I need sci fi fans to please be normal about the Three Laws of Robotics. These are not a serious proposal about AI ethics – they’re a narrative logic puzzle created to facilitate writing detective stories about robots. They’re the sort of thing you’d invent to annoy Daniel Craig if you made a movie where Benoit Blanc goes to space.
A couple of folks have commented that the Three Laws are like the Prime Directive in Star Trek, but that’s not really it.
The problem with Star Trek’s Prime Directive is that half the time the shows are genuinely trying to take it seriously and crashing face-first into its moral inadequacy.
The Three Laws of Robotics, conversely, are explicitly designed to fail. Their storytelling function is to create verbal logic puzzles with tangible consequences.
When a robot in an Asimovian detective story manages to twist “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm” around into something horrifying by playing semantic games with the definition of the word “human”, that’s not trying to make a profound statement about the nature of humanity – it’s presenting a puzzle-box for the reader to solve, and challenging them to figure out how the robot did it before the detective does.
Today’s aesthetic: robot smut that goes to enormous lengths to explain why it’s a complete coincidence that the robot is sexy, like yes, she may appear to be packing a twelve-inch dick, but she’s actually a courier model designed for bulk data delivery in situations where transporting the storage medium on foot is faster than sending the data via network, and what appears to be a penis is in fact a universal connector for ultra-high-speed data transfer – what? Yes, obviously she’s going to fuck someone with it, but first we have to do several thousand words of complicated worldbuilding establishing that its appearance and operation are based on practical engineering concerns and only incidentally resemble a big throbbing boner.
Concept: one of those gender fuckery makeover comics starring a gigantic industrial cargo handling robot with no discernibly human features. The makeover process involves an angle grinder and a welding torch, and the end result is not discernibly any more or less gendered by human standards than how the robot started out, but all of the characters in the comic act like the change is perfectly obvious.
Some artists are like “ooh, the supremacy of the machine”, and then their android character designs have exactly the same problems as their human character designs. Like, yes, that’s a very attractive chassis, but where are all the bits that make the robot go? This is bones – let’s get some components up in there. Make the robot thicker.
Call yourself a robotfucker if you will, but if the only robots you actually want to fuck are petite near-humanoids with slender limbs and waists the size of your forearm, you will not survive the winter.
This is what mass consumerist art has done to the idea of selling that as a product when it’s so clearly fine art. Like, with the effort she’s putting in x20 for a decent wage and materials?? That’s a $80,000 piece of art a member of the landed gentry would commission a year in advance for his wife on their 20th wedding anniversary. This is a priceless heirloom. How can you say “Oh yeah, I wanna buy it, you should sell them” as if you could ever turn something like this into a product??
This is fine art, period. That piece will be in a museum, or if not is should be in a museum in a hundred years.
They are so important to rodents or are a very important rodent themselves. Please be kind to them and leave offerings of fruit and/or cheese in their inbox.
The fact that people with low trust in others are more likely to fall into a cult or a scam is surprisingly positive because it means if you just take it on chance the average person is not trying to fuck you over.
Started this as a simple way to get rid of my art block and ended up with 8 fully rendered drawings somehow, i wasnt even planning on drawing backgrounds lol
also sorry for the long post (it will be even longer next time)
BABE WAKE UP NEW IMAGES FROM THE KICKSTARTER DROPPED
If I had a Nickel for every time the moon has been implied to be a larger force in a videogame, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told “Kay, you can’t go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.” And I sputter and object but they don’t hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.
I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.
And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.
And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.
That is, if she doesn’t kill herself first.
I know this is a really heavy post but if you read it and you appreciated it, I’d appreciate it in return if you reblogged it. This is really important to me and I want people to read it and understand it. Thank you.
When trans women are mocked and made into jokes in the media, I get very upset, and I am often told “Kay, you can’t go through life getting offended every time someone makes a joke.” And I sputter and object but they don’t hear me. So I want to be clear for once, about why the jokes make me angry.
