redbugpest wrote:So, to make this excessively clear:
Did Alia have detailed OM? Yes - She was a pre born RM and had access to OM
Did it go back hundreds of years? Yes
Do we have any indication of some time-limit on anyones OM?Not that I could see
Do we have any reason to doubt Alia's went back to the time of Omnius?No, just how many of those personas she had some form of contact with.
Did she know Omnious was a murderous, evil AI which turned on humanity and almost wiped it out?She knew of the Jihad, so she would have known about Omnius
Great, good to get that out of the way. Lets just quickly recap the argument and relevant quote:
1 - Alia has memories from the time of the Jihad, about Omnius et al. (originals).
2 - A. wishes for a machine to give her mentat level advice (Dune Messiah).
3 - A. characterises such a machine as 'compliant' and trustworthy (DM).
4 - A machine with mentat-like capabilities is a powerful artificial intelligence (definition).
5 - Omnius was a powerful artificial intelligence (prequels).
6 - O. tried to enslave and kill mankind (prequels).
7 - O. was an AI which was not compliant or trustworthy (5 and 6).
8 - Alia knows that a powerful AI can be untrustworthy and non-'compliant' the degree of enabling genocide (1 and 7).
9 - A. believes a powerful AI would be trustworthy and 'compliant' (3 and 4).
10 - A. both believes, and does not believe, that a powerful artificial intelligence is 'compliant' and trustworthy (8 and 9).
(So you could have just said, from the beginning; "I agree with 1, 5, 6, 7, 8" but have problem with the line of reasoning which ends in 9. This would have saved us some time and unnecessary arguments.)
Frank Herbert, in Children of Dune wrote:I should've left him at Sietch Tabr, Alia thought. It would've been better to just turn Irulan over to Javid for questioning.
Within her skull, Alia heard a rumbling voice: "Exactly!"
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! she thought. A dangerous mistake beckoned her in these moments and she could not recognize its outlines. All she could sense was the danger. Idaho had to help her out of this predicament. He was a mentat. Mentats were necessary. The human-computer replaced the mechanical devices destroyed by the Butlerian Jihad. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind! But Alia longed now for a compliant machine. They could not have suffered from Idaho's limitations. You could never distrust a machine.
Now, you are saying something about how what she is thinking about is different from Omnius:
redbugpest wrote:Lundse wrote:Did she also, at the exact same time, think about AIs that they were "compliant" and something you could "never distrust"?
Yes. In the same way that Leto II knew that the Ixan's were not to be feard - the technology that created the threat of the the Jihad was lost to them. Her musing ofr a mentat like AI that "you could never distrust" does not have to be an Over mind AI such as Omnius. There is no contradiction in her having knowledge of Omnius and the ensuing Jihad and thinking she could have her own trustworthy AI.
Just because she has other memory does not mean that she experiences the experience that the ego / memories of an ancestor reveal to her.
Here is an example from Chapterhouse, where Tam is being questioned by Odrade about her desert experience:
“Other Memory tells me what I need to know” (Tam)
“It’s not the same, Tam. You have to do it yourself”
I think this also supports the difference between other memory and Gohla memory.
The only relevant thing here is your claim that "a mentat-like AI which is trustworthy" does not have to be "like Omnius".
Except it is not relevant. At all. You are of course right that one could imagine such AIs, which are both trustworthy and quite unlike Omnius. The problem is that she is thinking about all AIs, and at the very least about AIs in general. Let me direct you to the last part of the quote:
Frank Herbert, in Children of Dune wrote:The human-computer replaced the mechanical devices destroyed by the Butlerian Jihad. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind! But Alia longed now for a compliant machine. They could not have suffered from Idaho's limitations. You could never distrust a machine.
What is Alia thinking about here? What kind of things is it which she is musing about in the later sentences?
"...mechanical devices destroyed by the Butlerian Jihad..."
This is a general description of powerful (and lesser) AIs. It even says specifically that it was the machines from the time of the Jihad. Does this include Omnius. You bet!
Then she quotes a bit in her head and goes on to state a few things to herself, about these machines. Note that she is not musing about some hypothetical machine which humanity might be able to build now, it is machines from the Jihad which has her thinking. And she thinks:
"...compliant machine..." and well as
"You could never distrust a machine."
(Also note that she uses
"They could not have..." between these two quotes. If the machine she is thinking about is hypothetical and has nothing to do with the machines from the Jihad, of which Omnius is one, she would have thought: "Such a machine could not..." - notice the missing "have".)
It is machines in general, specifically including those from the Jihad (which logically entails Omnius) that she is thinking about. And she is thinking they are compliant and trustworthy.
So your suggestion that she is thinking about different kinds of machines (one kind from the Jihad, including Omnius, and another which is all nice and stuff). This entails that in the above quote, Alia is thinking, in the first sentence, about the Butlerian Jihad and the machines that were destroyed. She quotes. Then she thinks about a possibly compliant machine - without indicating in any way that she is shifting her thinking to the hypothetical. Then she thinks about machines in the past, presumably from the Jihad - this cannot be hypothetical (and she even continues her train of thought, praising machines over mentats - in a passage you claim is not about the same kind of machines at all). Then she returns to praise machines of the hypothetical kind again - and again without in any way indicating that she has shifted to thinking about another kind of machine entirely from the one which tried to slaughter mankind.
My question is this:
How, in the name of all that is holy, do you make that reading out of the following. How is that not a train of thought about one kind of machines (machines in general), which specifically include machines from the Jihad?
Look it over:
Frank Herbert, in Children of Dune wrote:The human-computer replaced the mechanical devices destroyed by the Butlerian Jihad. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind! But Alia longed now for a compliant machine. They could not have suffered from Idaho's limitations. You could never distrust a machine.