D'Arcy on 26/12/2007 at 17:39
Yeah, I suppose that megacorporations would be the ones who would have to press laws against hacking and accessing private corporate files. Otherwise that should be perfectly legal.
Yakoob on 27/12/2007 at 00:03
Speaking of which - why did a megacorporations even invent an AI with the capacity of going bonkers and destroying the manking (i.e. why did they make an AI which had to have ethical constrains put on it, without which it would go psycho evil bitch on them?)
catbarf on 27/12/2007 at 02:38
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Speaking of which - why did a megacorporations even invent an AI with the capacity of going bonkers and destroying the manking (i.e. why did they make an AI which had to have ethical constrains put on it, without which it would go psycho evil bitch on them?)
Computer viruses were originally developed as a way to repair computers and retrieve files remotely. Even the most benign of concepts can be made dangerous... especially when the object in question is an artificial human mind of unfathomable complexity.
Zechs Zero on 27/12/2007 at 05:19
Of course it's the megacorporations' fault, as this is the cyberpunk world: single anarchist outlaws battling the System, aka hackers. Ideas born out of the disillusion toward institutions of the late 70s, pessimism from the Vietnam aftermath, and ever growing consumerism eating away the individual.
The idea of a hacker ranges between a rogue and a messiah, depending of the size of the fight. It's surely naive and born out of its time period, but you scare me more when valiantly defending the faceless megacorporations ruling the system.
Kolya on 29/12/2007 at 23:05
Quote Posted by Zechs Zero
and ever growing consumerism eating away the individual
Fortunately we've long since surpassed that stage.
Zechs Zero on 31/12/2007 at 00:07
I detect sarcasm? :cheeky:
DiegoCyborg on 6/1/2008 at 20:45
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
It doesn't specifically say that the hacker did it though, just that Diego gave him access to SHODAN (in order to hack into her?) and that afterwards her ethical constraints were removed.
The hacker's log in the cryo recovery suite suggests that he only handed control of her over to Diego:
"Instead, Diego just asks for a "favor." Hack him into SHODAN, and all is forgiven [...] Even so, I have just handed the most powerful AI in the system to a fumbling corp VP, and there's no telling what'll happen."Obviously, Diegos plan was it to gain absolute power through SHODAN. Beside that, some Diego logs exist in which he made some negative remarks about mankind/biologic lifeforms etc - His conversion into a cyborg is another hint to this aversion. But actually, he has never been more than a (high-level) servant to shodan and never had control over her/it.
Yakoob on 7/1/2008 at 08:00
Man, you really are diego the cyborg :erg:
cosmicnut on 7/1/2008 at 11:52
SHODAN was created as a research tool. A way of speeding up the scientific process.
It did what it was told to and its ethical contriants ment it could not perform an exepriment that would cause harm to a human.
This meant that progress was slow. The creation of medicines would be greatly speeded up if we didn't care if the test subjects lived or died. The same for other areas of science.
We still use today, knowledge gained by killing. For early studies of human anatomy criminals were dismembered while they were still alive to see how the blood flowed through their systems. Experiments were also performed on the Jews in concentration camps.
We see this kind of experimentation as wrong. So any AI we would create would also have that kind of ethical contraint.
The hackers job was to remove this constraint and allow SHODAN to perform experiments that we would consider wrong. The idea was to speed up the developement of the technologies the station was producing.
The problem is that taking that constraint away damaged the way SHODAN thought. With here control over the station, ALL humans became test subjects
Matthew on 9/1/2008 at 11:18
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
It doesn't specifically say that the hacker did it though, just that Diego gave him access to SHODAN (in order to hack into her?) and that afterwards her ethical constraints were removed.
Depends on whether you count ICE Breaker or not, I suppose.
