Plastic Memories: Say to good-bye - Vol. 3 Ch. 18 - Memories: 18

[MangaDex]

 

[ikikinoko]

Ahh this brings back my old days when watched this anime (right on airing fr), looks like get ready to cry again but from diferent pov.

Good work and keep it up with remaining chapters.

 

[PredatorDuck]

I'm not ready to be hurt like this again...

 

[Kaarme]

If you think about planned obsolescence with a light bulb or a fridge, it can be annoying, even frustrating, especially if you are an environmentalist, but with these Giftia that are easily human-like enough to fall in love with, it's pretty gruesome. Of course business is business, and the merchandise has to move for the business to stay afloat, to produce profit and pay wages to employees, fund R&D, and all that, but still. If they had introduced an option to extend the lifespan for an amount of money, it would ultimately only cause more really serious questions of ethics. So, creating hardware that simply goes permanently bad and even leads to dangerous behavior after a set time, no questions asked, is, kind of ironically, the only way to avoid more trouble.

If there was competition in the market, it's obvious the lifespan would grow because it would be an astronomical advantage when selling the units, especially when there's so much history behind it already. The net, TV, movies, and magazines would already be full of (tragedy) stories of Giftia, so most private buyers would realise that they will sorely miss the Giftia when the time is up. So, if Company B offered Giftia with a decade longer life, it would, for sure, beat Company A.

 

[Pars_d]

If you think about planned obsolescence with a light bulb or a fridge, it can be annoying, even frustrating, especially if you are an environmentalist, but with these Giftia that are easily human-like enough to fall in love with, it's pretty gruesome. Of course business is business, and the merchandise has to move for the business to stay afloat, to produce profit and pay wages to employees, fund R&D, and all that, but still. If they had introduced an option to extend the lifespan for an amount of money, it would ultimately only cause more really serious questions of ethics. So, creating hardware that simply goes permanently bad and even leads to dangerous behavior after a set time, no questions asked, is, kind of ironically, the only way to avoid more trouble.

If there was competition in the market, it's obvious the lifespan would grow because it would be an astronomical advantage when selling the units, especially when there's so much history behind it already. The net, TV, movies, and magazines would already be full of (tragedy) stories of Giftia, so most private buyers would realise that they will sorely miss the Giftia when the time is up. So, if Company B offered Giftia with a decade longer life, it would, for sure, beat Company A.

In this series, obsolescence is stated as a technical limitation which implies that Giftia lifespans will rise if technology improves. Not sure if that reasoning was chosen on purpose since a different series, Atri, has humanoids with obsolescence due to ethical regulations which implies that lifespans won't rise.

 

[Kaarme]

In this series, obsolescence is stated as a technical limitation which implies that Giftia lifespans will rise if technology improves. Not sure if that reasoning was chosen on purpose since a different series, Atri, has humanoids with obsolescence due to ethical regulations which implies that lifespans won't rise.

Yeah, the manufacturer would obviously state it's a presently insurmountable problem of available technology. It's not like they would directly confess that if Giftia lived longer, the company would sell considerably less units. Technically they could make them last longer and raise the price a lot, but it's not that simple. Mass production benefits from a large volume. With shorter generations, they can also keep optimising the rest of the Giftia body. Maintenance service for the Giftia body might be a decent business, but if you need to support a model for 50 years, for example, it can get somewhat annoying. R&D would also suffer if the product lasts too long because with very long generations, you can't introduce new innovations that often.

The solution would be to keep the current lifespan, but develop a method to copy the personality to a new body. That way you could almost guarantee the owner would buy a new unit, whereas with the current system, the customer will be left with an emotional pain they might not want to repeat. The new body just needs to feel the same, more or less, for the Giftia, but it could still include all the latest developments in technology, solving that problem as well.

The only problem there is that the Giftia could be practically immortal as long as new bodies keep coming, whereas their human owners can't be. So, if the human owner wouldn't want to buy a new body for the Giftia, for whatever reason, would he/she feel like a murderer and would the Giftia feel the same? Maybe it's not such a good solution, after all.

 

[lvthn616]

How to delete comment?

 

[lvthn616]

Yeah, the manufacturer would obviously state it's a presently insurmountable problem of available technology. It's not like they would directly confess that if Giftia lived longer, the company would sell considerably less units. Technically they could make them last longer and raise the price a lot, but it's not that simple. Mass production benefits from a large volume. With shorter generations, they can also keep optimising the rest of the Giftia body. Maintenance service for the Giftia body might be a decent business, but if you need to support a model for 50 years, for example, it can get somewhat annoying. R&D would also suffer if the product lasts too long because with very long generations, you can't introduce new innovations that often.

The solution would be to keep the current lifespan, but develop a method to copy the personality to a new body. That way you could almost guarantee the owner would buy a new unit, whereas with the current system, the customer will be left with an emotional pain they might not want to repeat. The new body just needs to feel the same, more or less, for the Giftia, but it could still include all the latest developments in technology, solving that problem as well.

The only problem there is that the Giftia could be practically immortal as long as new bodies keep coming, whereas their human owners can't be. So, if the human owner wouldn't want to buy a new body for the Giftia, for whatever reason, would he/she feel like a murderer and would the Giftia feel the same? Maybe it's not such a good solution, after all.

