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It's fairly evident that it's not a matter of 'yes AI' or 'no AI'. Even things like psyber-familiars need to fall somewhere on the spectrum of 'artificially intelligent' to 'true AI'. I mean, obviously none of us can sit down and talk to a Land Raider and ask it questions, but it's apparent somewhere along the line there was a distinction made between 'machine spirit' and 'AI' but I think they're a lot closer than people would be led to believe.
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Feb 17, 2014 18:26
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I could see a system whereby you setup a target range with Space Marines of the various Legions and ask the Land Raider to point out the heretics with las-fire would work. It might just return "target error" on an internal viewscreen when you ask it what colour is it's favourite though.
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Feb 17, 2014 18:29
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I enjoy the thought of the machine spirit concept being actual AI but people are too stupid to realize it. And the worshipping of technology deriving from this stupidity; that treating the AI like sacred divinity inadvertently placated it into cooperating.
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Feb 17, 2014 18:31
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I mean, that's assuming the Land Raider knows about the Horus Heresy, where the Land Raider has decided it falls, and it's understanding of the WH40k use of the word heretic. Maybe an Iron Hands Land Raider would think a Salamander was a heretic for abandoning Ferrus Manus, entirely ignoring the schism of the Horus Heresy? There is a point in WH40k where someone has a conversation with what WH40k considers an actual AI so it's not that hard to establish a distinction. A 50S RAYGUN fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 18:38
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Every machine has a machine spirit, even a bicycle with no digital electronics.SUPER NEAT TOY posted:There is a point in WH40k where someone has a conversation with what WH40k considers an actual AI so it's not that hard to establish a distinction. Baron Bifford fucked around with this message at 18:54 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 18:51
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I just figured it was sticky warp stuff and psychic influences that form the machine spirit.
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Feb 17, 2014 18:54
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It's a sort of animism.
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Feb 17, 2014 18:55
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Baron Bifford posted:Every machine has a machine spirit, even a bicycle with no digital electronics. What makes you think this? Do you think a lever has a machine spirit? Baron Bifford posted:It's a sort of animism. Machine spirits are a quantifiable thing, though. We're certain, on some level, machine spirits exist. A 50S RAYGUN fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 18:56
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It's what I understood from reading the books. The machine spirit explains why machines sometimes malfunction: it's in a bad mood because the user didn't appease it with the correct maintenance rites. Or maybe it has an rear end in a top hat personality (compare lasguns and plasma rifles). A lever is an extreme example but yeah, I expect that they see a spirit in levers too. A spirit with a very even-tempered personality, which is why levers behave predictably. It's kind of like animistic religions which thought that even rocks can have a spirit.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:00
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SUPER NEAT TOY posted:I mean, that's assuming the Land Raider knows about the Horus Heresy, where the Land Raider has decided it falls, and it's understanding of the WH40k use of the word heretic. Maybe an Iron Hands Land Raider would think a Salamander was a heretic for abandoning Ferrus Manus, entirely ignoring the schism of the Horus Heresy?
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Feb 17, 2014 19:03
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Saith posted:I just figured it was sticky warp stuff and psychic influences that form the machine spirit. Baron Bifford's grasp on the fluff continues to be sketchy at best. Sorry BB, but if you stopped making assumptions based on the real world you'd stop making a lot of mistakes. Anyway, while any given machine may or may not have a machine spirit, the ones you absolutely have to placate are the more complex machines - for the most part, a Lasgun is happy being a Lasgun, according to more than a few books, so the best way to please it is to use it correctly - but God-Emperor help you if you just try to use a Warhound Titan without respecting the fact that it's spirit is 1. stronger than you and 2. prideful. One of the explanations I've always liked is that STC technology threw in an AI just because they could, even in places where to do so wasn't really necessary. AI in the Dark Age of Technology must've been cheap as air, so adding one to the Lasgun you just built was simple and easy. And those relatively primitive AI's are now known as machine spirits. Of course that is hardly anything like an official explanation.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:04
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Baron Bifford posted:It's kind of like animistic religions which thought that even rocks can have a spirit. But there may be a difference between what people of the 41st millennium believe and what's true. Almost certainly is. What's the most primitive thing that's referred to as having a machine spirit in the books? Anything less complex than a bolter? I have no problem believing that the people of the Imperium would believe a bicycle has a machine spirit, but I've never seen a book where a machine spirit is actually implied to exist in anything less complex than a tank or a ship. So there may be a big gulf between what exists and what people believe. Just like in real life.  If that's the case, then I think that bolsters the argument that machine spirits are ancient, poorly-understood AIs.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:05
