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Comment by IdontRememberIt | Hacker News Reader

When I am watching Battlestar Galactica or most of the other scifi, I am always puzzled to see that the scenarists never take AI to fully operate a spaceship (piloting during landing/takeoff, firing, targeting enemies, etc).

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The series starts right after the Cylons, an artificial intelligence created by humans, destroys several planets. Decades before they fought another war when the machines first rebelled. By the time BSG tolls around, any artificial intelligence is taboo and Adama refuses to even enable digital communication between ship subsystems except in one scenario where they had to hard reset all systems to flush a Cylon virus.

to add to this, it's implied (or maybe stated explicitly, I forget) that one of the reasons galactica survived the initial attack is because it's an older warship without the sophisticated computer systems of the newer ships. the newer ships were trivially compromised by the cylons.

> the newer ships were trivially compromised by the cylons.

No.... Caprica six slept with Baltar who gave her access to the defense mainframe. She modified a version of the new fleet control system with the vulnerability that allowed the cylons to take over the fleet.

Galactica survives because she's a museum ship and would never get the update and was built in a time where computer systems were not networked inside battlestars. Another battlestar (spoilers) survives because it was shut down and getting the upgrades.

There are definitely several lines which suggests that Galactica is older than most of the fleet. I recall one line where they say something about how everything is hardwired, and there's no central computer, or something. Something about how it was built during the Cylon wars, which was different than the newer ships which were built after Cylons weren't a threat so they relied on more centralized computer systems.

You can both be right.

They did have that entire episode where they need to network everything together and do the entire "getting hacked live" thing.

I forget if there was anything special with the computers at that point

It's more common in novels and games. But it happens in TV and movies too, take HAL 9000 for example. And you also have to consider that a lot of scifi shows predate deep learning, so it's often referred to as "the computer" instead and AI is reserved for AGI, usually with personality and a humanoid avatar. In TNG the ship computer handled a lot of routines where the crew only provided high level input. It's advanced enough to run realistic holodeck scenarios. Stargate Universe also had a ship that was mostly run by the computer and made decisions that were often inscrutable to the occupants and only made sense in retrospect.

Oh, yes, stargate. Some civilisations had interesting level of automation in some episodes.

As others have noted, BSG specifically has internal story logic which explains why there isn't AI all over the place on the human side. However, more generally, AIs slugging it out, probably over great distances, over timeframes that would probably be very different (both quick and slow) from a human dogfight probably wouldn't be very interesting to viewers relative to essentially WWII dogfights in space.

(And, in general, some version of WWII combat (plus lasers, etc.) is still the model for most SF--even when it's not very deliberately aping it as in the case of Star Wars.

There was a scene in one of the culture novels (I can’t remember now but maybe Excession?) where a ship Mind narrates the progress of a battle to a human onboard.

Forgive my poor memory but it was a really cool battle. The Mind explained methodically and gleefully how it found and destroyed a bunch of enemy ships.

Anyway, at some point the human asks a question and the Mind says something along the lines of, “oh, the battle is already over. It only lasted three seconds”.

Maybe someone can help me remember where this happened.

I believe that was Surface Detail. Having trouble coming up with the exact quote at the moment. I think it was Demeisen of the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints explaining to Lededje.

That sounds like it might be right. Time for a re-read!

Long time since I’ve read any of the Culture novels but I’m not surprised there are examples there. I also remember there being scenes in The Forever War. And maybe the expanse although I forget how much of that was AI as opposed to just preparing for high G.

AI's fighting it out while the human crew does nothing is not compelling drama. That's why Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. etc. all have 2nd World War style fighting going on. To get a more realistic idea of what future battles will be like, you need to read Ian M. Banks. In his books, humans are (correctly) too slow and fragile to do any fighting.

Sci-fi is mostly about human entertainment and AI on AI battles just aren't as relatable. Consider something like chess, it used to be quite a drama in the human battles for world champion whereas computer vs computer is a bit meh. The trouble with human vs AI is it tends to be one sided on way or the other.

Actually, drama/soap opera is the part I am not a fan in scifi. I had pain watching Netflix's star trek and see the hero of the saga crying 10 minutes per episode... But I understand, it is here to target a broader audience.

Rewatch the mini-series.

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