Robots, AI and Genetics in Firelfy (the lack thereof)

POSTED BY: eilo
UPDATED: Saturday, August 28, 2004 18:00
VIEWED: 6839
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PURPLEBELLY

Friday, August 27, 2004 5:35 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by eilo:
I totally forgot the trash drones, you're right - it shows how well such elements are integrated in the show without being the reason for the show.

Programable drones were a plot requirement in Trash. Kaylee would have had to use a different skillset to influence a human pilot.

INEVITABLEBETRAYAL

Friday, August 27, 2004 2:06 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by chronicthehedgehog:
Wait for the movie if you wanna see this stuff. It's coming.

That's what I'm afraid of. As was mentioned earlier, we did see laser guns. And is there anyone out there that seriously considers "Heart of Gold" one of the better episodes? Or thinks of Rance Burgess as one of the better villains? Please...

_______________________________________________
I wish I had a magical wish-granting plank.

EILO

Friday, August 27, 2004 2:46 PM

Hi!

Quote:
Originally posted by PurpleBelly:
Programable drones were a plot requirement in Trash. Kaylee would have had to use a different skillset to influence a human pilot.

Yeah, the drone was required, but the episode wasn't about the magic trash drone they encoutered on some planet - like 50% of the Star Trek Episodes are centred about something unusal first encountered.

And I don't think that Kaylee would make a good undercover seductress - as soon as the pilot would talk about "Showing her his engine" she would be pretty useless for the rest of the mission :)

Quote:
Originally posted by InevitableBetrayal:
That's what I'm afraid of. As was mentioned earlier, we did see laser guns. And is there anyone out there that seriously considers "Heart of Gold" one of the better episodes? Or thinks of Rance Burgess as one of the better villains? Please...

No, but the how they handled the laser was very funny. Mal's disregard for this kind of weapon and the "Replace Battery"-like phrase in the end was very funny.

And this is exactly what I want for the other stuff like robots and AI. If someone comes up and ask me "Hmm, I like the show but why didn't they use lasers - bullets are pretty boring", I can say why they don't use lasers and it makes sense.

"Why there are no robots?" - "Because." does not help persuade people :)

Regards,
Eilo

--
Quotomat says: "Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale."
(Michael Wincott as Philo Gant in 'Strange Days', 1995)

GOJIRO

Friday, August 27, 2004 3:12 PM

Here's my two cents on the Robots and Laser Guns issue.

ROBOTS: It makes a lot of sense to have robot drones as seen in Trash, and I believe the core worlds have a lot of such fancy tech. What doesn't make sense is humanoid robots, and here's why. Name one other animal that always walks upright. Monkeys do on occasion, but not always. Same is true of other animals.

Humans are the only animals on Earth that walk upright as the default mode. And that's because it takes a mighty amount of computing power to do figure the balance thing, the walking thing, the not falling down stairs thing, etc.

Building a humanoid robot, then, would mean devoting MASSIVE amounts of computing power to just staying upright. When you look at the cost/benefit analysis, it makes much creater sense to create robots with wheels or jet engines.

As for lasers, it's sort of the same issue, only with energy instead of computing power. Lasers take a ton of energy to produce a beam strong enough to do any damage. Hence Burgess's gun running out of power, and the antique from Trash having no power. Again, from a cost/benefit analysis, if you simply want to kill someone, it makes more sense to use good ol' gunpowder and lead, or some hopped up version of same.

Sons dos centavos.

gojiro

THELION

Friday, August 27, 2004 4:38 PM

Quote:
Name one other animal that always walks upright. Monkeys do on occasion, but not always. Same is true of other animals.

Bipedal locomotion isn't a human-only skill. Most apes and birds are bipedal, and I can think of a few other mammals that walk upright, too (or hop around). It's not a question of computing power to walk upright, it's a question of what is more efficient. Humans don't need to run that much. They are plains/forest dwellers and hunter/gatherers, so they don't need quick running so much as they need efficient walking. Quadrupedal running is far more efficient than bipedal running for various reasons, and it's also much faster. More suited for those types of animals that have to chase down other creatures (carnivores). (Point of interest: Monkeys by definition are quadrupedal, but all four limbs double as hands and feet).