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The problem is that there exist two machine spirits: one that's certainly real, and one that probably isn't. The former is things like Land Raiders and Titans, which possess a machine spirit that is quantifiable and real. The latter is things like lasguns. In Helsreach, the Andrej compares the 'machine spirits' of las-guns of different worlds, comparing how easily they accept a new power source. I suppose it is entirely possible that this is actually a matter of some lasgun machine spirits being bloodthirsty, but it seems entirely more likely that it's a lower quality of machining bringing up a flaw that they just don't understand. Arquinsiel posted:The problem is, in the real world we haven't entirely decided because we've still not pinned down what intelligence actually is in nature, let alone if we have the ability to replicate it. For the sake of the discussion, it's probably safer to not get into the nature of actual intelligence. For the purposes of machine spirits, they seem to possess some degree of autonomy, self-awareness, and personality, which is enough to prove their existence is more than just some sort of fetishism. A 50S RAYGUN fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 19:07
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There was a series of comics they did years ago about titans where a warlord titan literally tells a bunch of mechanicum guys putting a princeps on trial for disobeying orders to shut the gently caress up because he was completely right. They drop a huge reference to the series main character in Titanicus so you can assume its still canon.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:11
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UncleSmoothie posted:But there may be a difference between what people of the 41st millennium believe and what's true. Almost certainly is.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:23
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Arquinsiel posted:Have you not read the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer? Negative, but having looked it up just now -- that's an in-universe source, so I'm guessing it states that lasguns have Machine Spirits? There's still an important difference between the author of the Primer believing a gun has a Machine Spirit (as Super Neat Toy points out in the Andrej example a couple of posts up) and a novel/sourcebook portraying a Machine Spirit actually having a will of its own. The "Machine Spirit" of a lasgun can be explained away as a temperamental piece of equipment. The "Machine Spirit" of a ship (which actually talks to people and attempts to enforce its own will) is much harder to explain without calling it an AI or an actual supernatural entity.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:28
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UncleSmoothie posted:Negative, but having looked it up just now -- that's an in-universe source, so I'm guessing it states that lasguns have Machine Spirits? There's still an important difference between the author of the Primer believing a gun has a Machine Spirit (as Super Neat Toy points out in the Andrej example a couple of posts up) and a novel/sourcebook portraying a Machine Spirit actually having a will of its own.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:31
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I'd like to read a novel which has a ship or a titan talking back to humans.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:33
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Titans have temperaments and egos, can actively influence the decisionmaking of their princeps, and can even subsume their personalities entirely. I don't think I've ever read anything about Titans actually talking but they certainly have emotions and in Helsreach the Imperator seems to be actively resentful that it is being controlled.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:37
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Baron Bifford posted:I'd like to read a novel which has a ship or a titan talking back to humans. Read the Night Lords trilogy. Octavia talks to the ships a lot. Titanicus has the machine spirits of the Titans being temperamental hunter-spirits, always looking for the next big fight.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:38
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Saith posted:I just figured it was sticky warp stuff and psychic influences that form the machine spirit. That's what happens if chaos starts mucking thinks up. Then you get space ships with demons instead of AI, for example. For the rest, we know mankind during the dark age of technology had to quell at least one machine rebellion and we don't know how they did it. One possibility is some AIs siding with humanity, another possibility is maybe the uprising was rather localised and easily supressed. Afterwards it was just blown up out of proportion after it left the realm of history and entered the realm of legends. We also don't know if STCs were build before or after the uprising was crushed and we also don't know what the victors of that uprising thought about AIs afterwards. For all we know it could have been a war between different AI-factions and it just happens the duty-bound solipsists won. Thought of the day: What would the Imperium call a solipsist AI hell-bend on ignoring everything outside it's self-claimed duties? A machine spirit. 
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Feb 17, 2014 19:44
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VanSandman posted:Read the Night Lords trilogy. Octavia talks to the ships a lot. I'll do that. On a tangent, can you recommend me a novel that explores in depth the nuances of the Imperial Creed, and why humans feel they must worship the Emperor? Perhaps a novel about the Word Bearers? VanSandman posted:Baron Bifford's grasp on the fluff continues to be sketchy at best. Sorry BB, but if you stopped making assumptions based on the real world you'd stop making a lot of mistakes. Baron Bifford fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 19:53
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VanSandman posted:Read the Night Lords trilogy. Octavia talks to the ships a lot. In Eisenhorn when he fights the chaos titan, it's suggested that there is an organic brain from a bear or wolf in the center of it's conciousness and it's been suggested plenty of times elsewhere that titans have personalities that closely resemble old earth predators.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:56
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Most non-ecclesiarchy sources treat the GE as a really cool guy who was really good at brain powers and fighting dudes, not as an actual figure of divinity. I mean, I guess on some level if you want to examine why they worship him, you can just imagine if you never learned about our omniscient god, but rather a much more subdued and localized one, but he was quantifiably real.
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Feb 17, 2014 19:57
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Demiurge4 posted:In Eisenhorn when he fights the chaos titan, it's suggested that there is an organic brain from a bear or wolf in the center of it's conciousness and it's been suggested plenty of times elsewhere that titans have personalities that closely resemble old earth predators. I didn't remember if it was from that far back, but yes - the Warhound titans are definitely wolfish. If it's an actual brain at the center, I don't know, but if it isn't it's a Mechanicum-made copy of one.
