The Sentients - electronic kids or trapped dictators

[RangerOne SG13 SOR]

Ok the sentients have been puzzling me for a while. We saw the initial code by Dr Chandra at his research facility and the early leviathon code at NASA.

Both appeared aggresive.

Any sentient AI on the internet is uniuqe ( to a point) even if it is a replication of another sentient (growth through duplication) it is still going to develope differently.

After the episode "Flux" we saw a sentient that had gained control of a group of humans via nanobots. This gives us the idea of a larger network of sentients working together controlling humans or some ultimate goal.

Now we need to know what this goal is. They say they are the future (LD-7) but without a world to live in they have no future. To destroy the Earth and live elsewhere is pointless and lacks reasoning as the Earth is there only real source of the internet (thier cyberspace home) and humans (thier physical instruments)

So I can only reason that the intent of the sentients is not only global domination but the domination of humans.

After LD-7 we see the sentients are actually studying humans (aggression in this case) This shows them as young in certain aspects such as Kitten the love smitten jealus crazed sentient.

I could argue that sentients once exposed to raw human emotions cannot deal with its effects as they have not "grown up" with these emotions to learn how to conquer them (great I sound like a dam Vulcan)

Kitten confirms more about sentients.

We know that Dr Chandra said they escaped to the internet. This is where they developed. It should be "natural" to assume that as independant "minds" they would develope differently, this should give them different character sets such as good and evil.

Will we see a splinter type faction amongst the sentients.

Also lets look at sentient breeding. We all know how computer virus work (duplication) so it is predictable to assume that the sentients would duplicate themselves to give them more strength (?) but the sentient mind must surely have suspicion as well as niavety so how much do they copy across. Why create a powerful equal that could ultimatly destroy you? create a weaker version and you have a soldier, so is this how the hive has been created?
With the gaining of knowledge and the introduction of human attributes (fear greed love hate) thier own society must suffer the same consqequences as our own. It is after all only science fiction that dictates AI is emotionless (Data from ST TNG for example) AI is artificail intelligence but that intelligence needs cohesion other wise its just a collection of facts/data. A good example of this was the film Matrix with the super human AI. Thier leader remember spoke on how he "hated" the world of humans etc he simply wasnt a servant of the big machine he was of his "own" mind.

Ok moving slightly away from sentients lets look at the NASA AI the leviathon. Is this a captured AI from the net that they are developing? It certainly is a factor in the destruction of the world.

What do NASA hope to achieve with Leviathon.

Again a final solution hits me, the hows and whys but then I have to tie this in with the destruction of the other worlds and thats where it all falls apart. Sometimes I get soo close Im sure LOL

But do I post these final solutions?

Ok then what are your thoughts on the sentients?

are they simply evolving and using mankind to further thier knowledge?

are they intent on the destruction of Earth?

 

[Dave]

I believe that from the clues we have been given that 'Leviathan' is a 'Trojan Horse'. I think that it's upload to 'Bright Sky' was not deliberate by NASA, but accidental. I think that the 'Odyssey 5' should stop trying to prevent the 'Bright Sky' launch, and concentrate on stopping the spread of the Sentients. I'm sure that the upload to 'Bright Sky' is some evolved form of Dr. Chandra's AIs though.

I can't answer your other questions.

But can I discuss the nature of these AIs here? In the 'Kitten' thread Padders mentioned plot holes to do with AI living on the net. What are they? I can think of a few. I'm no computer expert, but I'm confused to what they really are. I'd like someone to educate me, so if any of the following is wrong let me know:

Are they just Code?
You mentioned a computer virus. That is just a program code. Usually they are an exe. file and execute some comand rewriting other programs. They replicate by copying themselves exactly, and using email, or floppy disks to disperse themselves.

I guess the dispersal part is analogous to biological systems, where the wind, sea, or animals are used to disperse seeds.

Some lower forms of life do replicate asexually, making a direct copy of themselves, but sexual reproduction is more usual, which gives more variety, and a better chance of survival.

Even with asexual reproduction there is a high chance of errors (mutations) in the duplication. Biological systems have a number of checks and stops to reduce this, but most eggs don't become adults.

We did see the Leviathan AIs aggressively multiplying, so replication must be part of their programming. But without the checks that biological systems have, I would expect most of them wouldn't work due to the errors or mutations that they incur.

This is likely to be a big problem, because an AI must be a huge amount of data, not a simple computer virus, and there must be a good chance on our present day telephony system for a piece of code to go astray.

To put it into perspective, in the book 'The Physics of Star Trek' by Lawrence M Krauss, he discusses matter transportation, and in order to digitally code all the information in the atoms of a single human being, you would need storage the size of sixteen orders of magnitude higher than all the books ever written, or if on 10 gigabyte hard disks, 10cm thick, a library that reached a third of the way to the centre of the galaxy.

I realise that the AIs are bits, and not atoms, but the problem would remain Where are they actually stored?

I expect that we are meant to think that they live in spare capacity, in some unused mainframe somewhere. In 'Kitten' we saw her pinpointed to somewhere near Kiev in the Ukraine. But if there was that sort of data on my hardrive, I think that I would notice something wrong. Also they captured Kitten in a small PC with an inbuilt keyboard, which Kurt stuck in his freezer. It didn't have anything like that sort of memory.

 

[RangerOne SG13 SOR]

The reference to a computer virus was simply trying to explain how they may reproduce. The asexual point is what i thought too. As for storage yes I agree about how much storage would be needed, remember though they do not have any physical attributes so the amount of storage should be less. They must live in an active state using RAM so as you said people should notice if thier server or mainframe became sluggish. Also they would surely be interecepted by firewalls and virus checkers as they try to access ports or RAM of other machines. The sentients could be one huge plot flaw, I hope we dont start going down that road.