I learned to hate myself for being transgender before I knew I was transgender. I laughed at the jokes in stand up comedy routines, and prime time sitcoms, and animated comedy shows, and in the movies, and in books, and in games, laughing at trans women for existing, about “men in dresses”, about people who “got their dicks chopped off”, and I learned to think that was worthy of ridicule.
And then a day came when I felt a pang of envy at what my female classmates were wearing and I repressed it, and felt guilty, and a day where I felt incomplete because I had no breasts and I repressed it and I felt disgusting And a day when I realized the only images of romance that made me feel anything showed two women together and I repressed it and I felt like a monster And a day when I realized I felt sick when I looked at myself in the mirror after every shower before work and couldn’t bear to look at my own face, and I hated myself. And then there came a day when I hated myself so much, and I thought I could never understand why, and so I just wanted it all to end. And it was just a miracle that I swerved my car back into my lane in time.
And all of it started with a joke that I heard on TV, and then kept hearing from all the voices from the ether, over and over and over, worming an idea into my mind before I was old enough to realize I was absorbing it, the idea that a man in a dress is funny, and that changing your body parts makes you a freak, and that women who have penises instead of vaginas are liars and hurt men. And they’re still making these jokes. And somewhere out there right now, just like all those years ago, there is a little girl in a t-shirt and cargo shorts with buzzed off hair watching the TV, hearing that joke and absorbing it without knowing it, who will someday have to pry herself apart to tear it out of her head, just like I did.
That is, if she doesn’t kill herself first.
I know this is a really heavy post but if you read it and you appreciated it, I’d appreciate it in return if you reblogged it. This is really important to me and I want people to read it and understand it. Thank you.
last night i dreamt i was driving to norfolk but they replaced it with a completely different city like the entire landscape was different everything was made of wood and there was a frankenstein themed go-kart place
it was called like charlesland or something stupid like that
and if you drove further there was another city called flobert and i dont remember what was in it but in the dream i was like “i need to take a trip back over here”
I always assumed sex work was regulated just like any other work, only recently have I realised that’s it’s actually straight up illegal in a lot of places???
It never made any sense to me why it would be treated any differently, so I guess I just assumed that
I am fully serious about this btw. not “pro sex work” as in “there are no issues whatsoever within the industry”, but “pro sex work” as in “these are jobs and the workers should be a) allowed to work and b) protected from their customers by the law”
some of you guys view misogyny as simply men being mean to women and not a systemic hierarchical issue that prevents women from gaining liberation, support systems or a socioeconomic foothold and it shows every time you talk about “misandry”
we are so ableist about memory. people with good memory take for granted the fact that they can recall as much as they can, and use that to taunt, guilt and threaten people with memory issues. many neurotypes and mental illnesses cause memory lapses. traumatic brain injuries can cause memory lapses. brain cancer can cause memory lapses.
even if your memory is good, it’s not right to guilt someone because they can’t remember something. trust me, people with memory problems are desperately trying to remember: it’s just that we literally can’t. it is a very literal “i can’t remember”.
The number of times I’ve been accused of gaslighting bc I said, honestly, that I don’t remember some detail of some interaction, is pretty ironic considering how often actual gaslighters use people’s memory issues to do the actual gaslighting.
This is what mass consumerist art has done to the idea of selling that as a product when it’s so clearly fine art. Like, with the effort she’s putting in x20 for a decent wage and materials?? That’s a $80,000 piece of art a member of the landed gentry would commission a year in advance for his wife on their 20th wedding anniversary. This is a priceless heirloom. How can you say “Oh yeah, I wanna buy it, you should sell them” as if you could ever turn something like this into a product??
This is fine art, period. That piece will be in a museum, or if not is should be in a museum in a hundred years.
“how dare you say we piss on the poor” is perhaps THEE best piece of vernacular to come out of tumblr dot com in the past decade. along with “what were you doing at the devils sacrament” (cheeky. inspired. relevant in every context) and “harold, they’re lesbians” (timeless. funny as hell. gay)
Idk I’m tired of people thinking that astroturfing is unique to one group. Astroturfing is so universal that there were specialized campaigns to destroy all the organizations trained to educate the public on how astroturfing campaigns work.
