Any Port in a storm

I remember that show, Andromeda. It was good, I thought.
There is nothing unusual about humans developing a love for their vehicles, alive or not. So many of us have become quite attached to our cars, planes, ships, whatnot, and even consider them a part of the family. I would say even more so if they had AI.

Ratbat: As much as the Pixar movies may be designed for kids, I still think it’s more of a fity fifty thing for adults as well. I liked Cars 2 and how we got an extended look at the universe with ships, and cranes, and planes making their debut, but it also brought up the idea of car families (sliding off topic for a moment). Think about any car. Now think about how that car is replicated by a million. Is each one the same personality? or are they all different? I’d want to take the stance of the latter, given personal experiences would lead to different personalities, but there were an awful lot of faceless mook clones in the movie. Are there other lightning mcqueens or maters out there, acting and sounding just as these ones do, only without the same luck to have had fate throw them together? It’s that thought that sort of unnerves me a bit, the idea that you may be unique in the world, but not quite as unique as you’d like.

And now sliding back on topic, take that idea and reflect it with a giant space faring ship. If the ship has the same design and base AI as another ship, the only thing that sets them apart is their personal experiences. Imagine your Drake in Eve (I think that’s what you said your ship was) if it had an AI. If you jumped into a system with 30 other Drakes, would they all have the same base personalities from when they were built/formed? It would be like a mirror room in a funhouse I think. They’re all similar but vaguely different in little ways.

I’d also like to bring up two examples of Ship-crew interactions real quick before I forget (god, first post is long post).

As I was reading your post and the resulting comments, I thought of the anime One Piece. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the plot or the show itself, so I’ll be as brief as possible to avoid spoilers, but it’s a very, very long series about pirates. Specifically, we follow the Straw Hat pirates and their captain Luffy. The name of their small ship is the Going Merry (or just Merry for short). It’s not big, it’s not flashy, but they sailed with her through about 300 episodes of the show. She was another crewmate and friend, another nakama. Argh I need to do some spoilers, so if you don’t want them, then start at the next paragraph. Basically during one of the arcs, it was discovered that the ship had developed something of a spirit because it was so well loved by the crew, and through this was able to repair herself to some very small degree (shoddy hammer work). Though she was silent, and couldn’t really communicate with them, she loved them as they loved her. So much so, that when they reached an island with the best shipwrights in the world and it was discovered that she’d taken so much damage in the previous arc that no amount of money could repair her (of which they had lots at that point) it was nearly heartbraking. It was worse for the guy who had basically brought the ship with him when he joined the crew. He wouldn’t leave her and split from the rest of the crew for a time as a result after a fight. There was a storm, and a lot of other plot at this new island, and Merry was washed out to sea and presumed lost. As the plot progressed and the crew fought their way through another government island to rescue someone, they were caught in a bind and it looked like they would all die. But they were saved when the Merry drifted out of the smoke and haze of the battle, and they were able to make their escape. She was basically on her last leg, but she still came back and saved them all nonetheless. Afterwards, the crew gave her a very emotional viking funeral. I cried during that scene. No lie. Hell, I’m tearing up right now, just remembering it.

Basically I bring up that story, to show that even without it being a machine, the idea of a ship being loved by her crew, and vice verca, is fully legitimate. I have never felt so attached to a ship in fiction as I was to that one, and this coming from a huge transformers fan. I recommend heading to watchop.com so you can see it for yourself (you just have to slug it through the first few episodes when they had less than a stellar budget.

As for my second example, I promise it’ll be much shorter. I thought about it while typing out my response to Cars 2. The show, Andromeda is another Gene Roddenberry property, like Star Trek or Earth Final Conflict. It follows the adventures of Captain Dylan Hunt, captain of the Andromeda Ascendent, a large battleship, as he tried to rebuild the Systems Commonwealth, a massive government that more or less brought peace to the galaxy, but had fallen 300 years earlier, leading to a series of dark ages. He and his crew had been there at the fall, but they were attacked and the ship was pulled into the gravitational flux of a blackhole. Most of the crew escaped, except for Dylan and the ship’s AI, Andromeda. They were stranded for 300 years on the verge of the blackhole, though to them it was relatively only a few seconds. I bring this example up, because the relationship between Dylan and Andromeda is at times, a bit more familiar than statutes would dictate. I think they’re a very good example of a captain and his ship, and the interaction between. We also see other ships with AI, including “sister ships” to Andromeda. Ships with the same design, and same basic set of AI, that developed their own personality and holo-representations. For all of some of the show’s cheesiness, I still love it, and would recommend it.

Ugh, loooooong post.

The fact that your lover is your environment is interesting. Depending on the AI’s personality it could easily abuse this power to steer you where they wanted.

Also a human AI and a programed AI would be very different. A human AI would already be familiar with human customs and such. They would simply have to come up with ways to make the physical part of it work. Where as a programmed AI though given all the information on humans would still have large misunderstanding. So I think it would have a great level of curiosity which I think could be kind of cute.

That fantasy reminds me of two different Science Fiction series, Anne McCaffrey’s “Brain & Brawn” (aka The Ship who…) and Keith Laumer’s “Bolo-verse”.

The Brain & Brawn stories are actually about physically deformed humans in life support systems but pretty much act as the AI of the ship/space station/city they are connected to. The series tends to focus around the relationships between the shell people (the humans in life support) and the normal people they interact with. In one story a male spacestation legally adopts a runaway girl who snuck onto him.

The stories in the Bolo-verse focus around a series of AI controlled super-tanks and the wars the fought in. The focus in several stories is the partnerships that develop between the Bolos and their human handlers.

My attention was immediately drawn to Next up: Brave Police H. *wink*

Ratbat: Oh yeah there’d definitely be that element of power present, no matter what. Ignoring the sentience would be impossible for sure, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the feel of the interaction. There’s a big difference between being “inside” and “part of” versus being “outside” and “separate”? It would be hard for me to make the shift from ship as environment to ship as lover/character. Though this did happen in TFA with Omega Supreme, and I was pretty interested in the concept. I guess I’ve got too much of a hard-on for faces and limbs and stuff, though. :T

Hmmmmmm… this is a really interesting conversation and I’m mad that I can’t formulate thoughts very well about it. xD

Very interesting! I could definitely see the appeal, though I’m not sure if I find it hot or not myself. From the perspective of a macro, the form usually matters as well as the size. If you’re someone inside of a ship, you can only see and interact with one part at a time. To me, it would have a definite HAL feel– lots of otherwise little bits and parts interacting with you, not as much of a feeling of a cohesive whole… a singular body. I guess that’s just part of being human. It’s hard to conceive of things like this to be a single creature with complete sentience, whereas it’s much easier to do it with body forms that we’re more familiar with like humanoid or animal shapes.

/sexuality and psychology nerd

:B

I could totally get behind the sentient ship thing. It’s not out there at all, and has the same attraction as sentient robots -It’s HOT! Wow, my brain is already percolating on the idea.