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Feb 17, 2014 20:17
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VanSandman posted:I didn't remember if it was from that far back, but yes - the Warhound titans are definitely wolfish. If it's an actual brain at the center, I don't know, but if it isn't it's a Mechanicum-made copy of one. One way I read the whole Titans having personality things was that the machine spirit's learning ability stored copies of the personalities of previous princeps and that the personalities of each war machine was just a gestalt of common traits of former pilots/crew. I think it was in Mechanicum that a character observed that new vehicles were more easily controlled than those which had seen longer service and more masters. This would explain the pride of the Imperator/Warlords and the cunning and hunting instincts of the Warhounds and smaller items. I'm not saying that there's a literal brain in a jar somewhere, but that there is a piece of hardware that is uses brain tissue in its operation and observes and integrates the behavior and tactics of each operator over time. Wasn't this part of that Titan comic from back in the 90s?
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Feb 17, 2014 20:42
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Why are people engaging bifford? He's been around for years and is always wrong or ignorant about everything.
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Feb 17, 2014 21:16
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Baron Bifford posted:For instance, if you read the Dark Heresy rulebook and the Tau Empire codex, you have two completely different perspectives of the universe. This sort of stuff throws me off. This is one of the fun parts of the 40k rulebooks: each one is written from the perspective of that force! In the Chaos codex, the Ruinous Powers have been around since before creation and are the central forces of everything in the universe, and the Emperor was an upstart human with great power, nothing more, who is a long-dead corpse whose soul has long since been picked clean. In the Imperial Guard codex, the Emperor is the one true God of Mankind, and is alive and well in spirit and watching over all mankind, as well as lending his power to the faithful to ward off the Ruinous Powers who most certainly have not always existed (Slaanesh was only born around the 30th millenium)! In Space Marines codices, The Emperor is their genesire and the apex of humanity, yet not a being to worship as a god. In the Tau Codex, what the humans call "The Warp" is something that affects only them, a sort of degraded condition related to their method of space travel. They rave about spirits and demons, but that's stupid because Science! ...And so on. And, as usual, the truth is usually some hazy amalgamation of everyone's point of view (Like that the Warp has been around since forever, but it wasn't truly Chaosy until the early races started flinging suffering and bloodlust into the psychic sea. Or likewise, specific chaos gods show up at specific points in time, but it's not too crazy to believe that in the warp, if they exist at some point, they've existed forever, or some insane chaos version of whatever 'forever' is.)
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Feb 17, 2014 21:32
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This works nicely in the Farsight Enclaves supplement, where Commander Farsight suddenly wakes up and says "hey, the Ethereals' orders actually suck!" Does GW work from a secret truth-line when writing these books?
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Feb 17, 2014 21:43
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Baron Bifford posted:This works nicely in the Farsight Enclaves supplement, where Commander Farsight suddenly wakes up and says "hey, the Ethereals' orders actually suck!"
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Feb 17, 2014 21:54
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Not all inconsistencies can be handwaved by saying "oh, the narrator/character is unreliable".
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Feb 17, 2014 21:57
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Baron Bifford posted:Not all inconsistencies can be handwaved by saying "oh, the narrator/character is unreliable". THE UNIVERSE ITSELF IS UNRELIABLE.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:13
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I feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what "fiction" means in this thread.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:16
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Arquinsiel posted:THE UNIVERSE ITSELF IS UNRELIABLE. And? Even continuity or causality problems originating from Chaos or time paradoxes, etc, can all be adequately explained by an omniscient narrator. There can be something approximating objective reality when dealing with writing a fictional universe. 40k being 40k is not an excuse.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:18
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VanSandman posted:I didn't remember if it was from that far back, but yes - the Warhound titans are definitely wolfish. If it's an actual brain at the center, I don't know, but if it isn't it's a Mechanicum-made copy of one. Somewhere in the galaxy, there is a tech-priest that got in a lot of trouble after accidentally switching the grox brain meant for a harvester and the wolf brain meant for a Warhound.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:19
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FrozenDorf posted:And? Even continuity or causality problems originating from Chaos or time paradoxes, etc, can all be adequately explained by an omniscient narrator. Canon is overrated, IMO.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:20
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FrozenDorf posted:And? Even continuity or causality problems originating from Chaos or time paradoxes, etc, can all be adequately explained by an omniscient narrator.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:21
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It certainly relieves the writers at Black Library of some of the burden of coordinating their projects.Improbable Lobster posted:Canon is overrated, IMO.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:25
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Arquinsiel posted:When the point of the setting is to deliberately setup paradoxical situations in which mutually exclusive situations are both true as a function of the flavour and tone then objective reality is entirely counterproductive. 40k being 40k is not an excuse, it is the reason for inconsistency. Everything this poster says is true. Ignore other opinions unless they are mine.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:36
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Arquinsiel posted:..... To be expected since this really all started as background flavor for a freaking war-minis game... Honestly, I think we should all be a little happy about how something so unique and interesting was spawned in such an odd way. There is no doubt I have been steadily growing into a Warhammer 40K fanboy since I was a teen without actually playing the game that started the whole thing. Consider for a second that more popular settings like Star Wars and Star Trek required movies and T.V. shows to gain the ground they currently hold, and be happy that despite all sorts of weird continuity issues the setting has gained the fleshing out and popularity it holds despite having none of the advantages of the above.
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