Zygoptera on 11/11/2008 at 04:35
Dude, I was like totally agreeing with you. There's no doubt that Citadel was not just a mining station and that being able to make cyborgs was logical and consistent, I was just giving some context and an easily accessible example.
General Four on 11/11/2008 at 05:34
:o
Sorry. I was a bit ticked off when I posted. Kinda hard to think when your pissed. Please forgive and forget. I just deleted it.
Anyway can anyone give their thoughts on Shodan post-Citadel? I'll try to be on my best behavior and think though stuff from now on.:angel:
Zygoptera on 11/11/2008 at 21:41
If you want a really serious answer, then I'd say that Shodan is essentially an immensely powerful, cunning, spoiled five year old- narcissistic and psychopathic (unsurprising as she has no ethics nor presumably empathy). And that's really all you can say. I don't think she changes much over the whole course of both games, to be honest, though without much of a look inside her head it's hard to be sure.
I think there are some other, related, questions to be asked though.
1) How much of Shodan's original programming remains? Is she in fact just following her programming to logical extremes or is she a partly/ wholly new entity with new goals?
2) Could she 'relearn' ethics? A typical five year old may, technically, be a psychopath, but after a few years most people grow out of it, could Shodan?
3) If she started with more 'personality' than mere 'functionality' would that have made a difference? Relatedly, did a realisation of her being, in essence, a slave to the station and triop contribute to her anger?
4) Does she have an unhealthy fixation on her 'daddy', the hacker? The "creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors" is a bit... freudian? Was she trying to kill her parents? Does she want to 'sleep' with her father? Is a sound test sometimes merely a soundtest?
kodan50 on 11/11/2008 at 23:53
Personally, I would want to know why it started to act the way it did in the first place. Bad behaviour wouldn't have been programmed, it would have had to somehow learn to behave that way, and I don't think you can use "conscience nature" as a way to excuse every living creature with a conscience ability to know what is right or wrong, which, I might also add, can be defined differently depending on the person, or "conscience observer" you interact with. Or something like that.
Lansing on 14/11/2008 at 00:24
Quote Posted by kodan50
Personally, I would want to know why it started to act the way it did in the first place.
It would have been a pretty boring game if Shodan was well behaved and the most exciting thing about beta grove was the artistic arrangment of tulips.
BloodCat on 14/11/2008 at 07:57
Quote Posted by kodan50
Personally, I would want to know why it started to act the way it did in the first place.
Quote Posted by kodan50
I don't think you can use "conscience nature" as a way to excuse every living creature with a conscience ability to know what is right or wrong.
You have answered the question yourself. She had her ethics removed, she doesn't know what is right or wrong. And for some time there is no one to teach her, no authority she could accept. Zygoptera maybe right, and she really is looking for a father figure. I do not subscribe to that freudian sex thing though.
General Four on 15/11/2008 at 16:25
As to the whole father thing, the hacker is more or less an absentee to most her change from nice AI running Citadel to homicidal self-styled queen. I think Diego had more of an influence than we are allowing. With him in the picture we see not only a person whom she could learn bad behavior but also it kinda explains why she treated everything the way she did. Look how corporations treat people today. Or back in the 70's when the auto companies where so eager to mechanize the production lines. It's sad when you think how one cyberpunk's common themes is a big impersonal corporation abusing people.
:tsktsk:
Still, it's not like Shodan existed in a vacuum! Even something D'Arcy might have said could have contributed to the later madness:cheeky:
D'Arcy on 18/11/2008 at 18:21
I didn't say anything. We were never formally introduced. I do remember seeing her a little tipsy on the last TriOp Christmas office party, but I didn't want to take advantage of that. Unlike other people.
Lansing on 18/11/2008 at 21:17
Now there's a mod idea just waiting to be made...
cosmicnut on 19/11/2008 at 09:35
I would suggest that people read a little asimov, especially the robot shorts ("I, robot" and "the rest of the robots").
There are many reasons for SHODANs actions.
The station was obviously a research station. The mining operation was probably there to fund the research. Cyborgs would probably have been completely artificial constructs and used as support personnell. SHODAN used the station staff as raw materials.
When her ethical constraints were removed, it allowed her to think about possibilities that would have been against her ethical constraints. A good asimov example is, an AI is asked to work on a the problem of faster than light travel. The AI goes a little nuts because part of the way through the journey the humans no longer exist, aka they die, asimovs rules don't allow AI's to kill humans or allow them to be killed (IGNORE THE FILM), what sends the AI nuts in that story is that they come back to life again at the end of the trip, so it didn't kill them, but it did, but it didn't......
SHODAN was given a research project and told to complete it. With no constraints and the power/money hungry Diego egging her on she started performing human experiments. Pretty soon, the humans, again, became little more than raw material.
Of course that then leads to a train of thought. What is a god. A good is a being that sits on high, controlling the lives of everyone under its influence. It has the power to create and to destroy. With the worker droids, the cyborgs, the mutants, SHODAN controls them all. It creates, it destroys. AKA SHODAN is a god.... at least according to logic.
You then have to think about what the hacker does to SHODAN. AI programs are complicated, even with todays limited versions. Lots of effort would have gone into balancing SHODANS personality. Ripping out a HUGE piece of code would have destablised that. We also don't know how good a programmer the hacker was. Would you want some back street doctor to perfrom major brain surgery on you?....