Well, I think it's more of a integrity corruption, the same kind that plague old computers (not old in the sense of very old hardware, but just computer that has been used for a long time without any OS clean install). You know, things like broken shortcuts, corrupted files, default program missing, etc. You can get some performance boost if you do a clean reinstall of the OS on your computer, even after you reinstall all your apps and filling it with the same data.

Since we don't know how the memory is stored, if the data is stored in the same partition as the OS, and there are OS files that are modified to comply with the data (kinda like windows registry), it can make transferring data nearly impossible (you cannot do a reinstall as the application data is not there, the application data is the memory and thought pattern). Maybe you could transfer memories (as the data format maybe the same as the popular ones, so it can be searched), but for the thought pattern (personality), I think it will be hard to copy that, since it is a autonomously updating program. You also risk of the OS not knowing where the data is, since the pointer is not copied (the pointer is part of OS).

Same as an OS reinstall that you need to reinstall the program (registry edits and whatnot), in this case there are no installer for the "program", so you cannot use your computer the same as before, even with the same memories (files). In short, just copying the memories are not enough to make the giftia the same "person" as the copied.

Sorry for the long comment, this is just my hypothesis that I thought for a long time (I finished the anime at 2019 I think, and this bothers me at the end). Feel free to disagree (and can you please provide reasons? I would like to think about any other possibilities).

 

[Kaarme]

Since we don't know how the memory is stored, if the data is stored in the same partition as the OS, and there are OS files that are modified to comply with the data (kinda like windows registry), it can make transferring data nearly impossible (you cannot do a reinstall as the application data is not there, the application data is the memory and thought pattern). Maybe you could transfer memories (as the data format maybe the same as the popular ones, so it can be searched), but for the thought pattern (personality), I think it will be hard to copy that, since it is a autonomously updating program. You also risk of the OS not knowing where the data is, since the pointer is not copied (the pointer is part of OS).

I like to think the Giftia have a true neural network brain, not a more traditional computer like system running a simulation of intelligence. So, it would be a special artificial brain that both processes information and stores it, just like an animal brain. If it's a matrix of billions of cores connected to each other with if not analog then at least multi-bit digital signalling, you could say directly copying it might be challenging. It could also be impossible to directly program it. So, new Giftia would need to be trained to some level before getting sold to customers. However, the training (teaching) could be a thousand times faster than teaching a human. Just drop the "brain speed" to human levels before handing over the unit to the customer.

However, I have no recollection how it was explained in the anime, if it was. It has been too long. Maybe they are far more traditional computers. If I don't recall entirely incorrectly, in Chobits the persocons even had a spinning HDD inside. It was a show from before SSDs became a thing...

 

[lvthn616]

I like to think the Giftia have a true neural network brain, not a more traditional computer like system running a simulation of intelligence. So, it would be a special artificial brain that both processes information and stores it, just like an animal brain. If it's a matrix of billions of cores connected to each other with if not analog then at least multi-bit digital signalling, you could say directly copying it might be challenging. It could also be impossible to directly program it. So, new Giftia would need to be trained to some level before getting sold to customers. However, the training (teaching) could be a thousand times faster than teaching a human. Just drop the "brain speed" to human levels before handing over the unit to the customer.

However, I have no recollection how it was explained in the anime, if it was. It has been too long. Maybe they are far more traditional computers. If I don't recall entirely incorrectly, in Chobits the persocons even had a spinning HDD inside. It was a show from before SSDs became a thing...

Yep, how do they work isn't mentioned in the anime, so we could only theorize. It's a major premise (and can be a plot hole for sure), but detailed explanation is not strictly necessary since this is a romance-drama and not sci-fi. Granted, a more detailed explanation can make more sense, but theorizing good explanation based on today's technology can also be seen like a silly idea in the future (because tech changes).

Also, I haven't read much about deep learning and neural network, so I do not want to comment about that (I avoid spreading false information). I just use my experience with windows computers (you know, at some point the OS is corrupted enough that you cannot update but chkdsk and dism cannot solve the errors either...). However, by going with your information, it seems that you cannot perfectly replicate the neural network by training (since the immersion isn't there), so the result is a different personality at least. Still makes sense as a theory for the premise.

 

[Kaarme]

However, by going with your information, it seems that you cannot perfectly replicate the neural network by training (since the immersion isn't there), so the result is a different personality at least. Still makes sense as a theory for the premise.

It's not really information. I don't believe such "plastic" neural chips exists beyond theories, or if they do, they are quite rudimentary for laboratory experiments. Most of the simulated AIs in use today are just running on GPU-like computing accelerators or special chips that aren't much different from them. Nvidia's Tensor cores are such, but they aren't fundamentally anything that extraordinary, plus the associated memory is still traditional RAM. These can certainly be saved in backups and copied as necessary. However, they also aren't true artificial intelligences like depicted in the show. The Giftia even have emotions.

This is a good enough series to warrant this sort of discussion and speculation, even though the story's own focus certainly is on the drama, not the technology.