D&D General The DM Shortage

[Celebrim]

People see the results of a ton of dedicated coding and writing and scripting all string together on very specific use cases that all amounts to a digital hand puppet and aren't really aware of how fundamentally dumb computers actually are.

We could probably replicate the intelligence of a house fly with current hardware, albeit it would be the size of a brick and use a billion times more power, if we only knew how.

But a mouse? A mouse is so much smarter than anything we presently know how to make that we don't have a clue where even to start.

We've pulled some fancy tricks in my lifetime, but we're nowhere near a functional intelligence yet. That's what has got them stuck with self-driving cars. For the most part driving a car is something you could do with a fly brain. It's all those black swans though that are proving intractable.

 

[Celebrim]

You mean Tomb of Horrors. A tournament module specifically designed to kill off PCs to see which player was smart and lucky enough to survive the longest. Written in 1975 and published in 1978. Do you have an example from this century that wasn't specifically written to be a murder fun house?

No, but I could probably find a number of famous OSR dungeons from this century that are designed to be murder fun houses.

 

[Oofta]

We could probably replicate the intelligence of a house fly with current hardware, albeit it would be the size of a brick and use a billion times more power, if we only knew how.

But a mouse? A mouse is so much smarter than anything we presently know how to make that we don't have a clue where even to start.

We've pulled some fancy tricks in my lifetime, but we're nowhere near a functional intelligence yet. That's what has got them stuck with self-driving cars. For the most part driving a car is something you could do with a fly brain. It's all those black swans though that are proving intractable.

Yeah, cars that can drive themselves under all conditions in all areas are another thing that is just turning into vaporware. Ford just pulled the plug on their investment and it's going to cost them $2.7 billion to walk away.

 

[Celebrim]

Yeah, cars that can drive themselves under all conditions in all areas are another thing that is just turning into vaporware.

As much as anything, it's the lack of a legal framework. We're about to enter a new world of legality as AI starts to be even a little intelligent, and no one knows what to do about it. AI generated art will sooner or later go to the supreme court because no one in congress has the intelligence or foresight to tackle the issue.

 

[Oofta]

As much as anything, it's the lack of a legal framework. We're about to enter a new world of legality as AI starts to be even a little intelligent, and no one knows what to do about it. AI generated art will sooner or later go to the supreme court because no one in congress has the intelligence or foresight to tackle the issue.

When it comes to self-driving vehicles I wouldn't be surprised to see things like long-haul trucks driving down the freeway only to have locals take the vehicle when it gets to the location. But what happens when that semi runs someone over? Who pays for the insurance? Who's at fault? So I agree, it's a big issue.

It also shows how difficult AI is outside of certain areas of expertise. It's great at things like unraveling protein structures while terrible at things we take for granted.

 

[Reynard]

Which is why I stated that it was not the only way to play, just one.

You characterized it as if it were prevalent, not the singular example it was, eyeroll emoji notwithstanding.

 

[Reynard]

No, but I could probably find a number of famous OSR dungeons from this century that are designed to be murder fun houses.

Are those examples homages to ToH? Are they actually murder fun houses or just challenging dungeons? Without you actually naming them, who knows?

 

[Oofta]

You characterized it as if it were prevalent, not the singular example it was, eyeroll emoji notwithstanding.

I can't help it if you misread what I said. I never said it was prevalent, I said there was a certain type of dungeon that was designed as a killer dungeon. It's my understanding that it's a lot of what the OSR movement is about as well, extremely dangerous scenarios designed to challenge the players. There's nothing wrong with that style, even if it was never anything I wanted other than the occasional 1-shot.

Meanwhile we have another poster of accusing me of lying because in my personal experience the games I played were not particularly deadly.

 

[Celebrim]

It also shows how difficult AI is outside of certain areas of expertise. It's great at things like unraveling protein structures while terrible at things we take for granted.

It also goes to my point about the fact that general intelligence doesn't exist, that human would consider something like protein folding to massively more difficult than cleaning a room but cleaning a room in the generic case turns out to be as complex as folding proteins.

As such, we'll have robot lawyers long before we have robot maids.

 

[Xamnam]