runsforcelery wrote:feyhunde wrote:I'm just amused here as everything being discussed re: computers are common discussion topics on why doesn't the honorverse have X.
The Honorverse doesn't have self-aware AI for two reasons. One is that I had just finished two different novels, both of which had fully self-aware AIs in them, and I wanted something different. Same reason for the keyboards; both
Mutineers' Moon and
Path of the Fury had direct neural interfacing and I wanted something different for the Honorverse.
There's a
heap of "expert programs" and "brilliant software" running in the Honorverse; it's usually just far enough in the background that it doesn't show, and the characters don't think about it a lot more than a 21st century American thinks about electricity. It's just there, doing it's job. You see some of it surfacing occasionally, usually when the AI is interfacing with a human character and usually in a civilian setting. Verbal commands are not used by the military for a lot of reasons, but the big one is that I've written using voice recognition software for 26 years, and in that time I have been greatly impressed by its ability to misunderstand me even under optimum audio conditions. I know perfectly well the Honorverse's tech could deal with that; it's just pissed me off enough upon occasion that I decided I wouldn't use it, so there, nyah-nyah!
And of course another reason is that I set the basic template for the Honorverse's tech 27 years ago. There's a limit to how far I can adjust some of the underlying assumptions without violating canon and continuity. I think that may be
THE biggest single problem with writing a science-fiction series that runs as long as this one has.
In the case of
these books, I'm starting much later (from the viewpoint of my own contemporary tech base); the gradient between the Good Guys' and Bad Guys' starting tech is much steeper' and a big part of the plot relies on the human need to overcome that gradient --- to
reverse it, really --- absolutely ASAP. So we're looking at a society whose basic tech level and entire understanding of the laws of physics are in what might be called a state of whirlwind change. Which also changes what the characters are going to be talking about in the foreground. Unlike folks in the Honorverse, they haven't
built their "baseline tech" yet, so they're going to be discussing it a lot more.
