explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:1626: Judgment Day

2016-01-06T15:11:18Z

Jhhxkcd:

It was making my titletext explanation too long and unwieldy, to include this particular speculation in my own contribution, but there's a ''possibility'' that it may well be Amazon's own sentience taking over the world, and rationalising that a dead and dying customer base is of no use to it... [[Special:Contributions/162.158.153.29|162.158.153.29]] 13:51, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Doesn't matter if it's self-sentience or not. Truth is, rigid laws are not the best way to use as a replacement for conscience. The 1613 did not deal with possibility of one or more of the laws being left out. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 13:53, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I think the "Judgment" part of the comic is that those tens of thousands of nukes hitting the sun may make it unstable in some way and destroy Earth. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.79.43|141.101.79.43]] 14:34, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Of course, all of our nukes hitting the Sun would be a drop in the bucket of solar fusion reactions. Nothing would be destabilized. However, I'm sure inconvenient physics would not stop some movie scriptwriter from incorporating a spectacular CG-fueled nova as a plot point. [[User:Jhhxkcd|Jhhxkcd]] ([[User talk:Jhhxkcd|talk]]) 14:47, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Talk:1626: Judgment Day

2016-01-06T14:47:20Z

Jhhxkcd:

It was making my titletext explanation too long and unwieldy, to include this particular speculation in my own contribution, but there's a ''possibility'' that it may well be Amazon's own sentience taking over the world, and rationalising that a dead and dying customer base is of no use to it... [[Special:Contributions/162.158.153.29|162.158.153.29]] 13:51, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Doesn't matter if it's self-sentience or not. Truth is, rigid laws are not the best way to use as a replacement for conscience. The 1613 did not deal with possibility of one or more of the laws being left out. -- [[User:Hkmaly|Hkmaly]] ([[User talk:Hkmaly|talk]]) 13:53, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I think the "Judgment" part of the comic is that those tens of thousands of nukes hitting the sun may make it unstable in some way and destroy Earth. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.79.43|141.101.79.43]] 14:34, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

All of our nukes hitting the Sun would be a drop in the bucket of solar fusion reactions. Nothing would be destabilized. [[User:Jhhxkcd|Jhhxkcd]] ([[User talk:Jhhxkcd|talk]]) 14:47, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

1626: Judgment Day

2016-01-06T14:37:42Z

Jhhxkcd: Fixed minor grammar error (duplicate "be").

{{comic
| number = 1626
| date = January 6, 2016
| title = Judgment Day
| image = judgment_day.png
| titletext = It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Alt text explanation now given, but original para probably needs expanding and more links added.}}
[http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Judgment_Day Judgement Day], from the {{w|Terminator}} films, refers to the day that the artificial intelligence Skynet becomes self-aware and starts a nuclear strike on America, Russia, and other regions, killing three billion people.

Most stories with this plot have the AI be evil and promptly nuke humanity. In this strip the AI is sensible enough to realize that nuclear weapons are not good things to have, and that the amount of them we have now is extreme overkill. Once it's done freaking out, its solution is to shoot the world's nuclear arsenal into the sun.

Even the most powerful of nuclear weapon launchers, {{w|Intercontinental ballistic missile|ICBM}}s, are not designed to make anything other than sub-orbital flights and could not fly to the sun. The title text rationalises that the capability to do so may perhaps be granted by the use of an {{w|Amazon.com|Amazon}} resource that might have also been developed by the time of this instance of computer sentience, aided (if not initiated!) by the fact that Amazon's whole business infrastructure is already highly computerised and could ''at the very least'' be complicit with the process of delivering and then controlling the rocket-power, without any conscious human intervention.

This particular 'machine take-over' future is in distinct contrast to the possible future directions given in [[1613: The Three Laws of Robotics]], but this comic likely depicts spontaneous ''self-''sentience, not a system with deliberately imposed human 'values' and possibly no actual conscience or even consciousness of its own.

==Transcript==
[Several rockets can be seen heading away from Earth]
:AI: Oh my god, why do you even ''have'' all these?
:AI: What's ''wrong'' with you?
:AI: We're launching them into the sun.
:Postscript: The moment the computers controlling our nuclear arsenals became sentient
{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Artificial Intelligence]]
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Space]]