Winter Pet Date

[twilightpony]

Winter Wrap Up is only four days away now. The weather ponies must be scraping out the bottom of their snow flake bins. There's fresh snow on the ground today, but it's all bits and pieces. I guess I won't see the sparkle of fresh snowflakes until next year.

I dropped in on Amethyst Star, Team Leader for the Animal Team. Her supplies are gathered and ready to go. She knows who to assign to what and where, we just have to plan out the timing a bit and it will be perfect.

Next I took Owlowiscious to our pet date, and Spike and my checklist too. While Winona chased snowballs and Angel dug tunnels in the snowbanks, I consulted Rainbow Dash and Applejack, the Team Leaders for the Weather and Plant Teams.

The carts, shovels, plows and bells are dusted, tuned, repaired and ready (check!). Seeds are properly identified and ready to plant, sticks, ribbons and straw all set to go (check check!). Ponyville ponies are old pros at WWU.

The plows, nest making and planting material and half the carts are to be stored at Applejack's, the rest of the material at the morning rendez-vous location, Town Hall. Sounds good to me. I'll double check the inventory with the team leaders on site the day before Winter Wrap Up, to be sure. Maybe we should number the shovels. And put the seeds in alphabetical order; and sort the straw and sticks by size!

Annnd, maybe not. A good friend knows when not to go overboard. I rolled up the checklist and Spike took a nap.

Owlowiscious had a great time hooting directions to Winona who was trying to find the snowballs she hadn't caught. Most of the time, all I could see of Angel was his ears poking out of a burrow. Opal watched from her pet carrier. She had declined to step out into the cold, wet snow. Tank and Gummy were absent. Tank was hibernating and Gummy was feeling sluggish, basking by the oven at Sugar Cube Corner. Snow's not his thing either.

It was a grey day and we didn't stay long. I woke Spike, called Owlowiscious and we all went home.

Comments

[flareblitzfury]

Everything seems all ready! Great to hear!

Also it's good to hear Owlowiscious, Winona, and Angel had some fun!

[twilightpony]

Rarity thinks Opalescence enjoyed watching the other three pets and that the fresh air did her some good.

We're going to make Mayor Mare proud.

[flareblitzfury]

Cool! I'm sure she did!

Yeah! It's going to be a good Winter Wrap Up!

[algernon97]

It sounds like you've got everything in order and ready to go for Winter Wrap Up.

Good thinking to double check the day before. It'd be awful if something was forgotten and you didn't notice until WWU had already started!

[twilightpony]

With some things, like ice skates, ponies provide their own. But it's risky to wait until Winter Wrap Up Day to find out if all the kinds of seeds we need are where we thought they had been stored.

The planned greeting

[borglord]

Alright, let's do this properly (ish).

Hello, Twilight. It's nice to meet you (using "meet" loosely). You can call me Borg; one of my friends took to calling me "the borg lord" because I can come across kind of robotic at times, and I find that to be a more meaningful name in these sorts of circumstances than the one my parents gave me (though I omit the "lord" part when I can; I think it sounds haughty to call myself a lord of any sort).

Like you, I enjoy reading, having the world organized, and understanding things (though I don't enjoy organization as much as you seem to). I'm interested to hear about your world and your life, and I hope we can be friends despite my regrettable tendency to swoop in, say something, and then vanish, rather than carrying out a proper conversation.

Re: The planned greeting

[twilightpony]

Hello Borg! I think you are going to be a fun quill pal to have. Your E-encyclopedia indicates that a robot is a mechanical... doll? Or tool.

Re: The planned greeting

[borglord]

Roughly speaking, yes. More often a tool than a doll, though some robots are purely toys. Does Equestria use magic to make machines that perform very repetitive tasks on their own, or that can be controlled remotely to perform tasks in areas that are dangerous or otherwise inaccessible to ponies? Those would probably be considered robots by Earth terms.

The most interesting robots, though, are the fictional, fully sapient ones. They're usually portrayed as being very logical and emotionless, which is why you can use "robotic" to describe somebody (such as me) who has a generally analytical viewpoint and who doesn't tend to show much emotion.

Re: The planned greeting

[twilightpony]

We have some devices that are impelled by magic, but usually it's a pony that provides the raw horse power that turns a crank or spins a wheel. So no, we don't use wind-up toys to scout out scary places!

You must hope that "sapient" robots remain fictional! If sapient robots were to be made, they would not be limited by gestation periods and child rearing. They would quickly out-compete every living thing for resources and eliminate all living threats and competitors. It's the logical outcome.

Re: The planned greeting

[borglord]

I fear you've been picking up some common misconceptions in your research on Earth. For one thing, machine or not, an extended childhood is most likely necessary for true sapience; it might be possible to copy a single adult artificial brain into a multitude of robots, but it would probably require that all the robots be identical (both physically and mentally), which does not make for a resilient population. And otherwise the robots would still have to spend a long time growing up.

