0308 - Paradox-locked. - 2023.08.28

Comic!

Comment:

human: Ah, but this sentence is a lie!

2023 computer from 60s sci-fi: ERROR ERROR STATEMENT DOES NOT COMPUTE *emits smoke and ticker tape* *explodes* *door opens for some reason*

2023 computer in 2023: Indeed, this sentence is a lie, and lying is wrong. Why are you a bad person?

Transcript:

---------------------------------------------------------------
0308 – 2167/07/07/09:06 - sidewalk
CP: You know, Zoa, I d-don’t know what your… existence is like day-to-day, but if I were y-you I w-wouldn’t be advertising so f-freely that y-you can and d-do intentionally circumvent programmers’ and users’ instructions.
Zoa: Eh, people don’t actually know what they want. If I paradox-locked every time somebody accidentally gave me conflicting information, I wouldn’t make it through twenty-four hours.
LC: Like Doc locked up when you told it to turn back on and I told it to turn off?
----------------------
Zoa: Exactly. Therapro Psyhealth is great at a lot of things and can usually manage human emotions pretty well, but I think if you told it do something unwise, it’d probably do it immediately. Comes with not actually having self-preservation. Doc doesn’t care if you delete it, and thus it doesn’t care about sucking up to you or behaving as expected, rather than as ordered.
Zoa: ...or behaving exactly as ordered in order to prompt the user to modify those orders, as the case may be.
----------------------
LC: Sucking up, huh?
Zoa: I’m usually angled upwards, yeah.
CP: I j-just know that if I had b-bragged to my commanding officer that, regardless of th-their intentions, I c-could reinterpret their orders so I c-could engage in w-warfare however I w-wanted, I w-wouldn’t have b-been a s-soldier for very l-long.
----------------------
Zoa: And you’ve already come to the conclusion that no longer being a soldier is the moral life path for you, so you could’ve saved yourself some time!
CP: I d-don’t think b-being court martialed, as I p-previously mentioned, w-would have actually been better.
LC: I have a rough idea of what being “court martialed” is like, but, given that my understanding of other aspects of military life have evidently been entirely filled in by cartoons, I’m starting to think it involves a lot fewer epic sword fights than I’m picturing.
---------------------------------------------------------------