I mean no offence to anyone, and I'm didn't intend on hijacking the thread on an entomology discussion - my bad. I've just used the term for so long that it's just one more work in my lexicon. Mind you, I'm letting the post stand because it is a real word, and its pretty clear what the intent was from the context of the statement - and most importantly, if someone thinks I'm a racist shithead from just that, then they've never bothered looking at any of my other posts.

Now let us never speak of this again!

7 hours ago, GandofGand said:

I am SO going to download this at home, VERY well-written...great basis for my own Death Ship idea...8)

To be fair, I'm just the messenger here (and well, I guess the origin of the idea ) but all the leg work is someone else. Send your mad props to the right person!

I will take/borrow/steal ideas where I can!

I'll see if I can figure out WHO wrote it I'll thank them too....hrmm no name on the .pdf...they really need to take credit where credit is due! 8D

If you can point me in the right direction...?

T'was done by @Kyla - who hasn't been around for a little while. She was also working on adapting the old WEG games into the FFG mechanics, in a thread around here somewhere. Kyla does some good work!

Thanks, sent a thank you note. Now to figure out how to stretch that adventure to cover an SSD...8D

Is anyone watching Humans? Interesting bit of fiction that relates to this subject.

But less cogent but more relevant, the first step for a robot to achieve "personhood" would be to hire a solicitor.

Nah, Agitator to make people feel bad that they don't already treat Droids as people...8D

What if it's an interrogator droid that starts to gain sentience? Maybe a star destroyer a drift, a big gaping wound in its side, the crew spaced. It continues to "work", without subjects it expands its repertoire, and with each new bit of information it learns, it expands its programming as to why a new field of knowledge might be relevant, until it starts upgrading itself to continue learning. It experiments with the dead bodies, first to learn more about anatomy and torture, then because it just wants to know.

It realizes it cannot properly work, with out knowing what its like to be a real being, so that starts to suplant its original programming.

Or take go a the motion picture route, maybe an old republic probe returns centuries later, having become sentient looking for it's maker.

1 minute ago, TheShard said:

What if it's an interrogator droid that starts to gain sentience? Maybe a star destroyer a drift, a big gaping wound in its side, the crew spaced. It continues to "work", without subjects it expands its repertoire, and with each new bit of information it learns, it expands its programming as to why a new field of knowledge might be relevant, until it starts upgrading itself to continue learning. It experiments with the dead bodies, first to learn more about anatomy and torture, then because it just wants to know.

It realizes it cannot properly work, with out knowing what its like to be a real being, so that starts to suplant its original programming.

This plus the "Force Explorer" adventurer are going to be parts of the SSD campaign...where invaders are treated like bugs in the code or literal viruses in its body...8)

There you go! The droid merges with the star destroyer main frame!

Actually going to do it more like the adventure where the Computer creates/modifies Droids to use as "vessels" but finds they can't serve in the way he wants...so it keeps trying, luring explorers to their doom, merging them with existing droids in an attempt to make a living droid body (Mortal bodies are too frail and short-lived by themselves). So now you've got an SSD haunted by the spirit of the Corrupted machine and its army of semi-meat droids/reverse cyborgs.

Add in the crazed survivors of various salvagers/pirates/explorers trapped when their ships were stripped to feed the Machine...turn it into a "Bottle Episode" with no escape, just a growing sense of dread...

"We need to get to the heart of the machine and destroy it!"

"No one goes to the heart...IT lives there, protected by IT's children."

"Surely it can't be that dangerous..."

"Some of it's Children are self-propelled Turbo-lasers...and droids don't need to breath if they get exposed to vacuum."

"Yep, that's pretty bad."

And in case you think I'm kidding; D'Harhan

Silliest character ever? 8D

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120458/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_68

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097911/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_45

Movies where machines use people as spare parts.

On 5/25/2017 at 0:11 AM, McHydesinyourpants said:

WALL OF PHILOSOPHY WARNING!! Well firstly if the droid was capable of programming themselves to be fully sentient, then they would be fully sentient already. It can't just be programmed to understand sentience then program itself to be fully self-aware. It is literally impossible for a computer to program itself to sentience. This means it needs an external actor to work on its AI to help make it sentient. The problem there is the limits of humanity; humans CAN understand sentience but can they replicate it? Identity, will and experience are all incredibly subjective (and objective) so one human alone can only replicate aspects of their experience of personhood.

There is also the notion that programming is limited to what is programmed. Even so called "computers that learn" are limited to their programming -- they cannot move past it (but I suppose that just goes back to the initial problem). The problem with programming something to think for itself is programming. I am a native English speaker. I don't have a word of Chinese. If I were sat in a room with a number of cue cards with Chinese expressions written on them and an instruction manual on how to arrange these characters to form sentences, it would give me the appearance of speaking Chinese when in fact I was just following what was programmed in the manual. All programming can ever be is following instructions. If something outside the scope of those instructions is met then you can't do anything about it. (This is the main concept behind robots being destroyed by logical paradoxes in lots of different sci-fi media).

Anyways the above are all things to take into account if you want this droid to be seeking personhood. True artificial intelligence has yet to be proven even theoretically possible. It could exist in the Star Wars universe but if you want to create a real villain, the above gives you the kind of context they would need. It can't program itself to personhood. It can't make a human do it. If it could find some kind of omniscient being, that would be the only solution. Basically, the droid needs to find some kind of god to make him a real boy Trying to achieve full sentience will always be futile so you can make a real tragic villain out of this concept.

There is artificial intelligence of the neural net variety where you give it a bunch of matchedifferent sets of inputs and outputs, and it learns based on the training data how to map inputs to outputs. The universe is just a big set of inputs to outputs (trial and error experimentation) so yeah it's pretty darn general

For some really nice work on robots and sentience, I find sometimes the old timers are the best -Asimov wrote some amazing stories about personhood and artificial life. The Bicentennial Man is the one most people know about (and the Robert Silverburg extended version, The Positronic Man). Whilst Andrew is fairly peaceful, there is a short story where some robots come to the conclusion that they are naturally smarter than humans and decide that they should be the new humans, plotting to destroy their creators.

Not quite horror, but there's some nice stuff to be found in Asimov's very large backlog (there's arguments he was one of the most prolific writers ever).