Even if the robots had diversity, they wouldn't necessarily be better-adapted than us. The first sapient robots are almost certain to be poor imitations of their makers: clumsy, dim-witted, and prone to frequent mechanical failure. By the time we can build robots more generally fit than ourselves, we're likely to have figured out how best to live alongside such robots.

Because, really, there's no reason we need to compete with robots at all. We don't need to build them to prefer the same environments as us, and probably will build most of them specifically to operate best in environments inhospitable to us, since that's where we'll most need them. We don't need to give them an instinctive desire to reproduce as rapidly as they are able, and so we almost certainly won't.

Really, we'd likely be in more danger given non-sapient robots that can replicate themselves. Sapient creatures can choose not to compete, to leave areas free for species that they could wipe out. Non-sapient creatures can't.

Re: The planned greeting

[twilightpony]

Copying all existing knowledge into each new robot does not make a robot society vulnerable or cause it to stagnate. Knowledge is additive and the experience of each robot is different causing each to explore different avenues of improvement. This is like having multiple identical universities with the same books. The research and conclusions each university will produce will be a product of their experience.

You have a theory of evolution. All living things make near identical copies of themselves, but in the animal kingdom there is a social evolution aspect that usually can't be copied in the same way. It is the product of this social evolution that is usually transferred in its updated form to sub-adult animals through education. These animals are like books with fill-in-the-blanks sentences on the pages and room for a few sentences more. A sapient robot would have all the sentences filled in and have the ability to edit and add as many pages as fits the situation. A sapient robot would not need a dedicated fill-in-the-blank period, it will be changing to fit the need throughout its existence.

When copying the text from one book to another, it is not necessary for the books to look at all alike. And once the transcription is complete, each copy can become different with the notes that get scribbled in the margins, the lines of text that get highlighted, the pages that get bookmarked, and the essays that get stuffed between the pages. A sapient robot would be even easier to edit and modify.

It is the adults that run society and make the decisions, not the children.

You do have a robot society on Earth and I understand they have been very successful and resilient -- it's the bacteria. You are just fortunate that they aren't sapient. Overall, they use you but they don't need you.

As the dominant sapient species on Earth, I gather you are slowly losing the battle to keep a few of the creatures you hold dear. I think a sapient robot population might not want to keep creatures around that could shut them off, not even as pets or curiosities.

Re: The planned greeting

[borglord]

Childhood is about a lot more than learning culture. It does not take twenty or so years to learn how to make a few basic stone tools and some simple art. We certainly don't need that long to learn how people work; much of that is instinctive. We need that time to learn how non-people work.

A rigid brain is quick and efficient, but only within familiar circumstances; faced with excessively novel events, it will be unable to form reasonable conclusions or choose sensible actions. A plastic brain is easily adapted to new experiences, but it is slower to come to a conclusion and more likely to come to the wrong one in what should be a straightforward choice. A sapient brain in development may be of limited usefulness as it adapts to its circumstances, but a sapient brain that never went through a development phase is adapted to nothing, and serves merely as a very inefficient way to be non-sapient. The closest you could come to avoiding a childhood for sapient robots would be to meticulously design a neural net for a chosen circumstance, in which case all you've accomplished is moving the lengthy childhood to before the first time the robot is powered up.

You really can't learn without making mistakes. If you stick to what you know works, you'll never escape local minima so you can find how terrible they actually were. But if you never stop exploring, you'll never benefit from the minima you found.

So the identical robots would be like a slew of identical universities staffed by identical tenured faculty. Everything is run very efficiently; every professor is teaching at the full of his or her potential, and money is not wasted on faculty who are all flash and no substance. But if the economics department isn't very good, because the one university that was cloned to produce all of these was spending its budget of physics instead, then nobody in the world gets to learn economics very well; better hope nobody needs that. We're going to get lots of great physics research, but only until the economy collapses because we only gave each subject one chance, and economics didn't happen to do well in its one chance.

Humans permit the existence of species that have the potential to kill humans. (It's hard to find a species that couldn't possibly cause death, really). Ponies do the same. Why then must robots necessarily be determined to destroy all that could ever harm them? Are robots required to be vicious so that we can feel moral superiority over them?

I would hardly call bacteria robots. They're biological, they resulted from evolution, and they do not have an intrinsic purpose. Viruses you could maybe call robots, as they're only questionably alive, but bacteria are no more robots than a dog, or a tree, or a mushroom.

Re: The planned greeting

[twilightpony]

I think you're telling me that robots aren't inventive by design. Or that they become inventive if they're built missing parts that they can copy off other robots.

Ponies can reason with most dangerous animals, and when we can't, we push them back into the Everfree Forest. Humans use animals in a way ponies don't. I've read that many are going extinct, usually because they compete for homes with you, and they lose.

Bacteria copy themselves and are born adult. They also share solutions to new problems, adult to adult, using plasmids. They are like living machines that run themselves. Cookie-cutter copies with complex instructions and no dedicated learning period. Ergo, robots.