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The Legion Research Project |
Historian
Joined: June 28, 2005
Posts: 24
|  Posted: 2006-07-27 05:02
[Legion Research Project]
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[Displaying Project Summary]
You will no doubt be aware of the official public mandate for the Legion Research Project:
"To research into advanced macro- and nano-scale artificial intelligences, and to predict and design structures
limiting the probable impact of such technologies on the United Galactic Trade Organisation and its member worlds."
Although this is technically true, the official mandate is somewhat misleading and intentionally vague. The
assumption made by most citizens is that were are researching specifically into human AI technology, and this is true to an extent, but it is only a small part of our true purpose.
Back in 2268, during the Sirius Incident, we recovered the remains of badly damaged K'luth destroyer. Some of the intelligence gathered from this vessel indicated the existence of a third race with which the K'luth were at war.
At the time, the more immediate threat of the K'luth took precedence, and so all resources were directed towards containing this threat and maintaining the stability within the UGTO itself. There was mass panic, rioting and looting accross many of our member worlds as the shock effectively crippled the local governments.
Luckily, order reasserted itself, and we were able to unify our populace before the new threat.
After diplomatic relations with the K'luth Ambassador Shall’kar Yin’Gadark were formally established, it became clear the the real threat was no longer the K'luth themselves, but this other hostile race which the K'luth refer to as the Kraddax (the literal translation of this is "The Legion God").
Our existing intelligence services were effective in gaining much information about the Kraddax, including establishing that the Kraddax is infact a machine intelligence, and it refers to itself as the Mi, or Mir.
Given the impact that the K'luth had on our society, the UGTO High Council met in a closed session, and decided to establish the Legion Research Project. Our official mandate before the Senate is to research into the economic and societical impact of advanced AI technologies, but this is merely to establish a secured line of funding.
Our real purpose is to investigate into and collate the research on Mi, and to slowly leak the knowledge and existence of Mi to the public in a managed way that will cause the minimum damage to the UGTO as a whole.
[End Summary]
[Index]
[Context Reference - The nature of the Mi entity]
[ This Message was edited by: Historian on 2006-07-27 11:44 ]
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Historian
Joined: June 28, 2005
Posts: 24
| Posted: 2006-07-27 11:19
[Displaying Context Reference - The nature of the Mi entity]
As far as we understand, Mi is a singular machine intelligence composed of trillions of semi-autonomous processing units. It is not like the Borg*.
The best analogy to explain how Mi apparently functions would be in how our bodies work. When we pick up an object, we do not consciously control each individual muscle. We simply think to pick an object up, which then triggers our nervous system. Our autonomous reflexes do the rest and work out all the tricky bits, like precisely how much pressure is necessary to maintain a grip. We can exert a degree of conscious control over various elements of this process, but it takes a lot of concentration for us to manipulate our bodies and reflexes in such a manner.
The biggest difference here would be that if one of our arms gets cut off, we immediately lose control and it dies.In contrast, when a section of Mi gets severed from the central mind, it will continue doing whatever its last directive was until it succeeds or is destroyed. Once its objective is complete, it will revert to instinctive survival behaviour where it does what is necessary to continue existing until conscious control can be re-established. This is probably the most dangerous and adaptive state in which we could possibly encounter part of the Mi entity, and unfortunately our intelligence sources indicate that these are the cicumstances with which we are currently presented.
* Borg - a cybernetic hive mind from the long running science fiction series of Star Trek, which recently celebrated it's 300th aniversary.
[End Reference]
[Summary and Index]
[ This Message was edited by: Historian on 2006-07-27 11:40 ]
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