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Tag Archive for AI

One foot in front of the other.

February 6, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on One foot in front of the other.

Walkers

http://rednuht.org/genetic_walkers/

 

Using simple evolutionary systems in games can often be a way to develop worthwhile opponents in a reasonably short period of time.  When I was working with Blue Planet Software while they were in production an RTS called “Hanesakegassen” they began to set up “AI’s” to play against one another, over and over.  Each new version of the bot got to keep what the previous bot had recorded with regards to tactics.  What worked, what didn’t.  They (the bots) didn’t really ever know the *why* they just knew that the blue opponent always spent an extra minute collecting ammo, or that the green opponent hated to fortify areas with water.

The HTML tool above is a simple (by which i mean clean and straightforward, the code behind it is probably more complex than I can parse) example of this.  A bipedial, jointed figures is trying to “learn” to walk.  The most successful ones are copied and try again.  And again.  And again.

 

 

Do you really WANT these jobs?

December 6, 2014 Writing Comments Off on Do you really WANT these jobs?

 

Over the past few years, I’ve read a few online horror stories about working in the Amazon fulfillment centers.  About how body-breaking those picking jobs can be, how options are limited and the pay is not enough to help pay to fix the physical problems a job like that can generate.

So I’m torn.  These jobs sound wretched.  They sound like sheer torture.  I can easily see how you’d want to develop a mechanized/robotic system to make it cleaner, more efficient and move away from breaking people to get the job done.  Robots can do the kind of scut-work that will put a human in the hospital over time and the people are saved (yay people!)

But on the other hand, as hard and as painful as they may be, those ARE jobs.  They can provide for those people, those families.  So by saving the people, we are, with the same stroke, harming the people by taking away that opportunity.

In the sci-fi/cyberpunk that I write, I haven’t explored this specific human cost (yet), I utilize warehouses full of AI driven robots for some areas of the story, but this has got me thinking about the development of those warehouses, how they came to be as mechanized and what happened to all the people who used to work there.  I have some research to do here, and might have a new story or two to write.

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