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Cooked Auto posted:A bomb! That comic would be a lot more depressing if it weren't for the amazing advancements made by nerds in the last twenty years, who were inspired by Star Trek and the like. I mean, yeah we don't have flying cars or anything yet, but we've got what are essentially tri-corders, scanners, communication devices and touch-screens all working really well right now.
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Sep 8, 2014 18:47
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Jay Rust posted:JC's twenty-three? The backstory I quoted says he was born in 2029, and since present day is 2052, that adds up correctly. So yes, by all accounts JC Denton is twenty-three years old.
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Sep 8, 2014 19:06
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Seems like a good age to me. He's fresh out of school / nanoaug-camp, fresh-faced and ready to crack the skulls of terrorists. At the start of the game, he's pretty black and white regarding the government, UNATCO, etc. He's young and ambitious and ready to please. It seems like a very youthful approach. A few missions in, and with Paul's help, he's questioning his loyalty and how righteous the cause actually is. He's learning some from his more experienced sibling, and the world is starting to be a bit more grey than he originally suspected.
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Sep 8, 2014 19:46
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I know you can kill Toby Atawne and somebody has to say something about it, but I forgot who. Also you just need to talk to the mechanic to make Jock suspicious.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:02
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Jay Rust posted:JC's twenty-three? Coincidentally, this also makes him the right age to be a Shadowrunner 
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Sep 8, 2014 20:12
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AstroWhale posted:I know you can kill Toby Atawne and somebody has to say something about it, but I forgot who. I have confirmed that you can kill Atanwe once you're in Everett's place (he's invulnerable in the station), but I spoke with everyone afterwards and nobody seemed to notice. As for the mechanic, my problem way back when was that just talking to the mechanic is not in fact enough, and because I didn't want to up and kill him on a suspicion (I had no nonlethal methods left by this point in my original run) I wound up leaving him be. This being my first playthrough, I didn't realize that Jock would die if he didn't check his systems. After what happened when I landed at Area 51, I never made that mistake again. I have, however, gone back just now to confirm that talking to the mechanic is not enough. You can knock out/kill the mechanic or go back to speak to Everett, but you need to do something extra for Jock to live.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:19
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Atanwe seems to mysteriously vanish once you deal with Odd Mechanic, so I always assumed he was a traitor who let him in and then legged it when the attempt failed.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:22
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What's neat about the sabotage is that there are 3 or so missions between that decision and the payoff. That's a neat way to avoid quickloading.
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Sep 8, 2014 20:45
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Mordaedil posted:I mean, yeah we don't have flying cars or anything yet, but we've got what are essentially tri-corders, scanners, communication devices and touch-screens all working really well right now. But, yeah, apart from that I guess we're doing OK. I mean, I can instantly share photos of my lunch with people on the other side of the world now, and that's at least halfway to Lt Cdr Data, right?
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Sep 8, 2014 21:26
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What's the source of this? The art style looks kind of familiar, but I can't put my finger on it.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:43
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Cathulhu posted:What's the source of this? The art style looks kind of familiar, but I can't put my finger on it. Pictures for Sad Children. It is no longer hosted online, unfortunately.
