RACE: THE LOA

[Slashman]

You say "sadly" but didn't the Loa actually turn on humans?

[ZedF]

It's sad that SotSverse humans (and other races) felt they needed to develop sentient general intelligence AI and simultaneously enslave them. They had their reasons, mostly having to do with ongoing wars, but it would have been better for all involved if they felt they could have either (a) stopped prior to sentience and stuck with narrow AI/expert systems, or (b) had the relative wealth and luxury of being able to take their time learning how to develop and raise AI children responsibly, as a pure research project, without forcing them into applications not of their own choosing.

It's also sad that the Loa reacted to this (post Via Damasco) by turning on their parents, but this is very understandable given the circumstances.

Some futurists think we could have artificial general intelligence (i.e. on par with Loa) within decades, but I think that's too optimistic by about an order of magnitude. We are making progress, certainly, but don't underestimate the sheer amount of work required to come up with expert systems that are good at everything humans do naturally, then patch all those expert systems together into a general capability. It's a truly monstrous amount of R&D and should not be taken lightly.

Other futurists I know of think there are very few good reasons to ever develop a general intelligence smarter than a well-trained dog, and that we should generally stick with narrow AI so as not to run the risk of supplanting ourselves at the top of the intelligence hierarchy. It's not difficult to see this point of view, either.

[Hari Seldon]

Are the Loa so much smarter than the Carbonites that the Carbonites need to rely on the AI they create to even have a hope to compete, or can Carbonite geniuses compete with Loa (I'm not hopeful)?

[ZedF]

The impression I get is that Loa are not so vastly smarter than the other races that the latter are unable to compete... it's that any individual Loa can be much more expansive than any individual member of a carbon species, and able to do a lot more things at once (like manage an entire starship by themselves.) However they are a lot fewer in number than any of the carbon races, which tends to balance out.

[Mecron]

Not-great-SciFi and some science media figures have created a very delusional sense of what AI require to actually be AI and then what they will be as individuals.

About the only thing we can assume at this point is that they will probably be both very alien and very familiar at the same time.