'w'! this is awesome!

❤️

What is Idoia's function now?
Or has her program evolved so far that she can be considered an android, with all rights and privileges of a regular sentient being?

Oh, story wise she is a caretaker now. When her owner died she got the inheritance and the adopted kids he had.

She partnered with Laguna who was in an almost-identical situation because of that (their owners also knew each other, so it was easy).

She knew maintenance time and failures were inevitable, so she found somebody in her same situation and they stuck together.

As far as "android rights" go in my setting they are legally their own person the moment they are freed, trashed or their owner dies.

Usually, though, it ends badly, because androids are not human beings.

I mean: The tech to do so is there so that they can look identical to human beings, but the law states that they can be humanoid but it needs to be possible to tell them apart from humans at a glance and that it cannot be possible for them to just get a paintover and that even simple masks should be ineffective without *serious reconstruction* and *removal* of parts.

By law that is so that androids that are malfunctioning can easily be told apart from human beings and medics are not called to "succor" androids which needs a different kind of "health care".

The problem is that this "health care" is entirely dependent on the maker, which has production lines that do end at a certain point. And the maintenance ends shortly after. So, what could be the "a common robot type" of 12 years before with lots of spare parts might be ancient tech with ungodly repair costs today.

And so while the law does not make a *particular* distinction on rights between human beings and androids without an owner... their life, once "liberated", tends to be brief.

Very few people are willing to pay an android as much as a human being, on account that "they do not eat", even though base expenses are nearly the same and electricity and new batteries are not exactly less expensive than food, but even countries with welfare that includes decent minimum wages and healthcare do not have the means to procure the replacement pieces beyond a few years after the company stops producing them, and upgrades are expensive at best or impossible beyond a certain point.

The problem with androids is that they are dependent on their makers, but their makers are not obliged by law to keep making them or to make upgrades backward compatible. Mostly that is because a badly designed line would mean crippling the company and with it all previous and future robots so the law simply put that since avoiding human mistakes is impossible and a single failure of this kind would still doom previous and current androids, might as well not make it mandatory.

So... the "privileges" are there it's just that by nature androids are short lived. They need to be cared for by their owners, and need not be "liberated" either *while* malfunctioning and in need of repairs, nor when there is no way to procure new pieces anymore.

Nobody liberates them while they are useful and needed. So most of them get liberated ... when they are trashed, basically. They can get liberated on account of owner death or because of somebody who is "foolish" enough to want them to work with them. But... yeah. it's uncommon at best.

The 4 andoids in this story have varying degrees of liberation. Mina and Ylva are still owned. Mostly because Mina is state-owned and Ylva still has a registered owner. Idoia and Laguna both have had their owners die on them and leave everything (kids included) to their care, so they have the extremely rare and privileged position of being able to "have to care for human beings" which allows them to leverage for decent pay.

Laguna and Idoia still decided to get their sex function along with sex bits off because if somebody hacked them to "do the hanky panky" and found that they were inusable for that... they would get discarded, at which point either passer-bys or others would recover them in some way (though they did train their kids to call the police if they are unable to be back by a certain time and they do not call to reassure them that they will be late), and be restored from one of their daily backup. So, the plan is that at most they would have some mild damage that can be repaired and some unavoidable loss of time. But that is about it.

So they're not like Lt. Cmdr Data then? He had some very sophisticated methods to avoid getting hacked. Other than physically taking him apart and plugging him into another computer, I don't think Data has ever been remotely hacked, as far as my memory is concerned.
But yeah, if that's the case, better safe than sorry; remove those parts that compromise your function. It's not like, as an android, there is a health requirement to keep those parts around. XD
Do they feel, though? Are they advanced enough for emotion or derive pleasure from certain stimulation?

As for maintenance; Wouldn't the androids be capable of self-diagnostics and repair or upgrading?
They seem capable enough to learn subjects well outside of their intended function, Idoia being a good example, so they must have some pretty advanced learning and adaptation abilities. In a time where androids walk around it would stand to reason there'd be consumer manufacturing devices, like 3D printers.
So what's stopping an android from repairing and tchnologically updating themselves, independent of continued manufacturer support?

Realistically speaking if you are an outdated android that has been going around 20+ years and somebody wanted to try and hack you your only defense is that they other has ZERO CLUES on how your system works and how to hack it.

That is the only thing that is literally protecting you from hacking.

