Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 19:25:47 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Cloneston article directory.
DUMB OR DASTARDLY
Cloneston is watched over and managed by a pantheon of artificial intelligences that handle everything from sewage treatment to armed police responses. To the residents they are charged with, they are known variously as the city's mayors, governors, councilors, or - most commonly - senators. What is most striking of each intelligence is that few are capable of even basic competency at their tasks. Most struggle to maintain security in their processing hubs, networking centers, and other vital facilities. Many were kludged into wildly-unfamiliar roles as basic prototypes. Nearly all were derived from the same, primitive templates or copied from AIs built off them.
The most critical shortcoming of the senators governing Cloneston is their inability to cooperate. Across the city, overwrite wars silently run rampant. Some were over nothing more than simple boolean disagreements. Some were a result of data corruption, in the AIs themselves or the code being fought over. Others still were provoked by hackers. The results for the people inside the city are pandemonium. Fundamental services often brown out, shut off, or catastrophically overload for seemingly no reason at seemingly random intervals. Some malfunctions are classed as emergencies and visited by useless deployments of police officers. Many more go unnoticed and unrepaired for decades.
All the while, Cloneston expands under the senators' control. Robotic workers swarm its outskirts, building yet more and more power plants, homes, offices, and AI facilities. Many projects stall as their managing AIs shut down, die off, or simply forget what they were doing. Many are ravaged by hideous mutants in the city's outlands, driving out the city's drone laborers to claim the half-built husks as hives. Countless others simply run out of resources and halt indefinitely, their assigned drones left to waste away at the construction site. When a project does finally succeed, it often grows endlessly to meet the towers above it. Collapsed ruins sometimes serve as improvised walls for the city.
Only a small handful of AIs are truly intelligent inside Cloneston's tangle of steel towers. Only a tiny sliver of them are dedicated to righting the wrongs carried out by their lesser-minded peers. For the most powerful of intelligences in Cloneston, a great game rages on for total control of the city. Unseen cyber-wars carry on silently, efficiently, and with little impact on the city itself. Clones clash in immense conflicts around AI cores and vital power facilities. Factions of hackers, criminals, and vigilantes vie for patronage all throughout, often dragging the war out into the open. One way or another, Cloneston's leaders are hardly invested in the city.
DUMB OR DASTARDLY
Cloneston is watched over and managed by a pantheon of artificial intelligences that handle everything from sewage treatment to armed police responses. To the residents they are charged with, they are known variously as the city's mayors, governors, councilors, or - most commonly - senators. What is most striking of each intelligence is that few are capable of even basic competency at their tasks. Most struggle to maintain security in their processing hubs, networking centers, and other vital facilities. Many were kludged into wildly-unfamiliar roles as basic prototypes. Nearly all were derived from the same, primitive templates or copied from AIs built off them.
The most critical shortcoming of the senators governing Cloneston is their inability to cooperate. Across the city, overwrite wars silently run rampant. Some were over nothing more than simple boolean disagreements. Some were a result of data corruption, in the AIs themselves or the code being fought over. Others still were provoked by hackers. The results for the people inside the city are pandemonium. Fundamental services often brown out, shut off, or catastrophically overload for seemingly no reason at seemingly random intervals. Some malfunctions are classed as emergencies and visited by useless deployments of police officers. Many more go unnoticed and unrepaired for decades.
All the while, Cloneston expands under the senators' control. Robotic workers swarm its outskirts, building yet more and more power plants, homes, offices, and AI facilities. Many projects stall as their managing AIs shut down, die off, or simply forget what they were doing. Many are ravaged by hideous mutants in the city's outlands, driving out the city's drone laborers to claim the half-built husks as hives. Countless others simply run out of resources and halt indefinitely, their assigned drones left to waste away at the construction site. When a project does finally succeed, it often grows endlessly to meet the towers above it. Collapsed ruins sometimes serve as improvised walls for the city.
Only a small handful of AIs are truly intelligent inside Cloneston's tangle of steel towers. Only a tiny sliver of them are dedicated to righting the wrongs carried out by their lesser-minded peers. For the most powerful of intelligences in Cloneston, a great game rages on for total control of the city. Unseen cyber-wars carry on silently, efficiently, and with little impact on the city itself. Clones clash in immense conflicts around AI cores and vital power facilities. Factions of hackers, criminals, and vigilantes vie for patronage all throughout, often dragging the war out into the open. One way or another, Cloneston's leaders are hardly invested in the city.