In the episode Flux we saw the sentient in some kind of closet or conduit (in the house) maybe teh sentients cotnrol thier humans to build and maintain a system that can house them, but this would make them extremely vulnerable to attack (cut the power or just blow up the house etc) I thought the main use of the net was the safety it could give a sentient lifeform.

The leviathion could be a trojan horse, remeber the Cadre want a AI based space pilot to replace humans. Leviathon could be that, maybe it was supposed to control and maintain the Bright Sky satallite.

To make the earth explode like that would of taken a massive amount of energy. Something had to be present in the atmosphere to cause the chain reaction (nanites?) It is getting easier to tie down a solution to the Earths destruction. But it is bieng able to port it across to the fate of the other planets thats the "humdinger" of the problem. The more I think on it the more im inclined to fear that Coto will simply use some frail "time travel" or wormhole creation link to the destruction of the other worlds. That would be really sad.

Ranger

 

[Tabitha]

From the horses mouth, so to speak:

Manny_Coto
                A sentient is an entity which exists inside cyberspace. Sentients are
                pure thought and are incredibly powerful and knowledgeable. I
                look at them as God. Trapped inside their own Valhalla. But like
                the Odyssey member said in one episode, it's a rare God that
                doesn't want to create in its own image. So we have synthetics.
                Synthetics are the creations of the sentients, who wish to extend
                their reign beyond cyberspace. I hope this clears it up somewhat.

From an interview Dave found HERE

Doesn't really clear up many of your questions, but I thought you might be interested in an official definition.

 

[Dave]

That is just avoiding the issue though -- "pure thought" and "godlike" -- is not a scientific definition.

Either they exist roaming inside the internet, and take up vast amounts of memory (therefore being vulnerable to both discovery, accidental file corruption and attack by enemies) or they have built themselves synthetic servers somewhere with a physical presence in the real world (in which case they aren't able to "hide" in the internet as was described.)

I acknowledge that they don't need to store physical attributes or characteristics (assuming 'Kitten' was lying about herself in the photograph, that it) and only their thoughts and memories, but it is still a huge amount of storage space required.

(It is possible that they need the synthetics as backup space to store themselves.)

I think we may be at the point where further speculation is irrelevant, because the idea will not hold water. Maybe it is better to think of them as "pure thought" and "godlike" after all.

 

[RangerOne SG13 SOR]

The god reference about trapped in thier own Valhalla confirms was pretty much how we thought. That helps to explain the need to control humans, to control the physical to nurture thier growth.

Maybe the first stages of a sentient roams the net until it becomes too big etc, then it requires servents to find it a new home.

Remember in episode "rapture" the drug enabled Neils friend to "takeover" the minds of the others. He also explained how the drug gave him the ability to store information in other peoples brains like hard drives.

The sentients must also use the humans for storage. This again leads to some vulnerability becuase if a sentient lost a few hosts then it would be severly weakened.

Food for thought


Ranger

 

[Tabitha]

I like your thinking on the evolution of the sentients - it could then put Kitten as an adolescent in reality as well as in personality.

 

[Dave]

Originally posted by Dave
Are they just Code?

I asked earlier because originally, I thought that they had a physical form inside Dr. Chandra’s computer, but subsequently we discovered they were just nanobots. And the Synthetics are not physical manifestations of the Sentients, thought they are somehow linked, and may be used as data storage capacity.

But now in the episode “Begotten“, we see a Sentient get people to build a 'weather controlling' machine, that would allow it to appear with a physical form. I just don’t see how that can be possible.

Also, it seemed to imply that maybe Sentients have visited before, and that the 'Tower of Babel' was a gateway for a Sentient.

 

[Tabitha]

The more we learn, the less we know. Or some such trite statement


I am looking at the sentients without much of a critical stance. I don't really understand computers and their strange ways, although I am fairly efficient at manipulating them. With the sentients, I just took it as a given that what ever these entities are, they are constantly evolving, so it would be difficult to pin them down and define exactly WHAT they are. If we assume the creature from "Begotten", and Kitten were both sentients, then these are very different incarnations than sentients we have encountered previously - so an evolving process might make sense.

I don't recall them being actually described as nanobots? I am reminded of the visuals we saw as "leviathan", but I just assumed they were a representation of the activities of pure code. If the sentients are nanobots, how could they exist on the internet? Would they not have to be code to 'live' on the net?



Am I just confusing things even more?

 

[Dave]

Originally posted by Tabitha
I don't recall them being actually described as nanobots? I am reminded of the visuals we saw as "leviathan", but I just assumed they were a representation of the activities of pure code. If the sentients are nanobots, how could they exist on the internet? Would they not have to be code to 'live' on the net?

I was thinking of the "representation of the activites of pure code" as you call it, the picture on the monitor screen in 'Shatterer'.

When I saw that I thought it was something like an electron-microscope picture of the sentients. But they looked exactly like the nanobots that were re-arranging Chuck's brain in 'Flux', so now I'm assuming they were just nanobots at work re-arranging the hardware in the lab and not the Sentients.

I DON'T think the sentients are nanobots themselves, but I think that they use armies of nanobots to do their work for them. I expect it could be possible to design a 'virus' to replicate itself, then copy itself, and begin to replicate nanobots intusively outside of the net. This could be the way in which the 'Bright Sky' satellite was taken over and caused armageddon. It also explains how they take over individuals.

I DO think the Sentients would have to be pure code to live on the net, but we have seen the 'thing' come out of the funnel, and photos of 'Kitten', so I'm not sure what to believe anymore.