ashnistrike: Wiscon Schedule

Ashni (

ashnistrike) wrote,
@ 2008-05-06 11:53:00

Wiscon Schedule
Title: Not Enough Octopusses

"Here is a smart alien on our planet. It communicates through color change. It's more closely related to us than aliens out there, but we don't generally put it in our stories. We can't talk to them. Maybe we're not smart enough. Maybe we're biased against critters without backbones. How would we start to communicate? What roles could they play in stories? Let's talk about the aliens in our own tidal pools. "
Friday, 4:00-5:15 P.M.
Senate B

M: Mia Molvray
doselle young
Tom La Farge
Ruthanna Emrys

Title: "The Ship Who Knitted, and Other Side-Effects of Transportational Intelligence "

"From the 'crippled-child-in-metal' ships of Anne McCaffery to the kilometers-long GSVs of Iain Banks, the sentience of ships is a long-running SF trope. For many of them, they seem to be perfectly content as hyperintelligent ferries or smart sidekicks, but is this what we think would really happen? What are some alternatives to this view, and what would it mean to have a transport that's as smart as you are? "
Saturday, 4:00-5:15 P.M.
Senate B

M: Maureen Kincaid Speller
Alexander Lamb
Helen Keeble
Ruthanna Emrys
Chip Hitchcock

So, sapient octopi and sapient ships. Thoughts and comments on either subject, or permutations there-of, are welcome.

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	klingonguy 2008-05-06 05:31 pm UTC (link)
	Damn, these sound like fun panels. I'm hoping for something interesting when Balticon sends me schedule. (Reply to this)

	papersky 2008-05-06 06:35 pm UTC (link)
	Jack Cohen used to have an octopus that could tell his grad students apart. As grad students -- even ones in biology -- can't usually tell octopodes apart, this is to say the least suggestive. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	ashnistrike 2008-05-06 06:41 pm UTC (link)
	How did it demonstrate its knowledge of this distinction? (Reply to this)(Parent)

	helen_keeble 2008-05-10 07:49 pm UTC (link)
	Hi there - I'm on the sapient ships panel with you. At the moment I'm frantically re-reading Iain M Banks and Anne McCaffery (my, her books have not aged well for me, though I remember devouring them as a teenager), and scouring through my technical journals looking for references to current real-world research on automatous transport. I look forward to meeting you! (Reply to this)(Thread)

	ashnistrike 2008-05-10 09:55 pm UTC (link)
	I've never read the MacCaffrey (I think I encountered her too late to appreciate personally). Kagan's Hellspark is one of my favorites, along with, more recently, Bear's Dust. My area is human cognition, so I also have some speculations of my own based on the embodied cognition research. I look forward to meeting you too--this sounds like a fun panel! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

helen_keeble
2008-05-10 10:21 pm UTC (link)

You're into human cognition? Awesome! I'm what's rather nebulously defined as a "user experience designer", which is basically the intersection of engineering, information sciences, and psychology.

I started off in general engineering, moved to control systems, went to work for a control systems company and promptly found myself assigned to R&D as a software engineer, whereupon I took myself back to university part-time for yet another degree, and fell in love with the whole field of user-centered computer system design. So I've got an eclectic background, but my main interest is in how people interact with technology. Given that a large part of my work is to do with adapting computer systems to fit the mental models of the people using them, I'm fascinated by the concept of computer systems that have their _own_ mental models.

I haven't read the Kagan, but I'll see if I can pick it up before the panel. (I'm in the UK - got a long flight to fill!)

HAL from 2001 was suggested to me as a counterexample to the benign intelligences of Banks and MacCaffery's spaceships.

Other writers... Peter F Hamilton has organic, sentient ships (as does a classic Start Trek: TNG episode, IIRC). Damnit, there's a female far-future hard SF writer whose name I'm totally blanking on (I keep thinking "Catherine Asaro", which isn't right), who had a neat novel with post-Singularity humans on a sentient ship (I recall lots of splitting of personalities and making backups) which, if I remember rightly, was sulking for some reason and spending most of its time in hibernation mode. I wish I could remember enough to let me Google for this...

I seem to recall a Phillip K Dick story? novel? involving sentient taxicabs. There's also the Asimov story about the (somewhat) intelligent cars, plus of course Nightrider. Might be interesting to consider smaller-scale forms of transport besides the spaceships, particularly since we'll probably build an autonomous car well before we get clever spaceships. :-)

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ashnistrike
2008-05-11 03:04 am UTC (link)

My wife says that Catherine Asaro does have sapient ships in her Skolian Empire books, but doesn't recall the specific one you describe. I may be able to look at some of that.

Zen! From Blake's Seven. I knew I was forgetting something. And I wonder if the AIs frequently generated by Star Trek ships count as the ships themselves being sapient.

An interesting difference between cars and ships is that the ships would be turned on most of the time, whereas the cars would have only these brief spurts of awareness. I wonder how that would affect their personalities....

Do you do computer interface design specifically, or something more general? I'm familiar with the area, but know a limited amount about it (I'm on the committee for a design student studying product engagement right now, so I'm expecting to have to pick up more). I study memory and decision-making biases, mostly, with forays into the psychology of speculating about future technologies.

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