💻 Programming & Robotics Club Mingle 🤖

[subtract]

Who: Club members & anyone else who feels like dropping by!
When: October, during club hours after class ends
What: ??? club shenanigans
Warnings: TBA... please do not murder anyone in the workshop, there's delicate equipment in here

Programming/Robotics Club is held in the workshop on the 2nd floor of the school. There's no official schedule, mainly because Add tends to just... live in the workshop, basically, so club members are welcome to show up whenever. The room is generally kept tidy, with supplies and scrap electronics stored in a locked closet while the room isn't in use. Two highly advanced computers are available for anyone to use, or you can build/bring your own computer.

Before you can enter club area, however, you first must get past the club bodyguard... Yeah, this fucking thing is stationed by the door now. Anyone not identified as a club member may or may not get picked up and dunked in the nearest trash can. Or maybe you'll get random junk pelted at you until you leave. Or maybe it'll attack you even if you are a club member or given permission to enter... it's a work in progress. Please be patient with our good pal Ball Monokuma, he's still learning.

Comments

[notsosou]

Huh? That's strange, coming from you.

[He's noticed that uncertainty. Do you not like having hands and the like, Ranger? The freedom to move about without having to be carried by someone you're forced to trust? A certain amount of ability (greater than zero at least) to physically fight off someone trying to mess with you? You've got no need for that? It made Shin, weak, with a mind punched full of holes, so used to feeling powerless, realize just what he has as a baseline... and he hasn't even seen his own AI.

Ranger has a point though... maintenance is an issue. Getting enough to make even what they have so far has been an issue, let alone replace the donated hodge-podge parts he's trying to make play nice with each other. Senku's been working magic, but... it's science, not actual magic and there's physical constraints. All he can do is try and set things up right the first time so that if (when) something does go wrong, the results won't be catastrophic for Rei.]

Hey, I'm not the one who requested it. [Well, he suggested the idea, but Rei's response was extremely eager.] It's good practice, at least.

[What he's getting out of it... that much is true. It's really been making him stretch his brain.]

[rearranger]

[ He glances to Shin when he calls it strange, staring at him for a moment as though he'd said something quite strange himself before his eyes flick back to the screen. But he supposes if someone were to take on such a romanticized project as creating an AI worthy of having a body, then they might as well go the entire way. It was bothersome to leave a project incomplete. That, too, makes some amount of sense to him.

Ranger is happy enough to have a body, even if he hates every single facet of it, but it hadn't really been his choice either way. ]

Hm. It's not a bad project.

[ It takes a little longer for the implication of the first comment to catch up. He is happy to have a body, one that he hates every single facet of, but it wasn't as though it were his choice. ]

Dunno why it'd be strange. An AI is just another program. They're made to human specifications for human convenience, and that's all you gotta worry about. No sense in making it harder on yourself than you have to.

[ Naturally, that included him as well. ]

[notsosou]

[Oh boy, he avoids enough of this in Ethics Club already... as much as he can at least. He's torn because on the one hand, trying to find easier ways to do things really is the core of programming (succeeding is another matter). On the other hand...]

'Just another program'... If you're gonna make something that thinks like a person, not treating it like one's just an automatic failure, isn't it?

[It's something he's been sort of feeling out in the background of this conversation. After all, it means you haven't succeeded, because you haven't got something you're actually confident in... Even if Shin dislikes Ranger as a person, he'll grant him that much by this point.]

Ahaha, not that humans are all that great to each other either...

[So maybe it really is in keeping, treating an AI as a disposeable object, as if a program made for doing math or running a game and not the task of being a person. The game sure spoke to there being no difference in how they were seen. Just pieces... pawns... They really were just the last run of years of simulations... the implications of which get horrific fast too, but this is something Shin's had more practice not thinking too deeply about.]

[rearranger]

[ Would that be a failure? It shouldn't be. It never had been considered one, or if it had then Ranger wasn't on the memo. It was consistent with ASUNARO's goals and line of thinking. Dolls were dolls, humans were humans, but Ranger was a doll, and he was created to be a human, and because he was unique he had no point of comparison. So which binary was he meant to be slotted into?

The answer is obvious, of course; when creating a human, one needed to treat it as a human, otherwise you've failed. But he hits a snatch upon coming to that conclusion, making it difficult to parse. It's the correct answer, but it can't be, because it's not consistent. If he was a failure, he wouldn't have been kept for so long. Failure wouldn't have fallen under Gashu's radar, nor ASUNARO's. ]

... Maybe... [ The answer comes in the slow, careful tone of a person who's trying to determine if they're being asked a trick question. ] ... Yeah, it can only be one or the other, huh...

[ So then, what was he supposed to be? He shakes his head, trying to dismiss the question with little success.

It shouldn't matter, given the company's priorities, but it does. Shin is correct on that, too. ]

But everyone is disposable. That's why no one wants to be the weakest link there.

[ The Floormasters all had their own little Majority Game. Who would be the first to show weakness? Who could they they pin the blame of any little thing that goes wrong on to save the rest from coming under fire? And so on and so forth. ]

[notsosou]

[Shin's not above a little smug schadenfreude at apparently having thrown Ranger off kilter, unaware of how deep the problem is going.]

Only those two options? There was a talking dog in my class for a bit, if you can believe it.

[Which sure threw him for a loop at the time. So person is a lot wider than human, is what he's saying... which is probably small comfort to someone made to resemble one as much as possible, admittedly.

Okay he's being a bit mean... he'll stop. He's getting a bit of an unprecedented look into the behind the scenes of the game as well... though his sympathy is a tad limited by the fact their little Majority Game was working on the one that actually killed him.]

...makes you wonder why anyone stays, huh.

[It's a bit of a rhetorical question, because he knows well the kind of pressures the powerful can apply to hold the powerless in place, once they've caught them... and also how someone can throw themselves into that sort of maw and not realize until too late, stuck in all sorts of strings... but he can't help but see it as a stupid decision; the 'way weaklings live'.]

[rearranger]

[ Ranger takes in the information without much of a reaction. It's not something he can easily process, but he believes it well enough to add it to his records. It has little meaning to Ranger, who only has the two binaries that were given to him; there were those who were organic, and there were those who were artificial. Like so many things, he had simply accepted that as a part of his reality.

Even so, he seems to be considering something or another. His gaze loses focus for a handful of seconds as he runs through the question a few more times, coming to the same incorrect, contradictory answer each time. He draws in a breath, and it's only with careful effort that he's finally able to file it away. If he lets himself get caught up on in that thought, it'll be a problem. Safalin and Gashu weren't here to correct the error in his code. But as long as he doesn't agitate it any further, he should be able to handle it.

Even so, it takes him just a beat too long to respond: ]

Huuh...? You think so? It's nothing worthy of sympathy, you know. Those people broke a long time ago. They're scared, sure, but they've got their own selfish reasons for staying.

[ Well, maybe he should be ashamed himself for saying that, but it was a simple fact. Every last one of them knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. Ranger passes no judgment on it, finding it to be no better or worse than any other way of living, but they were pitiable people for how broken they were. But even that wasn't something an outsider need concern themselves with.

Every last one of them had made their choice. Every last one of them was sticking with that choice. ]

They've all got some stake in it or another... Well, can't say I ever really cared.

[ Which is really just to say that his only stake was "not failing." ]