn’t have that reminder of the real world.
I had the impression when the holodeck was introduced, it was a thing for capital ships only. Voyager was a (slightly) smaller ship and had a holographic-capable medical bay, but I don’t recall it having a full holodeck.
That having been said, I”m sure this is all a matter of priorities. I am reminded of the situation with car computers. The first car I had with a computer had it entirely for the entertainment system. It continued to have a traditional engine with a timing belt and everything. The first design I saw for a car with a computer controlled engine had a separate computer for the entertainment system. Today, any modern car has exactly one computer and it does everything, including telephony, which feels to me like it’s really asking for problems. I hate the idea that a computer cracker could take full control of my car, but honestly that’s the situation we’re in.
Voyager did have a full Holodeck, in one of the first few episodes, when they are talking about their power and resources situation, they make the offhand comment that the Holodeck has it’s own micro-fusion reactors, so it can be used without taxing the ships limited power resources for critical functions, and Tom Paris recreates a pub with a billiards table. There’s later episodes involving it directly, like Fairhaven and the Beowulf episode, and many where it’s involved indirectly. When it’s off, it does appear to be a smaller space than the Enterprise-D Holodeck. The Holodeck on both ships is indicated to have their own stand alone computer systems.
The Medbay’s holographic projector / Medical Emergency Hologram system is on it’s own computer core as well, though the Doctor could ‘transfer’ his program to the Holodeck when needed, and later to the mobile holographic emitter. *In universe* given that the future-tech mobile emitter could house his entire program, I never understood why they didn’t full on copy him there, so they could have two doctors. Out of universe, it was obvious. One actor, less issues to write up with the doctor missing or whatever, etc.
There is a bit of a logic to going from the Enterprise to Andromeda.
Both are Gene Roddenberry properties.
That and Andromeda came out before Halo.
Also, have you seen Lexa Doig, plus she has been in a bunch of Sci-Fi shows.
Fun fact, she’s married to Michael Shanks (or at least was), the guy who played Daniel Jackson on SG-1. It’s why they’ve had Cameos/recurring guest roles in shows the other is in. Shanks being the Avatar of that Siege Perilous-class ship in Andromeda, and Lexa being part of the SGC’s medical staff, for instance.
Personally I check the title of every page when I’m reading the little note at the bottom (of after the chibis, but it’s been a long time since the last ones).
…ya know, if you look at the way the technologies in question actually behave, generative AI basically IS the main computer of the Enterprise-D. Just sayin.
I think the main computer for the Enterprise-D is much better behaved than ChatGPT. That could be in large part because it doesn’t have a million people asking it to show pictures of various people without their clothes on, or cats that look like various people, or what have you. And especially it doesn’t have John Oliver asking it whatever John Oliver asks ChatGPT to make pictures of.
They are doing “as you know” exposition because they are in a DaveB comic, where any possible questions that pop into the author’s head need to be addressed
… It’s a vibe, and it’s part of why I’ve loved this comic over the many years
You are very right that the Holodeck was far worse than the computer, which is more Virtual Intelligence than AI. Doesn’t evolve, doesn’t learn (in the true sense), just adds information and is the same immutable base program with more information that requires direct intervention to ‘evolve’. The Holodeck is basically asking *that* to make more AIs and it hallucinates and fails to add the right failsafes, much like modern AI coding.
(Spock voice): Pot to Kettleprise, Pot to Kettleprise, your chromatic spectrum absorbs all light frequencies…
The holodecks were more a kind of art that real science. hard to properly hard code stuff like that into it.
the weird “computer” species that made adjustments to their computer and then also to their holodecks made sure of that.
No safety protocol is perfect; all can be defeated by the right amount of incompetence, willful subversion, or plain bad luck, and most are expected to contend with all three.
But at least one life-threatening issue per ship per year is not a very good safety record.
Sexy female AI voice ?
Aura from EvE Online, same base voice but with different accents if you switch to a ship from a different faction, constant companion from the tutorial to the end game …
Even the “dire warnings” like “your ship has exploded” have a soothing quality.
One day the rest of the galaxy will figure out who she is and this is the day where the reruns of her fights will be the most watched shows in the galaxy. And then someone will ask the most important question.
Is she the most powerful earth has to offer? Or do they have even stronger beings?
And the smart ones will decide to keep their hands off earth.
The others will probably get theirs burned.
A.I. , eh?
There will be a Day when after the 30th round of shading of the Voting Incentive, our dear Artist’s setup states:
“I cannot do that, Dave!”
Honestly, AI can already pretty much do what Cora did, scarily enough.
Could we have some vote incentives of maxima’s stealth suit dissolving.