Quote:
Building a humanoid robot, then, would mean devoting MASSIVE amounts of computing power to just staying upright.

It doesn't require that much computing power to walk upright; humans are a prime example of that. And processors today already have quite a bit of computing power; after all, who do you think would find the factorial of 522 faster: you or your computer? What it requires is processing information from thousands of sensors at once; you need parallel processing (and let's face it, no matter how fast the clock speed is, a 32 bit processor can still only perform 32 calculations at a time). The hardest part isn't processing the information, it's knowing what type of sensors to put in (how much of the right information you need).

[Edit]The reason why there aren't many bipedal robots around is simply a matter of economics. It's a lot cheaper to put a bunch of wheels on a robot than to worry about all the sensors and moving parts (moving parts are a maintainence nightmare). Plus all the R&D that goes into developing such a robot.

THELION

Friday, August 27, 2004 5:00 PM

Now I'll cover the lasers. In reality, a laser doesn't exactly give you the best bang for your buck. In order to output the kind of power needed to make a laser into a decent weapon, you would need a very large power source, not to mention a very large laser--there are physical requirements on the minimum size of lasers and I doubt in 500 years humanity has found a way to circumvent that. A power source that could put out that much energy would HAVE to be a fusion cell of some type, and there's no way right now to start fusion on that small of a scale (hell, we can't even break even with huge fusion reactors). So I would think that, in 500 years, if such a power source is even available, it would still be prohibitively expensive, and only the very rich and government agencies would be able to afford keeping laser guns "loaded", so to speak.

ROCKETSURGEON

Friday, August 27, 2004 6:01 PM

Quote:
Building a humanoid robot, then, would mean devoting MASSIVE amounts of computing power to just staying upright.

First, as someone trained in engineering, I can tell you that you don't need computing power to "balance" a walking bot. A control system with a movement sensor setup in the right direction and some sort of proportional amplifiers (just like the volume control in a radio), connected to mechanical outputs (like a leg motor or a thruster jet) can easily balance a system. None of this needs digital computers. At worst, a complex robot may need a computer to "tweak" the control system’s response when the robot is in an extreme crouching position or at a running pace, but again, not computationally intensive, it just takes a bit of trial and error and some good design work to figure out what the right control system “feedback response” looks like. This shouldn’t take 500 years.

Like TheLion said, it’s about what the robot needs to do, it’s function. It would be pretty ridiculous to have a C3PO-stype robot swim up to a garbage crate on Bellerophon and clip it to a belt and watch this relatively tiny tin-can swim wildly to move the larger tin-can through the ocean.

The issue here (at least with the robots) is what I would call the difference between “advanced” or “effective” technology and “high-technology”. A firefly spaceship is not high-tech by 26th century standards, but it works, so it gets used. It is effective. Consider how the mere presence of the trash drone was dismissed. It is unobtrusive and effective. It’s as good as it needs to be, just like a pencil is. I imagine that they will still have pencils in the 26th century. In sum, they probably have lots of super high-tech, complicated, AI, humanoid robotic toys in the future ‘verse, but no one’s found a good use for them. Or at a minimum, indentured slaves are just much easier to use, control and replace for most frontier applications (yeh, that’s cold, but it’s not supposed to be a utopia, is it?). Remember that even if technology progresses continuously for the next 500 years, slavery will still have existed for thousands of years more than robotics.

---
"Here's something you can't do ... [insert cool manoever here]"

THEREALME

Saturday, August 28, 2004 2:54 AM

I think that one of the ideas of past SF (early days of Asimov and Clarke, maybe) was that if you wanted a robot to drive your car for you, it would be a human shaped robot that would walk up, open the door, sit in the driver's seat, and drive.

The reality that I expect to see is that we have some chip in the car that connects to some sensors, and THAT will drive you around. The actual humanoid robot is not needed, and in fact is in the way.

It would look cool, though...

The Real Me

STANDING8

Saturday, August 28, 2004 6:00 PM

"Here's my take on robots, AI, genetic gymnastics, aliens, laser guns, and the usual trappings of sci-fi. It don't belong in the 'verse, no way, no how."

i concur.

-Soul Rebel-

a love supreme dreaming...

http://www.livejournal.com/users/standing8

updated: 7/30/04!

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