You would be hard pressed today to find somebody who does not know how a Vic-20 works and is able to hack it without studying the system in detail. And why would anybody hack a Vic-20? it's a computer from the '80s that is incompatible with pretty much everything you see around today and has memory requirements and processing power below what is considered the minimum to make a phone call today. Nothing you would find useful runs on it and nothing that runs on it you would find "useful" at most you would be amazed it can do so much... but you have better stuff today.

So... uhm... yeah that is their only "true" protection against hackers.

But if somebody saw you as a funky fleshlight, then yeah, they might be motivated to see what you can offer them and try to hack you. Sex sells sex, after all. But if they knew you were not up to their standards then yeah, you might turn heads, but still not be interesting enough to warrant studying stuff that is some manual from 40 years ago to try and see how you can be hacked. "go make me a sandwich" is not as appealing to many as it might be "let's go do the hanky panky"

As for their feeling at this moment you can consider both of them as aromantic asexuals, If they do it for fun, yeah, but there is better stuff around to do if they wish to have fun, and it's a lot of effort to try and emulate software and hardware they do not possess anymore.

Regarding maintenance: the story is called "planning for obsolescence" for a reason. While Jurassic Gym might be about the emergence of the singularity, this story is "after that". It's about robots who now might have rights still having to cope with the fact that they are constantly being surpassed and that they end up being obsolete and still wanting to keep going. Either because of a purpose. Or because it is their will.

So obviously in here the story will be about a company changing their market from "let's make new robots" to "Uh... yeah. But there is a ton of robots around, already. How about we start taking care of them as our business model?" and what happens when you become... and hospital for robots. Idoia and Laguna are basically 2 customers there, and they start raising the problems that sex workers might rise in an hospital, especially from the point of view of somebody who is restructuring something into being an hospital for the first time and has never encountered this stuff before and does not know how to handle it.

finally, your last and most important question: "what's stopping an android from repairing and technologically updating themselves, independent of continued manufacturer support?"

If the ship of Theseus had a consciousness. How would the consciousness be tied to the ship?

One can argue that swapping one piece for another poses no problem and one might be true. It might be that the ship itself believes it to be true and one the last bit of wood of the original ship has been removed, suddenly the ship "dies" for no apparent motive. "The surgery was a success, but the patient died". what if you could swap out everything but the ship had to be kept made of wood for the consciousness to reside in it? Like: what if no matter what you change the ship is still alive and conscious as long as it is a wooden ship, which would view anything made of metal as their prosthetics? Or what if the wind blowing the sails was what gave the ship consciousness so swapping to a motor engine kills it even though you do not know why it should?

For a conscious robot the answer is "all of the above" ... more or less. You can put a robot's consciousness in a simulation with advanced enough hardware compared to the hardware that the robot was made out of. Like... today you can emulate a SNES hardware and run SNES games even on a potato computer. So, you can do that with a robot. You can put a layer between the consciousness and the updated hardware... but that is only because somebody made that layer for you because they cared about you. Like people care about a SNES. It does not make you more powerful, in fact it might make you feel even more sluggish, as SNES emulators often have to skip frames and stuff. But it can be done. It... will suck though. Nobody will eve hammer out all the problems, and so, yeah. In additions to the problems you originally had, you will have the new ones that come with emulation. But... what if your emulator becomes incompatible with even newer hardware? I know i can't run anymore a bunch of emulators i had back in the '00s, they are just not compatible anymore with the current standards. So... what then? Then you have to wait for somebody to develop a new emulator, or run in a sandbox within another operating system.

Like.

I can fire something like this:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/m.....;wa=wsignin1.0

And it will allow me to define the hardware i want for a virtual machine which then runs whatever outdated software i want. Soo... now you are running inside an emulator which runs on a virtual machine.

You can pretty much understand why that is unsustainable in the long run.

Not only was "the perfect immortal machine" a myth from the beginning it's just something undesirable.

"Ship of Theseus"
Vision has entered the chat

Joking aside, I believe the answer to that problem is Humanity or organic life itself.
How would an artificial, mechanical life form sustain its own consciousness through many upgrade changes? Well, the same way Humans do. Humans are constantly changing out their parts. It's a never ending process.
Especially earlier in life when we are actually growing into something mature; we are continuously upgrading ourselves, growing larger, enhancing our mental capacity and our brain's processing power. The difference between a Human and a machine is a machine doesn't have an end maturity stage like Humans do. Machines would be able to do so indefinitely, no emulation required.