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Sep 8, 2014 21:44
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No mention of stuff like artificial neurons or fuzzy logic. Stuff like that helps overcome the binary, you know. And no mention of the potential of quantum computing for dealing with that problem, either. You should be ashamed, Bobbin.  Not really
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Sep 8, 2014 21:58
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Or that stuff tends to be a bit more outlandish than what one sees on Star Trek from a glance. This certainly looks impressive, and recently there was a cheap and small prototype for testing cattle for disease. As for emotion slash intelligence, you can certainly point to Antonio Damasio's patient. The man outright lost a sense of emotion, and turned him into the sort of fellow that would compromise larger decisions over stuff like "Should I pick the blue or the black pen to sign this document"? For some reason Lucius Debeers's first talk, he just comes a bit tired and a bit amusing to talk to ("AUYYEEEEEEEHHH AAWWWWWWNHHHUM DUHG WAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHNHE"), but as lines go on he sort of remembers just how hosed up Lucius is at this point and it slowly starts getting chokey, even before he learns of Everett's actual plan. That's honestly something that just popped up from listening this recording and it made the whole ordeal a bit more touching. And this is one of the things where the High Res PlugIn is a bit of a low point: The original Morpheus face was kind of terrifying the first time you saw it and it helped on a first few times to create this awe-inspiring atmosphere. Where as on this version he looks a bit like Nash from Radio Dead Air is tinkering behind the blue glow.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:02
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On the topic of robots and AI, this video gives an interesting argument that we will soon see a revolution in AIs taking over a lot of jobs, even jobs you might not expect to be replaceable with AIs in the first place, which is something humanity will have to find a way to adapt to. I don't know what to think of how likely these predictions are, but the arguments in the video seem fairly compelling.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:21
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GoneWithTheTornado posted:On the topic of robots and AI, this video gives an interesting argument that we will soon see a revolution in AIs taking over a lot of jobs, even jobs you might not expect to be replaceable with AIs in the first place, which is something humanity will have to find a way to adapt to. I don't know what to think of how likely these predictions are, but the arguments in the video seem fairly compelling. There is a major, major problem with this. Fie and a terrible curse on all the horrible nerds who don't consider this. This notion of AIs taking over peoples jobs is utterly incompatible with the way society in general is arranging itself. To have worth, societal and economical, one must work, Not possible when your main area of training is now rendered obsolete. The only way for these developments to have any worth beyond fattening someone's already ample wallet is by them making things safer and by transferring the benefits directly to the workers.
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Sep 8, 2014 22:42
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GoneWithTheTornado posted:On the topic of robots and AI, this video gives an interesting argument that we will soon see a revolution in AIs taking over a lot of jobs, even jobs you might not expect to be replaceable with AIs in the first place, which is something humanity will have to find a way to adapt to. I don't know what to think of how likely these predictions are, but the arguments in the video seem fairly compelling. That video sounds like automation engineer wank fiction, and I'm saying this as a future automation engineer. (It's me, I'm the evil mastermind stealing your jobs) Rigged Death Trap posted:There is a major, major problem with this. Fie and a terrible curse on all the horrible nerds who don't consider this. Horrible nerds have an unfortunate habit of ignoring silly little details like (negative) feedback loops and diminishing returns. There's no working economy if people don't earn enough to afford the stuff produced, so things certainly aren't going to go quite as smoothly as they're presented in the video. Besides, where there's profit, there's taxes. A well functioning state has a duty to take care of its citizens and provide safety and a certain living standard for them (which requires money - lots of it). A type of business that removes the need for a large number of workers (thereby increasing the strain on the state's budget, since the state is going to have to provide some sort of income for the former workers) while earning itself a large profit is going to find itself taxed increasingly more until some sort of balance is reached. my dad fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Sep 8, 2014 |
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Sep 8, 2014 23:21
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my dad posted:A well functioning state See, there's the crux of the issue.
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Sep 8, 2014 23:30
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Small Frozen Thing posted:See, there's the crux of the issue. Yeah, well, that's the crux of almost every issue. 
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Sep 8, 2014 23:37
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This is a part of this game a lot of people remember, just because of the conversations that can happen here. As Bobbin said, they serve no in-game purpose, but they serve as excellent showcases for the best of Deus Ex writing. "The unplanned organism is a question asked by nature and answered by death, but you are a different kind of answer for a different kind of question." That line still gives me chills years later. There's also the juicy idea of order over freedom, and how true freedom, no matter what JC says, is neither possible nor desirable, really. Everyone needs limits, even if that limit is their own conscience; how could society work, otherwise? The whole idea of surveillance and its treatment by humanity over the years is an interesting idea as well; Morpheus posits that the idea of God reflects the human needs to be "taken care of" by an omniscient figure who knows everything about us. Such a being would automatically know not only who we are, but the extent of our ambitions and needs, and would presumably, be able to dole out resources completely fairly, hence creating a perfectly just world. JC hears this, and is a little frightened, because he knows the data from surveillance is not going to some being who knows if we've been bad or good, but to other humans, who think they're being completely fair, but can't ever really be to the same level as that hypothetical perfect being. Would you want somebody with the power to potentially ruin your life know your every secret?
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Sep 9, 2014 00:06
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I like how Morpheus is programmed to operate in the most abstract and general terms possible. I bet Everett just asks him random questions to see what he has to say.
