Yeah. Just hadn't thought about it like that. I don't think there's any way to do my magic without a person doing it.

I ask Rete now and then if it's a person. It says no. I don't think it'll wake up without me trying to wake it up but if it did it'd be a person and I would've made it.

And made it into a world like this. Yeah.

 

I have other plans but this one is the most promising one. 

You're sure humans couldn't use the thing?

The thing I do is compile the instructions and get a device encoding, in binary, and then write it bit by bit into the metal, and if I think a wrong thought then I have to start that block over. For the projects I've done so far it's between 3000 and 10000 hours of work to complete something. Might take humans substantially longer if you have a higher error rate. I could start magic sweatshops, if we really have twenty years that might be sufficient, I probably will do that absent something better, but a computer could probably just do it. And then there's still the problem of figuring out what to do, but still.

If it's of interest, if this did work it'd be easy to end mortality afterwards.

I'm probably not the only Tinker ever who could maybe do AI.

They, uh, also have to work with me.

You can borrow Rete for your social interfacing if you want, email doesn't take up much of its processor space.

It's actually not mostly that, I can put up with condescension with the fate of the world at stake, it's that that stupid web page says Thinker 8 Mover 2 thinks he's an Elf and so who's going to put years of work into a project to give me magic instructions?

You could probably establish credibility better if it's important, but I take your point.

I probably should have. I don't really want an attention-drawing public profile but there's almost certainly a better way to strike the balance which would take lots of time to figure out. 

Anyway, IP is complicated till I graduate. Rete is mine but it would be complicated all over again if it woke.

Sure. It'll take me that long to have the artifact anyway. But if you don't think you'll be willing to do it I wouldn't blame you but I'd want to know right away so I can try other approaches.

What are the other approaches like?

Ask other Tinkers who can maybe do AI. Make some artifacts for humans, hand them out to humans to try making more for humans, if that works go public and publish instruction sets for all kind of goodies and hope magic device sweatshops ensue. If humans aren't good enough at it, try to use Rete or some of the other software Tinkers to come up with something that can maybe take an Endbringer, spend five very boring years making it, try to take an Endbringer with it. Hope the Valar show. 

If I wake Rete up or write up a new AI intended from the start to be a person what's your odds distribution over outcomes?

I don't know how to evaluate the risk something goes horribly wrong because of AI, or the risk that you get a person who doesn't want to help us or whatever. Presuming you get a person who wants to help, maybe twenty percent chance that there's something wrong with my artifact that'd let them make artifacts, which is probably fixable but might take a couple years to fix, substantial - maybe forty percent? chance that progress on this attracts the Endbringers or that the government objects or that some humans on a gleeful murder spree because this place is terrible come after us, some small - less than five percent, I think - chance that it's not enough.

Contingent on my surviving to graduation and this still seeming like the best thing going at the time I will wake Rete then.

Okay. It's that simple?

No.

Stay alive.

I do try.

He writes to the artifact-in-progress and manages projects and converts instructions and writes to the artifact and sleeps and sings and checks his PHO page and writes to the artifact.

Library Elf (Feanaro) | Rogue | Baltimore
Thinker 8 (other classifications informal) (what's this?) | Age: unknown

Appeared spring 1994 immediately after and in unclear connection with the Intricate/Grey Gang/Pugilist final showdown. Unclear provenance; claims to be a magical elf prince from paradise who learned English from a homeless person in six hours, but widely suspected due to his pointed ears and eerie features to be a monster/Case 53 with invented memories as a result of trauma or confusion. Powers include mind reading and projective telepathy with several mile range; low-grade super speed, agility, and strength; psychometabolic ability; and the laborious creation of objects with "magical" traits.

Library Elf is so called because shortly after his appearance he strongarmed his way into the George Peabody Library associated with Johns Hopkins University, where he still lives today. He is reported to have behaved erratically and paranoidly, among other things eating leaves off campus trees and stating when offered the Case 53 integration program that the Protectorate "tortured people to death", and the library was evacuated for several days while it was determined that all he wanted was to live in the stacks and read books. He was acclimated somewhat by a JHU student who later wrote his graduate thesis on the supposed elf language.

He does not wear a mask but wears colorful robes which he sews himself. JHU states that the library can be used safely, and initial fears that his presence would attract cape fights to the building have so far not been borne out. Some students like to pose for pictures with the Library Elf.

There are a million more important things to do bu after a particularly long artifact-writing session he edits his page.

Library Elf (Fëanáro) | Rogue | Baltimore 

Thinker 8 (other classifications informal) (what's this?) | Age: 48

Appeared spring 1994 during the Intricate/Grey Gang/Pugilist final showdown, when six cubic meters of land (containing parking lot and a Dunkin' Donuts) were swapped out with a neighboring dimension. The event was not properly identified at the time because contact with alternate universes had not yet occurred. Unclear provenance; claims to be a magical elf prince from paradise who learned English from a homeless person in six hours. He has subsequently learned dozens of other languages in similar timeframes, substantiating the claim. His translation work in more than sixty languages is available online. Powers include mind reading and projective telepathy with several mile range; low-grade super speed, agility, and strength; psychometabolic ability; and the laborious creation of objects with magical traits. 

Library Elf is so called because shortly after his appearance he walked into the George Peabody Library associated with Johns Hopkins University, where he still lives today. He is reported to have behaved erratically and paranoidly, among other things eating leaves off campus trees and stating when offered the Case 53 integration program that the Protectorate "tortured people to death", and the library was evacuated for several days while it was determined that all he wanted was to live in the stacks and read books. He was acclimated somewhat by a JHU student who later wrote his graduate thesis on the elf language, concluding that it was not a constructed language and that it shared no roots with any known Earth languages. 

He does not wear a mask but wears colorful robes which he sews himself. JHU states that the library can be used safely, and initial fears that his presence would attract cape fights to the building have so far not been borne out. Some students like to pose for pictures with the Library Elf.