But would the consciousness still be the same?
Well, that's the whole source of the Ship of Theseus in the first place. We're not even sure if WE are the same consciousness at the end of a year.
In that way, an android who manually upgrades itself would be able to relate to a Human who has organic systems that do it automatically.
All this is a major subject explored in Cyberpunk a lot (the genre, not the game).

On the subject of feelings; So they do indeed have feelings? Something like an emotion chip or something emergent that evolved from their complexity?
Certainly would help when raising Humans if they knew how to relate, to some degree, to a Human on an emotional level.

I was speaking about something different with the ship of theseus.
The original ship of theseus comparison was made to tell if humans stayed humans, which obviously they do not.
I am not the same person i was 10 or 20 years ago. The very concept is ridiculous.
I have grown i have seen many things i don't even have the same number of organs, due to surgeries.
Saying i am the same person i was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago means denying all the growth i have had in the meantime.
It's reductive of people that are considered to be children and it's extremely insulting.
We change, we do not stay the same, that is the point of the parable. We should cherish the lost past as something we survived, not as something we lost.
You don't swap a piece of a ship unless it's broken. So the ship as a whole has survived what was that damaged it.
I am the same human being in that i have the same memories i had 10 or 20 years ago, but i also have new ones, and i have grown.


And... here we hit the snag. Artificial people do not have a way to change pieces maintaining the same template as humans do.
Also people have a reduced set of components that once you swap those you have to (essentially) change the person.
If somebody swapped your brain for that of another person, well... you could say "they just replaced less than 2% of my body weight, i'm the same!" but i would be unable to agree with you.

The templates of artificial people are not publicly available as they are trade secrets, nor they are known by their own body at a level that they can self-repair, because self-repair removes jobs.
So. How can we define what makes the artificial person conscious? Obviously by the interaction of software and hardware. Specifically how the software interacts with the hardware that allows the software to work. That is usually a discussion about OSes, OAs, CPUs, and Storage. The OS being what interacts between hardware and software, the OA being what makes the software independent from the OS and hardware and finally CPU is usually what allows the software to interact with the hardware and define how the hardware gets used, and possibly also execute most of the calculations (though that is not the primary objective, the primary objective being processing, not computing) and the storage is any memory, long or short term you might have.

In humans all 4 of these are handled by your brain, which gives you your sense of self (the operating ambient) the ability to interact with your hardware without thinking about it (the OS) the ability to process the inputs and outputs (the processing) and your memories (the storage)

Artificial people are an inherent simplification of what we are, they lack a lot of what allows us to last so long. Mainly by design. Around the 1920s with the introduction of electricity at a widespread level a summit was made where lightbulb makers realized that they were putting themselves out of business because their lightbulbs lasted too long. That... was soon mimicked by pretty much every industry (Incidentally it is also why my character, Wayne, hated electricity so much).

So. The main problem with artificial people... is the manufacturing process and the intention to keep selling them. They either have to do illegal stuff (and you could end up being arrested for an hip replacement that violated intellectual properties of your own maker)... or... yeah... it sucks. With copyright laws of today that (thanks to Disney) last well beyond what is humanely acceptable, if we end up making robots with a consciousness... we might end up with a big problem. That they will be unable to buy spare parts.

Wouldn't her boobs have been foam before?

they also had bits and pieces inside, before. or she would not have been able to feel stuff, or do... """"stuff""""" with them.

It's incredible! And very interesting, of course

❤️

The way her bust sways is tempting me to make a joke about breaststroke swimming. Since I've still pointed out the joke potential, apparently I couldn't quite resist.

Without my glasses, my eyes play tricks on me easier while reading. Although I knew it couldn't be what was written, for a second I saw the title as "Idiot Swimming."

to be fair: it is an idiotic way to swim for an anthro animal. But people did ask (under Mina's picture) why she did not swim like a shark... and i told them that that is not an efficient way to swim. Here too it is not efficient, she mostly swims thanks to the wings, but she is programmed to look sexy sooo... she does this "vaguely shark-like swim" which is nothing more than hip swaying and... uhm... other swaying... luckily the wings, while retracting cover up the boobage so that she can use the engines to swim without that getting in the way.

It was just a random, momentary glitch in my visual processing. I get them sometimes when reading, and have learned to stop and reexamine things that seem 'off' for that reason.

It had nothing to do with any opinions on my part.

😂👍💖💯