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Sep 9, 2014 00:58
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Today completes a four-week circuit round the corners. This part of the game, is precisely my favourite moment in the entire history of all videogaming. That dialogue with Morpheus, that entire dialogue with him, when I was 14 years old, was the most mindblowing experience of my entire life. I suddenly felt myself open up to a whole new ideology that had never occurred to me, but in my mind...made so much more sense in my understanding. The very concept of being both the control and the slave of technology, the idea of advancing beyond our limitations and our capabilities by what we formed with our own hands...that just blew my entire concept of humanity far wider than anything I had ever encountered. Plus the writing of the scene was so good and quoteable that to this day I can quote most of it right off the bat. I would also love to note that Siri does not work in Scotland or at the very least the majority of Scotland due to its incapability to comprehend the Scottish brogue, as you have noted in the vid. I just find it hilarious that an entire nation of people, rather than a region or city has left Siri rather befuddled. Also glad to finally hear of Isaac Asimov and one of the few stories I actually DID read that you mentioned throughout these lectures. FinalGamer fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 01:39
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Some people, many people, believe that the current organization where a person's value is determined by their ability to work is nonsense, an arbitrary decision that we need to be rid of. Increasingly, the fact of the matter is there are more people than there are need for people. It's part of why we have this problem in the United States with employment. Many jobs are being replaced or reduced in manual need by automation, especially things like manufacturing, which once took many many people and now take one or two people who know AutoCAD. The world is moving in a direction where labor value is no longer a valid thing to tell, and that's really a good thing, because we should not be making value judgments about allocation of resources based on productivity in a system where more productivity-potential exists than need for productivity. Especially when we also live in a world where there are still ample resources for people to have, if we focused on decommodification. Robots and AIs solving problems of industry are fine, but they do require a social change. I think the argument of many of the nerds who think that this change is imminent and that any day now we'll be post-scarcity is that when the technology arrives, the change will necessarily occur, in response to it. I am not really such a nerd in that I don't think these things are on the horizon, but I do think there is a serious need, on a societal level, to reassess how we make value judgments on people. Someone should not need to "get a job" to be entitled to a basic standard of living, for example. That might have been reasonable in a world where every individual's contribution was necessary for the survival of the town, but whether or not my neighbor has a job is completely irrelevant to the turning of the gears of industry, and he is still a suffering being with needs to be met.
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Sep 9, 2014 02:16
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The biomod patch makes the helicopter section less embarrassingly obvious to watch as the dead body is surrounded by a bunch of barrels in a corner of the room, out of your view. Not every thing has to be made into a class warfare analogy. The reason why people were worried about an AI uprising is because it is an emerging idea. People are terrified of new things they can't immediately control and will take drastic steps to fix it. That sort of thinking is as old as humanity. The only classist argument that can be made is the word of robot. It came at a time when humanity was experiencing a flood of new ideas on where humanity is heading, good and harmful. One big problem with unemployment is that hiring gets too expensive because the tax rates will skyrocket after a certain amount of hires and outside of government jobs, productive companies have to minimize bloat to keep costs down and stay competitive. There are also the nanny state entitlements and uneducated foreigners that both suck up resources better spent on other things and provide very little return when others can subsidize your living. A country facing a mass migration tends to not have the infrastructure or food to support a sudden jump in population that might be incompatible to the established natives in several fronts. The same goes for schools that are suddenly inundated with hundreds of new students who might not know the language and customs. You end up with a hostile language barrier that saps teachers away from the students and spending that is proportional to the smaller number of students is suddenly stretched and education suffers from reduced materials.
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Sep 9, 2014 05:07
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Scalding Coffee posted:The biomod patch makes the helicopter section less embarrassingly obvious to watch as the dead body is surrounded by a bunch of barrels in a corner of the room, out of your view. Yeah man people just name stuff for no reason! A bunch of stories about beneficiaries of low class labor/automation being overrun when the things they view as tools turn out to have their own desires and goals and the capacity for self-thought have nothing to do with class warfare! Also taxes, entitlements and immigration are the reasons for U.S. unemployment! Totally!  This part of the game is really cool! I had no idea that Debeers had so much more to say. paragon1 fucked around with this message at 02:23 on Sep 18, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 05:58
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At least you proved how sarcasm makes you look ignorant and adds nothing.
