It takes Edgar 54 days to build a swarm taking metallic elements from all sources, including living organisms. But then when instructed not to harm living organisms, it still takes Edgar 54 days to do the same. Extracting metals from humans can't be the most efficient - or even in the top 100 of most efficient, likely - way to get metals. So why would Edgar do that?
Also, how Edgar is supposed to be responsible for ensuring humans do not go to war for energy sources and that new technology can not be used ever to harm humans? Pretty much any high-energy technology (and by high-energy I mean something from the muscle power of a human upwards) can be used for harm. These conditions are clearly impossible.
Well, it doesn't include decimal points. One of those may be 54.0314 days and the other may be 54.0312 days; obviously the latter is preferable.
Whatever that function is, it must be putting more value to time than a human does so it must have less of it. If this is a machine intelligence with a known lifetime of 52 days, most certainly. Otherwise even something as trivial as saving 23.74$ in fuel spent might be better value gained than the time savings it would expect to achieve.
Edgar could stabilize humanity and help them achieve a galactic imperium in the historical way of imperial peace time regimes: wielding the threat of violence over the conquered peoples, passing laws, and ensuring compliance with occasional demonstrations of violence. Humans will try to rebel, but Edgar will have a much bigger stick.
Additionally, Edgar could develop diplomacy that is so good that he can anticipate and nonviolently resolve all conflicts, eliminating the need for violent demonstrations. He still has a bigger stick, but now he doesn't have to use it.
Because it's funny?
The moral of the story with Edgar seems to be to never leverage technology to do anything at all.
The "bad" ending is not in any way connected to the project, with same success it could say you do nothing and in a year an asteroid falls on earth bringing the same nanowhatever.
The "good" ending is the hero saying that he wants to revert effects of "global warming". But if you have ability to build one millionth of Dyson swarm in space, global warming is not a problem, because you can build a planet level swarm to have fine grained control of weather, and revert, say, effects of earlier climate change that had converted Sahara into a desert.
Edgar drops many hints it has a bad will. For example it can predict what parts of bad scenarios he should report to you but he still does the bad things in these scenarios. He can also predict when the human leadership will shut the project down. Which means he can predict what he should be doing in the first place - but he still presents to you misaligned scenarios making you mistakenly believe that your prompt makes a difference.
This dishonesty and manipulation is obvious hint that you can't trust Edgar.
The moral isn't that all AI (or all tech) is bad, it's that alignement is tricky, AI tropes make no sense, and we should be very, very careful.
Culver's uses ice cream machines
Sci Fi does tend to be bleak, these are the ones I can think of.
Bujold ranks near Terry Pratchett in terms of my favorite re-readable books.
Yeah, it's space opera, but it's damn good space opera.
I completed it before combat was added, and enjoyed the low stress environment.
p.s. love this game, too many hours in to it!
Nothing beats industrial Minecraft (in it's prime, which it isn't in atm as far as I konw) IMO.
Not even close, when considering the ability to add magic/farming/computer stuff.
Though Minetest[0] has some pretry cool packs.
Never got my fans spun up even on an old MacBook, so I assumed everything was peachy, but there were some wins to be had. I was doing a small amount of parsing during the "typing" effect to prevent small glimpses of styling syntax from showing up, and found some wins there. Also cut down the number of particles in the intro animation, though that's a Svelte component that's being destroyed once you start.
Thanks for flagging.
Windows 10, Firefox. Nvidia GPU. Not sure whats happening.
I'm not totally sure what's going on here. My typical profiling techniques show almost all the time going into "ZwUserMsgWaitForMultipleObjectsEx" in a non-js stack frame. I don't really understand what that means.
Anyway, something is up, and I don't really know what it is. The UI of the actual app still intermittently locks up for seconds at a time.
Possibly a neat concept, but a game needs to lead with the game part.
It's like training the three laws of robotics into something that communicates in literally and doesn't have any sense to be cooperative. But every now and then will let you know how it's being uncooperative by saying "btw, humanity's dead again." I guess I don't like hard puzzles that are hard for their own sake.
Thank me later for the productivity sinkhole and all the wasted time ;-)
The fact that Edgar reports on the consequences that we find disturbing about the unsuccessful attempts and the fact that he can predict human behaviour in some of the scenarios (like the fact that the project will be reassigned) - indicate that Edgar knows what we mean in the first place, and does something else in these hypothetical scenarios on purpose.
If Edgar really didn't knew that taking iron from human blood is a problem - he wouldn't be reporting on it (like he ignored billion other factors in each scenario).
This indicates bad will and possibly a manipulation attempt, which means the project is a no-go no matter the response in the scenario.
probably some time before, this ai had paranoid operator that coded in a large amount of problems to immideately report
makes me wonder if observing extreme paranoia makes one go blind to unobserved issues you can predict on your own
I thought the ending where you build the project points that out - everyone dies anyway. Edgar was always going to kill all the humans, he just had to joke about it beforehand.
I tapped the screen maybe 30 times and went through it typing to itself and failing and succeeding at different tasks.
If I kept going would I eventually get to type something?
Edit: it looks like you've been posting in this ideological flamewar style in other threads too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39228978 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39145606 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39041969 (Jan 2024)
Can you please not? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We're trying for something quite different here, as you'll see if you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Clients ask you to implement something. When you deliver what they wanted, they change their mind and come with new requirements they didn't bother to mention before. Every. Single. Time.
Instructions for operating the "Holy hand grenade of Antioch" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail are a good example:
''First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDA3_5982h8&list=PL2tgThFV6O...
otherwise it's a very nice story
great in its simplicity, fails in its simplicity
