Has someone fiddled with the temple AI?

Suppose there is some sort of AI operating the temple in Zion.

Even if that AI has not picked up on Merlin & Co using Federation Tech it should have noticed the enormous tech progress that Safehold has recently made in an incredibly short span of time.

A human certainly would just need one quick glance at that enormous rate of development to guess something is fishy (from the temple point of view). So why hasn't the temple AI done anything?

One possibility is that the AI is really stupid - or not an AI at all. However considering that even Nimue's Cave has an AI (though a limited one) the Langhorne faction with their infinitely easier access to the Fleet tech surely would have had it easy to install an AI also.

Another possibility is that Langhorne & Co explicitly programmed their AI so that it does not intervene ever. Not even by alerting the current church authorities when something is off. That sounds a little hard to believe too.

So it occured to me that maybe someone fiddled with the AIs original programming?

Did someone - 1) a faction in the church dissatisfied with Langhorne's course for instance - secretly install something that hid hints about emerging tech from the official church authorities? Or 2) did the Shan Wei faction even manage to sneak a mole in there and alter the programming?

I just realized there may be an option 3:

Did the temple AI maybe in fact alert the church leadership (in the form of Clynthan) - and that was actually one reason for Clynthan's overreaction towards Charis? Feeding Clyntan's paranoia (which wasn't actually paranoia). Clynthan did not think of this during his final moments though - so I don't know how likely option 3 really is.

If option 3 is the case then it would be interesting to know whether the new church leadership has access to the themple AI too or whether Clynthan took that to his grave?

Actually, there is a 4th possibility, and it is one that is raised by the possibility the Nahrman Batz is one huge smoking Chekov's gun. From Nahrman, we know that it is possible to transfer a personality into a computer (as well as the example of Nimue, and numerous other references to such actions). Suppose that the reason there is no AI in the Temple is that one of the senior command staff was supposed to transfer into the Temple complex to keep an eye on things, so there would be no need for an AI - you have a real I to follow along. The question then becomes - What happened?

fallsfromtrees wrote:Actually, there is a 4th possibility, and it is one that is raised by the possibility the Nahrman Batz is one huge smoking Chekov's gun. From Nahrman, we know that it is possible to transfer a personality into a computer (as well as the example of Nimue, and numerous other references to such actions). Suppose that the reason there is no AI in the Temple is that one of the senior command staff was supposed to transfer into the Temple complex to keep an eye on things, so there would be no need for an AI - you have a real I to follow along. The question then becomes - What happened?

Yeah. I do not think there's an AI in the temple. I have a hard time believing they would trust one. If there's any intelligence there it's an upload. Given that, several possibilities come to mind:

1) Suicide. It got tired of it's boring job once there had been enough generations to stamp out the old ideas.

2) There's been some sort of failure, it's there, it's noticed, it can't alert the temple leaders.

3) It's there, it's noticed, the temple staff won't listen to the blasphemer.

4) It's there but they chose badly, the person is following the original plan, not their modified one--the temple secretly supports Merlin. (And will have no doubt figured out that Merlin is a PICA.)

Possibility 5 [which actually applies to both falls' and Loren's ideas]:

Any I in the Temple isn't watching in real time.

We know that real personalities in a tank will go mad if they have to live too long, and IIRC there's an indication that it can happen to AIs as well, so whatever the personality there's an excellent chance that it's on a rather long sleep/wake cycle. And it may have modified that cycle to multiple centuries long ago if it was satisfied with what it was seeing. If it takes the sustained existence of an outright violation of the Proscriptions to trip the filters and trigger an out of order wake-up call, nothing that's happened yet would cause that.

As for what could be the source of that satisfaction, one likely possibility is the rise of Harchong. We know that Bedard and Langhorne were ignorant enough to buy into the notion that Egypt was a static culture for millenia, and China, which provided a lot of the seed-culture for Harchong, has long been peddling the myth that it's an ancient, stable civilisation. Whoever is in, or programmed, Under-the-Temple would certainly have bought that in spades and been confident that once that matrix is set the success of the Langhorne Plan was guaranteed.

Of course, anyone who knew his Chinese history would actually have been trying to figure out why there hadn't been at least two peasant revolts already, and wondering whether reading the Spring and Autumn Annals or The Record of the Warring States would give a better notion of what to expect next.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Actually, there is a 4th possibility, and it is one that is raised by the possibility the Nahrman Batz is one huge smoking Chekov's gun. From Nahrman, we know that it is possible to transfer a personality into a computer (as well as the example of Nimue, and numerous other references to such actions). Suppose that the reason there is no AI in the Temple is that one of the senior command staff was supposed to transfer into the Temple complex to keep an eye on things, so there would be no need for an AI - you have a real I to follow along. The question then becomes - What happened?

