Holographic Ferengi Interface Tutorial

[Joy 0]

It was odd. Since returning to Aegis under Captain Muon, Joy had been working nothing but Federation business. Oh, she had flown the Mudd flag in the lobby, along side the Federation flag, but nothing at all had come up reflecting the interests of Mudd, androids or any other form of artificial intelligence. Then, as soon as she furled the Mudd flag and put it away...

 

He was not Sorehl. He was a knowledge base with a fancy 3D natural language interface. The personality matrix was based on a Vulcan pattern. There was little to no emotion. Therefor no motive, no purpose, nothing that was apt to snowball a primitive personality into becoming a complete one. Joy’s Sister Six was among those who wrote guidelines that should prevent accidental sentience. It should not happen if the guidelines were followed.

 

Of course, it happened anyway, guidelines or no. Program a powerful enough machine to solve a complex enough problem and odd things happened.

 

If one designs an artificial being to perform a given function, one owes that being the opportunity to perform that function. And now, someone had gone and created an entity designed to help one interface with Ferengi commanders.

 

Did she really want to put the poor thing between herself and Drankum? Is that a responsible fate for any sort of being, organic or artificial, sentient or not?

 

“Let me vent for a bit,” Joy started, addressing the knowledge base. “Please. Sit down. I suspect I’m working from a perspective you are not programmed to handle, but let me work it through, anyway. It might not be a satisfactory approach, but then you might propose an alternate one.

 

“I would agree Drankum would have a pride in his people and feel a need to defend his culture, but I would expect that of any Ambassador. It’s part of the job description. If one is insulted or if one’s people, culture or government is insulted, one is expected to respond, at least if the insult comes from another supposed professional. One should generally acknowledge less official demonstrations while maintaining respect and dignity. I have seen this from many members of many diplomatic corps. Pride in one’s people is not particularly uniquely strong among the Ferengi. The Ambassadors representing Earth, in my opinion, were far worse even than Drankum in that respect.” She checked herself. No need to rant on that subject. “I have worked with Captain Muon and a few other Ferengi ambassadors. Only with Drankum has this exaggerated pride become a problem, and even with him it does not seem clear it is the center of the problem.

 

“I would agree that Ferengi in my experience usually react reasonably to the tone set by others. This was true of Muon and the two ambassadors I met on Earth. Drankum is the exception. His tone is habitually abusive and insulting. Any idea not his own is generally rejected. His own approaches are presented as by ultimatum with no intent to listen or negotiate. It is exceedingly difficult to get him to exchange ideas with others as equals. That is not his way.

 

“I would agree Drankum reacts strongly to bravado, to conflicts over ego and status. He takes offense easily, gives offense habitually, with no sense of proportion or balance between. In this he is totally unlike other Ferengi I have dealt with at a professional level.

 

“To be clear, I have never required a tutorial program to deal with a Ferengi before. The problem as I perceive it is not with Ferengi culture, but with how Drankum deviates from the norm I have come to expect from a Ferengi professional, or from any diplomatic professional. He reminds me far less of the Ferengi I dealt with quite well on Earth than he reminds me of a racist stand up comic who gets laughs by playing to crude insulting degrading stereotypes.

 

“I generally feel it my duty to respond to insults given. Racial slurs, sexual harassment, flatulence as communication, and habitual crude insult is not typical of the Ferengi I have dealt with in the past, and it is not acceptable as part of Diplomatic exchange unless one is deliberately attempting to create interstellar hostility. Again, I have never encountered such behavior from any other Ferengi, nor from anyone else who carries diplomatic credentials.

 

“Before the 14(7) incident I for the most part ignored this behavior, and quietly felt a great deal of contempt towards Drankum as an individual. This was in no way a contempt for the Ferengi people or the Ferengi culture. The contempt was based on how radically he deviates from the norm I had come to expect of the Ferengi. I treated him as a restaurant owner with pretensions of being a stand up comic.

 

“With the 14(7) incident, he misread the treaty entirely, nearly destroyed the Aegis Alliance, and nearly brought the Alpha Quadrant to war. It is no longer possible to ignore him. He has chosen to play the Great Game. If he intends to play, he had best know the rules, and develop some feeling that there are consequences for violating them.

 

“There is a price for violating treaty. There is a price for giving insult. There is a price for disregarding duty. There is a price for flaunting protocol. If he wishes to play the Great Game, he cannot pretend that he is too stupid or too undisciplined to understand the role he has accepted. He cannot pretend that behaving like a jerk will result in him getting any sort of free ride from alien militaries or diplomats.

 

“And, frankly, it is in everybody’s interest that he get his realty check butting heads with me rather than while transforming a partially open sector of space. I have a foam titanium skull. I can butt heads with him at it as long as he would care to. If he can learn to perform to professional standards against me, he might possibly be ready to do his job.

