Reviews by elspru
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A must for any serious AGI developer or Roboticist. , March 12, 2017It helped me discover what I valued most in regards to AGI development and my dreams for the future of robot-human interaction. I’d recommend it to anyone serious about AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) or Robots.
Play
I found the first play through to be the most genuine and enjoyable. My robots ended up with very high autonomy and empathy. I ended up replacing my arm with a robotic prosthetic, and getting a chip in my head, as well as marrying a robot, who said we would go to the stars together.
I played it several other times to get to various other story-archs I was interested in, such as the business, robo cult, hive mind and nation founding ones. I found them to be mildly informative, but most of all it was nice to be faced with these choices, make them and thus have a better idea of what combination of things I truly want for myself.
I found I didn’t like playing “fake” as in making uncharacteristic choices to maximize certain attributes, but found that I could play myself, just keep an eye on the score, and if all the attributes are over 20 by mid game then you’ll have maximum choice with what to do.
Bodies
The host bodies of the robots were rather minimal, though granted most of the plot is really about you, and discovering who you are, rather than gaining any insights about the robots.
One particularly incredulous part was where in 2019, a phone is used for the robots brain. I imagine that perhaps Dr. Gold was under the impression that Siri is an AI that lives in your iPhone/iPad, but that is a common misconception, as actually Siri lives in Apple’s cloud, and sends your voice there, and responses from there. The “Siri” on your phone is little more than a voice message forwarding program.
In reality a phone may be realistic in the 2030’s, as even in the 2020’s when we’re first scheduled to achieve consumer grade human-level computer hardware it will still be workstation/desktop size.
Right now (2017) only large corporations can afford human-level computer hardware, it can take for example contemporary 900 GPU’s to do the work of a Deep Learning computer programmer.
Storyline-Archs
In general I’m happy with the selection of archs available, covers just about every readily apparent eventuality.
Though admittedly I had to play through it maybe 5 or 6 times before getting to all the parts I wanted.
Conclusion
All in all, it’s probably one of the best books/games I’ve ever played in my whole life, and well worth the money.
While it claims to be 300,000 words, I think it depends on how it is counted. A single play through reads like a novella 4-5 hours, can be completed in an evening or two.
Can play the first two chapters for free, the whole game is the cost of a few USB cables ($5).
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