NaNoWriMo update: failure!

[tuftears]

I got about 8.5k words done on the proposed Genies: Rocking the Cradle story.

I kind of bogged down though... The real world is too depressing for writing about a bunch of psychopaths. I'm trying to think of a replacement writing project, something that will be just more silly fun.

What do you guys think of the idea of a Starfleet Cooking Academy?

Comments

[jordangreywolf]

Wow. I haven't gotten to see any of your story-writing in *ages*. Now I'm curious.

"Starfleet Cooking Academy." I can see why the "cooking academy" part, given the angle of most of your journal posts as of late :) but why the Starfleet part? I must say, I've been flummoxed by the role that replicators and holodecks play in the Star Trek universe.

At one point, it might seem that all you need to do is tell the computer, "Give me a simulation of the world as portrayed in THIS BOOK." (And if aliens can replicate a visually-convincing version of gangster culture from A PRINTED BOOK -- no photos! -- then surely that's possible, eh?) And then at other points, we have someone boasting about some holodeck "program" he has spent a lot of time "making," as if it were something far more involved than just a list of wishes for the computer to intelligently interpret. (Maybe it's just a really SPECIFIC wish list.)

But the same goes for transporters and replicators. What's the point of cooking, if you can just "replicate" it? I suppose it's purely a pastime at that point. Bragging rights. I suppose that's not such an alien concept, really, since I might ask why I even bother cooking, when I can so often get a better -- and possibly even more cost-efficient -- result by eating out, getting something at the deli, etc.

One thing that strikes me, though, is the phenomenon of "gold-pressed latinum." Supposedly, it cannot be replicated. I might infer that it cannot be TRANSPORTED then, either. (As has been demonstrated with Riker and his "transporter malfunction," if it can be transported, it CAN be duplicated.) But more importantly, if there is something in the universe that cannot be replicated, perhaps there are *limits* to the technology. Perhaps a transported human being is close enough to the original to pass a Turing test, but maybe there's some sort of margin of error that can be overcome by a living being. (Maybe it's simply never come up, but too many transports within a span of time could result in degradation of the code, with a build-up of errors, so to speak.) And perhaps there are nuances that can't be properly replicated.

Eh, I'm just waving my hands about here, but just thinking that even in a Star-Trek level universe, there might be LIMITATIONS to even "magical" technology such that someone might be picky enough to prefer "the real thing" over that which is ***PRESTO!*** conjured up by a machine. (I suppose it could be purely in one's head, but I can't imagine such a mindset being too popular for long in such a science-centric setting.)

Unless, of course, the whole point of this story idea is to be totally silly, and I am -- as usual -- ENTIRELY OVER-THINKING IT. :)

[tuftears]

This is a Star Trek-*like* setting in that you have a benevolent Federation-like collection of mostly friendly species, ships running about, that sort of thing, but I conveniently exclude certain things that would ruin the story. :) Envision the Enterprise series, rather than ST:TNG.

* Holodecks: nope! Holograms are non-solid.
* Transporters: nope! Shuttles.
* Replicators: very basic, work more like 3d printers and specialized for various industries, i.e. engineering would have a replicator to manufacture pipes and structural elements and specially shaped armor plates.

Now some thornier issues:

I lean toward "most AIs are more cunningly programmed expert systems than true minds" but I'm waffling over whether there should be "conscious AIs" at all. It feels like something that should certainly be within the realm of the technology available to advanced races, but once you introduce conscious AIs, you have to resolve questions about the ethics/legality of an AI copying itself, being deleted, how to avoid the AIpocalypse, et cetera.

Cloning/mind-taping is more of a legal/moral issue than a technological one, I haven't yet decided what their status is but I don't think it should be common, i.e. we shouldn't have ships populated by clones of the best-performing officers, or creating easily replaced clones of veteran soldiers for security. It might be very expensive, possibly illegal.

And if you can record minds, you can make backups, you can edit memories, et cetera, you just need a sufficiently powerful computer.