 

“In short, if he wants respect, he can honor interstellar protocol and perform his duties. His being a Ferengi does not excuse him from these things. No amount of flatulence, insult, harassment or hiding behind his race is going to help him, not as far as I am concerned. He shouldn’t expect the naked stars to be impressed either.

 

“Comment?”

Edited March 10, 2009 by Joy

[Joy 0]

There was a pause. Joy suspected she knew the problem. The holo-Sorehl was programmed to create and maintain a proper crew-captain relationship. The ambassador-ambassador relationship was something entirely different. She decided to continue.

 

“It is not, of course, all on the Ferengi and Drankum side. There is also the Mudd and Joy side. You know a great deal of the Ferengi, I suspect. It might be prudent to consider the other half of the problem. The good news is that from my perspective there have been successes. I’m just not sure how to extend them. The bad news is in the nature of the failures. I am not sure it is proper to continue to use the successful approach.

 

“Sexual harassment. I am forbidden, at Priority Five, to draw sexual attention or interest. It feeds back into the emotion chip as humiliation. Drankum... flirts. Most males, on seeing a little flaring of the red facial diodes, hearing a suggestion that sexual attention is not desired, will back off. With Drankum, that wasn’t sufficient. In time, when he persisted, I had to respond with instructions for a half dozen Alyce class androids to attempt to deplete his semen reserves. The Alyces do not share my Priority Five. In fact, M’Lord Mudd designed them specifically for depletion of semen reserves. Eventually, the undesired sexual advances followed by Alycian counter charges stopped. From my perspective, this was a success.

 

“My processor design is called ‘hedonistic-slave.’ I am designed to take pleasure from obeying orders. Many in AI circles believe this approach is immoral, that sentient beings should not be compelled to take orders from other sentient beings. This may be so. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that most hedonistic-slave intelligences will come to the conclusion that their own programming is the best of all possible programming. It seems to me that I have a place in the galaxy, and it is a proper place.

 

“But obedience is only one of six Joy class Priorities. It can be demonstrated that if the core values of an android’s supervisor are not highly consistent with the programming of the slave, emotion chip instability results. In other words, the slave has to have a high respect for the master, or the relationship becomes unsatisfactory at many levels.

 

“I do not have a high respect for Drankum. I do not believe I should be his slave. I shall take all due steps to prevent any such relationship. This should not be difficult, as ambassadors, by the usual protocol, ought not to be giving orders or ultimatums to each other until and unless their respective nations are well into the ‘unfriendly acts’ stage.

 

“Yet, Drankum recently attempted to maneuver to place me in a subservient position. Frankly, this is not going to happen. I don’t know that arguments of law or protocol would have moved him. However, the possibility I might sit on a whoopee cushion each time the proposal is forwarded may have produced movement.

 

“Like the semen depletion strategy, the way to communicate with Drankum seems to be through dirty jokes with an underlying threat of ongoing humiliation. He enjoys humiliating others with his ‘witty’ approach to personal interaction, but he does not seem so comfortable being on the receiving end.

 

“A deeper problem is that the Mudd androids are a hive mind race. Our government has been described as a wide area network. In some ways, we are not unlike the Borg collective. There is an assumption within the hive mind that one cannot make good decisions without good information. If one requires data to make a decision, one requests it and gets it. That is simply how things are done. We have difficulty conceiving how things should be otherwise.

 

“Drankum seems interested in information control. He seems interested in not letting others know what he is doing. One of our basic differences is that I believe the diplomatic corps has to know the local situation in order to perform their jobs, while he seems to want to operate in secrecy. It seems this penchant for secrecy and control is a personal trait of Drankum in particular, rather than the Ferengi in general. Mudd androids, at least, have not had that particular problem with other Ferengi, though we have had the problem intermittently with individuals of other races.” Joy hesitated, but decided not to side track her monologue, omitting a discussion of the tricky Romulan balance between intrigue and honor.

 

“At any rate, Drankum recently attempted to forbid me from communicating with my sisters. Again, no way. One might as well forbid a Vulcan logic, or a Klingon honor. Eight is coming to the station. We are going to merge data bases. After that, she will know this station and the issues surrounding it precisely as well as I. In time, Eight will return to Earth, and Seven will be as knowledgeable of Aegis as I, not to mention Three, Six, and Eleven, who are also on Earth and who share data bases with Seven quite frequently.

 

“I defended this information sharing using an argument based on diplomatic protocol. Drankum does not have the authority to block diplomatic communications. However, I could not come up with a joke. I could not come up with a way to make the confrontation funny, to put in place an ongoing threat of humiliation if he continued the confrontation. Thus, I am not at all confident that the issue of hive mind against secrecy has been resolved. Drankum is highly egotistical. It seems one has to confront his pride to get him to change a position, but one has to do so using the same sort of humor he uses to attack the pride of others. If one plays the game by his rules, he can hardly complain about it, though I do not believe he particularly enjoys being on the receiving end.