Whether true AI or human-based AI as fallsfromtrees proposed: location (in the temple mainframe) and function (keeping an eye on things) would be the same.

I have a new idea though which I now find more likely than the ones in my OP:

The temple AI (or human-AI or whatever it is) can only be reached via the Wylson key.

That explains the Key's function and the fact that the temple did not intervene.

Bruno Behrends wrote:Whether true AI or human-based AI as fallsfromtrees proposed: location (in the temple mainframe) and function (keeping an eye on things) would be the same.

I have a new idea though which I now find more likely than the ones in my OP:

The temple AI (or human-AI or whatever it is) can only be reached via the Wylson key.

That explains the Key's function and the fact that the temple did not intervene.

This is not just conjecture. There is actually textev to support that. Remember back when Wylson was shown the truth and he describes the computer into which the key must be inserted and hands put in the indentations as the priest cries earnestly for help. It can only be done once, though.

Don

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n7axw wrote:

Bruno Behrends wrote:Whether true AI or human-based AI as fallsfromtrees proposed: location (in the temple mainframe) and function (keeping an eye on things) would be the same.

I have a new idea though which I now find more likely than the ones in my OP:

The temple AI (or human-AI or whatever it is) can only be reached via the Wylson key.

That explains the Key's function and the fact that the temple did not intervene.

This is not just conjecture. There is actually textev to support that. Remember back when Wylson was shown the truth and he describes the computer into which the key must be inserted and hands put in the indentations as the priest cries earnestly for help. It can only be done once, though.

Don

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And that's the weird part. If it's an AI or personality upload, why only once? That implies to me that either it can't go back to sleep, or activating it will use up some critical resource that can't be replaced. And they also say that it was intended for an external threat, not for heresy. I've long wondered what external threat they're talking about. Surely not the Gbaba; nothing in the Temple could do anything about that. Right?

bkwormlisa wrote:And that's the weird part. If it's an AI or personality upload, why only once? That implies to me that either it can't go back to sleep, or activating it will use up some critical resource that can't be replaced. And they also say that it was intended for an external threat, not for heresy. I've long wondered what external threat they're talking about. Surely not the Gbaba; nothing in the Temple could do anything about that. Right?

As a theory on the “only once” part of it. Perhaps there’s a PICA in the bowels of the temple with a waiting memory download. An original Federation PICA with the built in time limit before it dumps it’s memory. Recall Proctor was only able to bypass the time limit because he was a crackerjack programmer. it’s entirely possible Langhorne’s group had access to a PICA and never would have considered what OWL did in going hyper heuristic and designing a new model from scratch.

Or maybe he had Safehold borrow from Heirs of Empire and Pardal. Maybe there was an automated system set up to do all of this but someone physically unplugged it.

bkwormlisa wrote:And that's the weird part. If it's an AI or personality upload, why only once? That implies to me that either it can't go back to sleep, or activating it will use up some critical resource that can't be replaced. And they also say that it was intended for an external threat, not for heresy. I've long wondered what external threat they're talking about. Surely not the Gbaba; nothing in the Temple could do anything about that. Right?

icspots wrote:As a theory on the “only once” part of it. Perhaps there’s a PICA in the bowels of the temple with a waiting memory download. An original Federation PICA with the built in time limit before it dumps it’s memory. Recall Proctor was only able to bypass the time limit because he was a crackerjack programmer. it’s entirely possible Langhorne’s group had access to a PICA and never would have considered what OWL did in going hyper heuristic and designing a new model from scratch.

Or maybe he had Safehold borrow from Heirs of Empire and Pardal. Maybe there was an automated system set up to do all of this but someone physically unplugged it.

No PICA under the temple. We have authorial fiat that the only PICAs on Safehold are Merlin and Nimue. We need another explanation. Although David is the master of misdirection (think of the fatal would to Hector, in the snippets for LAMA), he has never been caught in a direct lie - and he has said no other PICAs on Safehold.

fallsfromtrees wrote:No PICA under the temple. We have authorial fiat that the only PICAs on Safehold are Merlin and Nimue. We need another explanation. Although David is the master of misdirection (think of the fatal would to Hector, in the snippets for LAMA), he has never been caught in a direct lie - and he has said no other PICAs on Safehold.

So that just means there is one floating above the planet in one of the OBS platforms. Or on one of the moons, or whatever. Like you said, he's good at misdirection. He didn't say there wasn't one. Just that there isn't one on Safehold.