I haven't even touched the question of psionics: whether they exist, whether you can read alien minds, whether you can use it to read and edit memories, control other people's minds, et cetera.

I might just declare that conscious AI requires specialized hardware, i.e. a renamed version of "positronic" brains, so you can have them but they're advanced technology and most will be fixed installations due to size, power, and cooling requirements. Same for brain taping, you might need an installation to do it "right", you can't just use a headset and a tape recorder. It might be very expensive and uncommon.

Anyway, the upshot is, cooking is a very needed and useful profession in the setting I have in mind, but the protagonist is going to discover that becoming a master chef to the stars is much more complicated than just learning some recipes. :)

[jordangreywolf]

"Star-Trek-LIKE:"
I completely agree regarding your ideas for the more fantastic Star Trek tech. I think shuttles are more fun than transporters. (I mean, yeah, transporters can be "fun" in the way of "How could we RIDICULOUSLY abuse this seemingly 'innocuous' technology and break the universe?" but not so much in a serious, ongoing story. ;) ) As far as holodecks go, if you want escapism, then it's VR goggles or, if you're really desperate, "neural induction" headsets that somehow mess with your sensory input. If you want exercise, then it's holography ... but maybe there could be some sort of hand-wavy tech that allows a little bit of force feedback. No, you won't feel like you're REALLY there; it'd be a pale comparison to the real thing. In fact, I think there might be a disincentive against making things "too real": If things got to the point where you had trouble distinguishing VR from reality, you could imagine the "waking nightmare" scenario -- is it real or is it VR? Am I out of the simulation yet?

Rather than relying upon some external technology that forces the room to generate magitech "force fields" to provide an illusion of solidity, perhaps it could be that if you want the more interactive experience, you need to "suit up": you wear a suit that through some means (anti-grav? magnetic fields? gyroscopes and weights? something else?) can give you a sense of force and weight for certain activities.

AIs:
I can envision a certain sort of "AI" being possible through conventional programming techniques. For instance, I think of the traditional Infocom "Zork"-style adventure engine. Through repeated cycles of play-testing, if you use an Interactive Fiction engine that is NOT beholden to "legacy" memory restrictions, you could develop a ridiculously robust "parser" that might seem uncanny in its ability to have a comeback to all sorts of things that a player might reasonably type. (Responding to the UNREASONABLE things that might be typed, however -- that would be the real challenge. It's a lot harder to pass a Turing test if the tester is allowed to veer away from any particular topic.)

In my various sci-fi imaginings, I like to think that "true" AI is basically just an artificial copying of the basic workings of the human mind, with a few tweaks borne of experimentation without fully UNDERSTANDING how it all works. Really, I doubt that it should be possible to truly "copy" a human mind, or "upload" it in any sense into a digital world without in essence having the sort of technology required to do Star-Trek style transporting -- a way to compute and simulate the positions and vectors and interactions of particles down to quantum levels. While it might be entertaining to think of a human mind as a computer, it is NOT digital by any means. It's a chain reaction of chemical processes. A "memory" might consist of countless neural associations scattered through various parts of the brain: as I understand it, there's no numeric address that might be assigned to the exact physical location that a particular "memory" resides in, as you might expect to find a block of data on a hard drive.

Therefore, I envision AI as being a lot closer to Blade Runner: using humanity as a pattern, substituting some materials here to get certain physical characteristics we'd like, or engineering certain behaviors by implanting false (and imperfect) memories to get a desired outcome -- with an AWFUL lot of hit-or-miss until you land on a "recipe" with a marketable effect (and not necessarily exactly the one you set out for in the first place, and prone to break down over time as real-life experiences interfere with the "programming" since real people CHANGE over time).

Not to say that I wouldn't write a story about digital consciousness or mass-produced androids, or memory chips or other such things. I think there might still be an interesting story to be told (perhaps a HORRIFYING one). Sometimes accepting what I believe to be an absurdity (or a violation against my beliefs) is necessary as a price of entry to get to an entertaining story.