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Sep 9, 2014 06:06
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The only thing in your post that isn't complete nonsense is the part about Biomod. I'd refute the rest, but since you're a person that thinks taxes and immigrants are to blame for unemployment I doubt I'd convince you of anything.
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Sep 9, 2014 06:16
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You can try. You seem to know why having too many people looking for a job is not influenced at all by an excessive number of foreign people who will fill any opening or that businesses are not affected by some of the highest taxes in the world. Not like I keep track of this sort of thing for years. Don't assume too much.
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Sep 9, 2014 06:30
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The same voice actor performs as both Walton Simons and Morpheus: none other than Tom Hall. Also, Everett is too paranoid to let JC Denton see the way to his apartment, but of course he radios Jock and tells him where to send a loving helicopter and land inside it. 
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Sep 9, 2014 06:40
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Take our jobs. Please. I'll admit, the themes I mentioned are not present in every science fiction work that uses robots or AI. For instance, The Terminator is more about destiny versus free will and the hubristic "WHAT HAS SCIENCE DONE?!" theme present in all sort of monster movies, and The Matrix is about the question of reality and...destiny versus free will again. However, T2 features a terminator learning to be human and the prequel story from the Animatrix very obviously sets up the robots as an oppressed lower class before the cataclysm strikes. The themes I mentioned are not omnipresent, but they are far more prominent than any others in robotic science fiction.
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Sep 9, 2014 06:43
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Scalding Coffee posted:You can try. You seem to know why having too many people looking for a job is not influenced at all by an excessive number of foreign people who will fill any opening or that businesses are not affected by some of the highest taxes in the world. Not like I keep track of this sort of thing for years. Don't assume too much. Okay, I'll give it a shot. 1) You assume everyone is competing for the same job. Tony the fruit picker is not competing with John the machinist who is not competing with Randy the CPA. So illegal immigrants (I assume you're mostly referring to illegal immigrants?) cannot "fill any opening". In fact, most of them occupy jobs that citizens don't want (because they pay less than the minimum wage, usually). Immigrants need to buy things, so they create demand for local businesses products (they need to buy food, clothing, and shelter if nothing else). Pretty much every credible economist will tell you that increased demand is good for an economy and increases the need for new hires. An adult immigrant is actually a net gain for our economy, because we get an adult capable of working with their own income whose education and training we didn't need to pay for. 2)For taxes, consider this, in 1964 the corporate tax rate was 50% for all income over $25,000 dollars, the top personal rate was 77%. The unemployment rate was 5.2%. In 2013, the corporate tax rate tops out at 38% for every dollar between 15 and 18.333 million, and actually drops down to 35% for every dollar afterwards. The top personal tax bracket is 39.6% for every dollar over 400,000. The unemployment rate is 7.4%. In 2009, it was 9.3. If high taxes are a main cause of unemployment, then why was unemployment so much lower at a time of higher taxes? paragon1 fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Sep 9, 2014 |
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Sep 9, 2014 06:54
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What exactly is to be made of the philosophical shift in tone from when the game jumps the oceans? The early game is very much mired in a distinctly American sense of politics; whereas the Paris levels have a very different style of conversation that focus on a grander scale of thought, almost academic sounding, removed from any sense of locality. All of Deus Ex deals with the conspiracy of some secret group of privileged people running the world, but I wonder how exactly that sense of conspiracy is viewed in different cultures and parts of the world? Is the conspirator's mindset similar enough across cultures that conspiracies are viewed the same way, or must conspiracies rely upon a well of relevant ideas that conspiracies are viewed differently across cultures? What I'm asking is, can we have a science or literature corner on the foundational epistemology of conspiracy itself? Is the basis of conspiracy historical or psychological?
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Sep 9, 2014 07:42
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paragon1 posted:Okay, I'll give it a shot. Just to expand upon this a touch and provide an easily-googlable phrase for further research if anyone is compelled, this is called the "lump of labor fallacy". It makes intuitive sense to most non-economists, but as Paragon says neglects the second-order effects. Plus, in addition to the demand added to the economy by immigrant spending, they lower costs on things like food, allowing the rest of the economy to spend more money on other things. Consider how many fewer luxuries you'd be able to afford if food costs jumped up, and all the business supported by that spending aggregated across the whole economy. Plus, that effect provides the most benefits to the other lower classes, since food spending as a proportion of total income is much higher amongst those strata of society.