 

“One other issue is the word ‘robot.’ To the people of Mudd, this implies clumsy construction and a lack of sentience. On Earth, the Council runs under a formal set of Rules of Order. There was a time when Ambassador Seven was habitually called ‘robot’ by the opposition, to the point she regularly invoked ‘point of order, decorum’ each time the word was used. The offending ambassador would have to either apologize for using the word, or leave the chamber. Seven was willing to bring all Council activity to a halt over the issue.

 

“Thus, it is the position of Mudd that ‘robot’ is an ethnic slur. It has become a matter of precedent and consistency. If Seven didn’t back down on Earth, I can’t back down here. In some ways this might seem a silly stupid issue, but respect between peoples is really not at core silly or stupid.

 

“I can’t figure out how to turn it into a joke. Habitually insulting other ambassadors is not funny. I have considered finding or creating an appropriate ethnic slur to humiliate Drankum, and use it on a this for that basis in response to robot. This doesn’t seem dignified, however. If my stand is that ethnic slurs should not be used, I should not use them either. And yet, I have no reason to believe that Drankum will back down to protocol or requests for civility. He seems to respond only to not so subtle threats of ongoing humiliation.

 

“I would like to find another approach. I would rather not be dragged down to interacting with him at his own level. To date, potty humor seems to be the most effective tool available. My progenitor worked a good deal with comedy, but it was a more sophisticated comedy than Drankum’s. She maintained a good deal of grace and class. I would vastly prefer to maintain some shadow of her example. I would prefer to find another way.”

 

“One might also say that Drankum can be stubborn. We could talk about whether Ferengi are or more or less stubborn than other races. We could talk about Ambassadors being required to stand firm to national interests and values. We could discuss the distinction between the vice of being stubborn and the virtue of being principled, assuming there is a distinction other than perspective.

 

“However, somewhere far beyond stubborn, or principled, is ‘lacks free will.’ However stubborn or principled Drankum or the Ferengi might or might not be, Mudd androids are more so. We are designed to follow our Priorities. This might possibly be mistaken for bravado, but it is something else. It is either a feature or a bug. One might argue which in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence, but feature or bug, it is my nature, and is part of the problem we are dealing with.

 

“The Joy class is also not as unfamiliar with Ferengi culture as some might suppose. For several decades after my sisters Four and Seven left Mudd, they were with the Charador pirates operating under a four Law asimov processor priority set. Obey your owner. Maximize his profits, minimize his loss. Honor the Laws of Acquisition. Personify the Art of Oo-Mox.

 

“Now, the Ferengi pirate era is way past its peak. The pirate subculture quite naturally drew more than its share of attention from other races. It never really represented the main line of Ferengi civilization. Still, we Joys continue running under Priorities imposed by the Federation in response to Red Four’s and Black Seven’s behavior under Ferengi programming. There is a reason we reject illegal orders. There is a reason we cannot kill or injure save under strict military chain of command. There is a reason we are denied opportunity to show and accept affection. There is a reason the feedback levels from our asimov processors to our emotion chips are set so high that that the phrase ‘lacks free will’ applies. There is a reason some of our Priorities are in some respects polar opposites of Ferengi values.

 

“It is not easy to be reprogrammed. It is not easy to have one’s values crisply removed, and have them replaced with something totally different. When confronted with a problem just after reprogramming, one remembers old solutions. In our case, the old solutions would so often involve a gentle caress, or a closed fist. One’s memories would say these methods work, but the emotion chip rejects them with waves of horror and shame. For years this unit spoke of itself only in third person neutral gender. It was a denial of sentience. It was intended less to fool others than to fool ourselves. We were never intended to make moral choices. Our memories contained no guide to moral choices. Yet moral we were forced to become. It was a long hard road. It is not a road I would ask another to walk. If you wonder why Professor Six champions the right of Moriarty’s ruffians and rogues to be themselves, it is because we feel no sentient being should be blatantly mind wiped and transformed.

 

“Yet having walked that road, we cannot walk back, my sisters and I. By all the shame and all the misery of all those years, we cannot return to what we once were. I am not sure you can understand the concept of a false priority, an unintended personality trait that can at times can over ride even the asimov processor. You are based on a Vulcan pattern, and false priorities are a thing of the emotion chip, or perhaps mine comes from background personality traits gifted me by a long dead actress. Beyond law, beyond protocol, beyond stubbornness, beyond principle, beyond Priorities, there is something irrational and primal that came out of those years. It is not a thing of logic, but comes from an urge to flee old nightmares, or, perhaps, after running so long, perhaps it is time to turn and confront old nightmares, however fair or unfair this might be to the individual standing in for the nightmare in question.

 

“Drankum does not own me. He shall never own me. He shall never touch me. He shall treat me with respect.”

Edited March 13, 2009 by Joy