Re: Master Chef to the Stars: I can think of all sorts of complications beyond just learning some recipes. For starters, I recall the trouble I ran into when trying to replicate recipes I'd been cooking all the time back in Iowa, when I first moved to the Carolinas, and then down to Florida. Namely, Dutch rolls, fruit pizza, snickerdoodles and buttermilk pie DID NOT cook quite the same way in each location. Elevation and air pressure can affect cooking times.

Then there's the matter of availability of ingredients. Sometimes you have to learn to make substitutions ... and to make corrections to try to offset the drawbacks of certain substitutions.

There's also a matter of context. Something may taste a certain way all on its own. Eat it AFTER something else, or in combination with a certain drink, and it may alter the taste significantly. Or, tastes often change with age: I used to adore cake frosting and various sweets that now I find sickening -- I used to HATE dark chocolate ... and now it's what I pick out of those assortment bags for myself. As taste sensitivity fades for some older diners, their preference tends to shift toward saltier palates (or so I've heard -- and it seems to match up with some of my experiences eating with older relatives). And in a sci-fi setting, I can imagine that you'd have to make radical alterations to accommodate alien species. :)

[tuftears]

Holodecks are just plain trouble. :)

AI is certainly a fully viable thing in some sufficiently advanced technology, I just need to limit it for the purr-poses of the story setting. Think of it as a game feature and how players might abuse it: "My character is an AI! Therefore I can copy myself into all available space and all these copies can try to crack this code simultaneously. Rolling for hacking..."

Yep, exactly right, regards cooking difficulties. I'm thinking of a mix of cooking obstacles to overcome:

* Learning to cook in a variety of circumstances (cafeteria mass production, alien environments, multiple courses, "live performance" cooking, etc.)
* Mastering alien tastes, biology, and customs and tailoring recipes for those
* Food safety and cooking processes - you don't want cross-contamination i.e. using the spatula you were using for a heavy metals-laden dish for another dish!
* Understanding alien ingredients, recipes, and techniques
* Logistics (planning meals for a 5 year mission, dealing with a closed cycle life support system and the limited selection of materials available from hydroponics)
* Competing against fellow students, maybe in terms of a sporting competition, maybe with bets on the line or to right a wrong

[jordangreywolf]

Ooo. One challenge I can imagine -- but might be very hard to set up story-wise -- would be the ever-present problem of trying to make one dish to serve to two different aliens at the same table. Depending on how alien your aliens are, that might be simply IMPOSSIBLE in a number of settings (especially if right from the get-go, you can't even share the same atmosphere to safely breathe, hence how in the world would you eat at the same table ;) ). But I imagine some situation where there might be something built up around commonality in palates, wherever that happens.

I'm not sure how to model that with alien species, though. Perhaps it would be easier if the alien races were closer to "on this world, CATS came to dominate," while "on this world, our dinos didn't get wiped out, so it's DINOPEOPLE" and "the cockroaches who survived the nuclear apocalypse* were the predecessors to this world's insectoid race."

(* I've heard that the idea of "cockroaches as nuclear-armageddon-proof" is grossly exaggerated. But I'm running with it anyway just for silliness. ;) )

So what could Periplaneta Sapiens enjoy while sharing a table with Homo Sapiens? ... Well, duh, of course, he'd eat the leftover scraps! :D Ahem. Okay, bad example. But he'd gush over the Kool-Aid (sugar water).

No chocolate for canines. ;)

Eh. I can't think of any *serious* examples. Drat it. It's well out of my area of pseudo-expertise.

[tuftears]

Yeah, I'm going to take the approach that most aliens have a sufficiently similar biology that cooking cross-species is actually doable and not an exercise in futility. :) Progenitors blah blah DNA seeding blah blah. There will still be differences but not to the point of having to figure out how to cook rock.