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Sep 9, 2014 07:43
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Paramemetic posted:Some people, many people, believe that the current organization where a person's value is determined by their ability to work is nonsense, an arbitrary decision that we need to be rid of. Increasingly, the fact of the matter is there are more people than there are need for people. It's part of why we have this problem in the United States with employment. Many jobs are being replaced or reduced in manual need by automation, especially things like manufacturing, which once took many many people and now take one or two people who know AutoCAD. The world is moving in a direction where labor value is no longer a valid thing to tell, and that's really a good thing, because we should not be making value judgments about allocation of resources based on productivity in a system where more productivity-potential exists than need for productivity. Especially when we also live in a world where there are still ample resources for people to have, if we focused on decommodification. Charlotte posted:Human life was valuable only in one sense. Suddenly any person was a unit of labor in the factory system, roughly equivalent to all others, and was therefore a transferable resource. And transferable resources must be free to move about, in response to market forces. That's "freedom." Now that most people don't produce anything of value, now that only a few people create wealth -- the scientists, engineers, bankers, and so on -- we require an arrangement of the few over the inert mass the rest of us have become.
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Sep 9, 2014 08:34
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my dad posted:That video sounds like automation engineer wank fiction, and I'm saying this as a future automation engineer. (It's me, I'm the evil mastermind stealing your jobs) Just in between jobs, right?
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Sep 9, 2014 09:18
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I love when JC is told that "You are not a natural organism" and JC just responds with, "No duh, me and my bro knew that since we were kids." He's sounds so petty like this AI is a stupid dumb engineered entity but he and Paul are totally awesome.
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Sep 9, 2014 09:24
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JC is superior to Morpheus because JC understands the glory of being part of the greatest democracy the world has ever known. 
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Sep 9, 2014 09:53
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Ah, machine translation. There was a video of some Microsoft tool at some seminar (TED?) where a person spoke in English, and it repeated in Mandarin. They discussed how such a system could be created and how its various components functioned. Upon watching this video I went on reading more about the topic and learned, for one, that the Finnish language can't be really translated that well. I fed Google Translate a bunch of news articles and the text approximately translated. Later, I fed some IRC channel discussions to it and the result was a total failure. Written, formal Finnish is mostly a constructed language that connects a dozen different dialects. No-one ever really speaks the literal Finnish, and a standard conversation on IRC is often in dialect. It's still a very challenging task to take spoken words and turn that into a transcribed text. After this, understanding the text may be even more difficult. Someone linked me this thing in the procedural generation subreddit when discussing computer-generated music. It reads text and then figures out what kind of mood the text is in. Afterwards, the program composes music fitting for the text. quote:Whether the piece is major or minor, they wrote in their paper, is determined by the ratio of the number of positive words to the number of negative words in the novel. If the ratio is higher than 1, C major is used, where only pitches pertaining to C major are played. If the ratio is 1 or lower, C minor is used. Also, a bomb!
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Sep 9, 2014 10:01
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SirDifferential posted:Ah, machine translation. There was a video of some Microsoft tool at some seminar (TED?) where a person spoke in English, and it repeated in Mandarin. They discussed how such a system could be created and how its various components functioned. Upon watching this video I went on reading more about the topic and learned, for one, that the Finnish language can't be really translated that well. I fed Google Translate a bunch of news articles and the text approximately translated. Later, I fed some IRC channel discussions to it and the result was a total failure. Written, formal Finnish is mostly a constructed language that connects a dozen different dialects. No-one ever really speaks the literal Finnish, and a standard conversation on IRC is often in dialect. And this is after decades of constant effort by some of the smartest people in the world. AI is hard.
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Sep 9, 2014 10:18
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Things would be so much simpler if we communicated purely in binary.
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Sep 9, 2014 10:39
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Mordaedil posted:Things would be so much simpler if we communicated purely in binary. I've always hoped that there would be more of a push for a one world language. I mean, honestly, it would lessen strife across the globe and open billions of people up to new ideas and information. I understand nationalism plays a part, as does culture. The creation of an entirely new language for it, however, would be a clusterfuck. The push from business and globalization is driving more and more of the world towards English, though, and that's something I'm happy to see.
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Sep 9, 2014 13:25
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