Ivy: The hills?? Those aren’t in the splash zone! There’s nothing even up there except a bunch of big rich-people houses!
Coco: Uh-huh.
Ivy: Ooh, Coco . . . do you think the poor lil’ drones got confused, maybe??
Coco: Maybe.
Or maybe their “AI” will always calculate it’s “most effective” to protect the people who are most like RDS. And/or the venture capitalists whose investments financed his company in the first place.
. . . You would know these words if you didn’t blow off your econ study seshes.
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9 Comments
These drones may be full of false facts, but the one thing they know that’s true is which side their bread is buttered on.
…really hoping there’s some way Ivy can comedically overwhelm the drones and dump the storm surge on the rich people.
Only if she can do it in a way that leaves Homu upset at the rich people and the rich people upset at Homu’s government – rather than the rich people looking like victims and Ivy looking like a “Ceannic aggressor”!
The drones are awful by design, but they potentially have use if programmed correctly and are not doing any harm so I don’t see any gain in dumping the storm on them. Hopefully the government sees the error of relying on them too heavily at this point though.
I think it would be more effective to show what the drones are doing on news. Which I though is sort of what was planned with Holly. Well we will see …
Wonder if the drones were programmed to focus their efforts on what would cause the highest loss of value (aka money). On a shallow level, that seems like a completely reasonable way to make decisions, probably pretty easy to program too. Especially seems like the kind of flaw you might see, oh, a money obsessed venture start up to make.
But, for one, it doesn’t take into account what SHOULD be the basis, which is what’s most VULNERABLE to the storm. As Ivy says, the hills are one of the safest places in the path of the storm, being at higher elevation, which is also probably part of why they’re full of nicer, higher value properties. Or, if you don’t want to program you drones on the basis of geography and predictable results of where storms USUALLY cause damage, they could at least be programmed to protect areas based on population density. That wouldn’t be too hard to do and would at least, in theory, protect the largest number of lives.
But this isn’t even getting into the more complex calculations that would make the drones really useful, such as focusing on protecting what’s necessary for for human survival, such as making sure major roads in and out aren’t washed out and hospitals are protected. Because those rich people aren’t going to be happy if they can’t get any food or supplies, even if their houses are just fine. Oh, and let’s not forget the necessities of electricity and sewage and clean water. Those are some of the biggest problems in the aftermath of storms: Lack of heat, safe water sources, and hygiene issues.
(Historical) population density is useless without knowing how many people evacuated from where. I think your third option is the best – drones should focus on protecting infrastructure like electricity, water, gas, and then hospitals and major roads.
Alternative would be to program them based on previous storms, basically making them protect what was most missed due to damage in previous cases. Assuming there are data for that, which may not as in previous storms water mages were doing the protection.
What’s “seshes”?
short for ‘sessions’ i think
The drone butter is real
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