The same tactics I’m seeing now were the same tactics used to divide and destroy the 2014-2016 Black Lives Matter movement. (To the point where the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement is seen as a separate and new thing, and “Say Their Name” campaigns predate 2014.)
The same tactics I’m pretty sure were used against immigration reform movements.
These tactics just keep being recycled because everyone thinks they only ever apply to the groups they already belong to—and it doesn’t count when they’re used against others.
In 2022, Massachusetts residents voted in favor of a Fair Tax ballot measure to extra-super-duper-tax those earning more than one million dollars a year and to spend the revenue from that on education and transportation initiatives.
Naturally, there were the naysayers. Those who warned that all of the state’s rich people would move away to their very own Galt’s Gulch or whatever, if they were forced to pay a four percent tax on anything they make over a million dollars. The implication there, of course, is that raising this tax would, ironically, lead to the state collecting less revenue overall.
That didn’t happen! In fact, the state has already raised $1.8 billion in revenue so far for this fiscal year — which is $800 million more than they expected, and they still have a few months to go. The vast majority of the surplus will go to a fund that legislators can use for one-time investments in various projects.
The revenue has already been invested in universal school lunches, in more scholarships to public colleges, in improvements to the MBTA, and to repair roads and bridges. These are all things that will improve the quality of life for everyone, including the “ultra-rich” who happen to live there. The fact is, it’s just nice to live in a society that is more civil, that takes care of its people and its children and that fixes things when they are broken.
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Elizabeth Warren, Pramila Jayapal, and others have introduced bills in the House and Senate for a nationwide millionaire’s tax of two percent — two cents on the dollar for all wealth exceeding $50 million and six percent on all wealth over a billion dollars. This would bring in an estimated $3.75 trillion over 10 years, which we could use to improve the lives of all US citizens. We could have so many nice things!
It’s time to stop living in fear of what millionaires and billionaires — who have made their fortunes off of roads we’ve paid for and employees we’ve paid to educate — will do or where they will move if forced to pay their fair share. That’s no way to live. If they have some place better to go that won’t force them to contribute to improving their community? Let them. Other people will come along and be more than happy to pick up where they left off. But more than likely, they won’t do jack shit because they’re rich, and if they wanted to live someplace else, they’d be there by now.
Oh so you think that queer folk in a country can’t celebrate their rights?
I thought that queer rights for every person was a good thing?
Or is it only a good thing if you like the country and if you don’t like a country, queer people there should suffer?
Cause that doesn’t sound very “Queer rights!” to me.
It’s so bizzare to me. do they thing the Tel Aviv pride parade is funded by the IDF or something??? do they think the gay laws Israeli activists fought so hard to achieve are only allowed to pass because Israel is a “bloodthirsty genocide machine” and is trying to distract the world??? do they think queer people existing in Israel is a lie???
pinkwashing as a concept is so fucking weird. why are you mad queer people are getting rights????????????
It’s the Israeli “promotional material” featuring queer symbols that people have a problem with.
It’s Israel’s “promotional efforts” (propaganda) which they used, that tried to convince people that Israel is the more moral actor because they supposedly embody more western values like supporting queer people that is problematic.
Saying that people against the Palestinian genocide are mad at queer people in Israel because they’re celebrating their rights is a strawman, you have simply misunderstood what those people are saying and what “pink washing” even means.
![[trump voice] They’re calling it prison abolition, folks, complex—prison industrial complex, they’re calling it. Very disgusting, very sad [crowd boos] I’m the first person to say, perhaps that none of us are free until all of us are free, and you’ll be hearing it more and more
— holden m. accountable (@noahpasaran) May 30, 2024](../media/903edf8744bd6b9a4b6cfdc6eae1cc3982f40f67.jpg)
