Intergalactic Summit

No, some things are flat out impossible. A rogue drone cannot fundamentally rebuild hardware with programming alone, nor can its programming fly through the open air to infect other systems unless you provide it the means to do so. A closed system will trap a rogue drone as effectively as it would a human being. The absolute worst I could see it doing to a closed system is destroying itself, and at worst the immediate area around the computer it is being stored in, and even that requires a mind-boggling amount of negligence on the part of its captors.

Anyways, as to your reply to me... scientists used to think it was fundamentally impossible to examine the base programming of a human being. Some still do, despite all evidence to the contrary. It is not a question of "We cannot extract a rogue drone mindstate" but instead a question of "How can we safely extract a rogue drone mindstate to ensure viability" and "Should we extract a rogue drone mind state against the rogue drones will". Theories have been proposed about how to do the first. It is up to you to decide the answer to the second.

Yes, that is what we are saying.

Interesting debate...

im not qualified to go into whats moral or not, but id like to point to a few thoughts... Everything in the universe is energy in some form or shape... energy is what makes up the particles, that created the base elements in the periodic system... these base elements forms cells, wich in their turn build up my body... through code, the DNA code... my body creates a biochemical process, wich creates currents wich allows my synapses in my brain to think, and thus making me sentient...

These drones, robots, tincans, call them what you want, but they are made up off same energy like you and i, they may not be organic, yet their code is self learning, AI, sentient ?

And if we should label them a "spiecies" , if i were a drone, and had reasoning, id be very coutious and defensive when it comes to dealing with humanity... the history dont exactly prove them wrong, and if we were to compare wich spieces comitted most atrocities !

You are ignoring the year YC 37 in which a peaceful Sansha's Nation was staying in Stain 'where it belonged', and yet the empires definitely 'gave a **** about its existance' to the point of glassing several planets, killing almost everyone in Nation, and necessitating that the survivors go on a permanent war footing against what had turned out to be an existential threat.

We were peaceful until you did this, Bai'xao, so what you said remains demonstrably untrue.

Ah, yes, the propaganda angle. Did Kuvakei use slaves purchased from the Amarr? Certainly. He made them better in almost every single way. He improved their cognition, their strength, their reaction time. He gave them a very special place in the growing Nation, as the first of the True's. I understand some of them are still around, and they are almost as Venerated as the master.

Where you fall off the rails is the claim that we captured civilians. If you have evidence of this, I would love to see it, but I doubt you do. There were more than enough people flocking to Nation to become a part of Utopia, and so there was no need to do more. This was the real threat we posed, that our way of life was enticing enough to people that we became a threat to the old guard.

You say the Master was insane. We disagree. We also have much closer line in on him than you do, so we have more data points to work from, and considering that all your information comes from post-facto sources published by the 'victors' of the conflict... well, has anyone who has lost a fight of that magnitude ever been called anything but mad? I doubt that the citizens of your empires would have taken well to being told that they were, in part, for the (at the time deemed successful) genocide of several billion Utopian idealists who were busy keeping to themselves.

So yes, we attack you now, because we realize that we cannot live with you as you are. You have proven this, and there are two major lines of thought. Either we simply have to put ourselves on an equal or slightly superior footing to your empires, at which point we can consider ourselves safe and live with you. This is the reconciliationist line of thinking.

There is a second line of thought which says that we cannot live with you at all. We will never be safe until your empires are ground into dust and your people have been forced to become a part of Nation, or die.

The very fact that these two separate ideas exist disproves that there is not a 'line of individual thought' within Nation. Do you still believe otherwise?

There talents lie elsewhere, and they have very little need for full language functionality. How much talking do you think goes on in a collectivized mind?

We are not interested in your hearts and minds. When I tell you these things, it is not to bring you over to my side, it is to explain to you why things are proceeding as they are.

That last point is understood.

The first point, though, I think you are still mishandling. They sound like robots because they are speaking what is effectively a foreign language, using concepts that are no longer necessary in a post-connected state in 99% of cases (I've been known to communicate with my fellow Networked types by sending feelings, impressions, concepts, all without the use of language as it is technically considered, and I'm remarkably verbal for someone with a Network), with a speech organ that is likely unused. Of course they sound awkward.

Okay. I don't see the problem with this.

Such a curious, wondrous concept, this one of a collectivized mind, Tibbers.

It's almost poetry, don't you think? That the inefficiencies of language as opposed to post-language communications via a Network cannot themselves be adequately described through our verbalization.

Truly a romantic thought. I cannot fathom what an improvement it must be to the lives of a Networked collective.

Amusement; Anslo appreciates the reasons why the commoner looks unfavorably upon a True Slave but himself looks unfavorably upon the Rogue Drones for the same reasons.

And if I may ask, is the stance of 'as much as necessary and no more' so terrible?

So much conflict, so many human toils written out from our behavior entirely.

And really, what is 'freedom' exactly? Or rather, what does it mean to 'be free' as we refer to it?

But of course, I digress.