Are Commanders sapient?

Having given this a bit more thought the only counter that I can see for my quoted post is that commanders only have the appearance of sentience due to their programming, which is ultimately just a reactive input/output system.

This opens an interesting philosophical avenue. I will give five (5) pounds to any person claiming to be sentient that can prove that they actually are, and that they are not in fact just a complicated input/output system with no free will.

And I will give ten pounds to anyone that can prove to me that they exist.

Okay, now it's time for me to pitch in so... here we go.

These are learning AI. There's not really any way they could not be. Simply by having the hard-coded imperative, at some point in their existence, to win this was at all costs by beating the other sides until they cry uncle. And then shooting them. The only way to ensure victory is to have a bigger stick. This technological advancement has resulted in a stalemate at the functional top of militaristic technology.

As becoming more destructive would just result in them blowing themselves up, they would have to fight smarter, not harder. At some point they would develop a way to learn. If they've developed a way to learn, they are a strong AI. If they are a strong AI, they either are or will become sentient, sapient entities. They'd likely develop into individuals, with their own personal approaches on the battlefield.

Now it's worth noting that what develops here is not going to be human-like, even remotely. These are entities who have literally evolved around war, whose sole purpose is war. They will cherish it, revel in it, glory in it. They will be very much like a colder version of the orks. (except when they aren't because, y'know, individuals)

From another perspective: This situation is selective evolution at its most ridiculous. As is easy enough to demonstrate on Earth, smart things tend to win over stupid things on a geological timescale. This takes place over a cosmic timescale. These machines have been becoming smarter for thousands or millions of years. Anything that stayed stupid died.

I'd say the average commander at this point would have manifold the computational capacities of the entire human race.

TL;DR They're going to be sapient. You can't stop them.

They could be a AI, emergent/emerging SAI, or fully formed SAI
(SAI = sentient AI).

Another way to look at it is 'mind uploading'. It's what the CORE did in TA.
Organic consciouness turned from flesh to machine.

Could be the CORE Contingency, was a complete success - only to have their new society degenerate into all out civil war. In which case "Welcome to the TA2".

SAI is short for strong AI, not sentient. Basically it means it can learn, rewrite its programming, and modify itself to become more intelligent/better able to learn.

I recommend you look up strong AI again. While the tech may not be there yet, the ultimate goal is to achieve true intelligence.

The human brain is itself a collection of hardware, firmware, drivers and software. It's connected to sensors, devices, performs maintenance routines, solves problems, and can even reprogram itself. Who's to say a robot with all these capabilities is any less sentient than a meat bag? That is, unless the distinction is one of pure prejudice.

I think that it will ultimately be the designers choice, as currently it could go either way. They could be incredably designed software AIs like in Portal(Which I suppose would be considered sentiant by a simple and straight forward defination of the term). Or they could be something like the story for Cortex Command, where basicly human brains are still running everything, but no humans exhist any more.

Wasn't GLADOS an engram?

Just because something doesn't think like a human doesn't mean it isn't sentient.

How about the commanders are built from faction specific factories that are just dumb enough not to recognize any sort of peaceful solution to the war, i.e. have 'fight until the enemy is completely dead' hard-coded as a primary directive.

It might be more appealing to have robots with minimal personalities. Kinda like Abattur in the new Starcraft 2 expansion: just enough 'human' emotions to make them funny or scary, bt with a completely alien set of 'moral' rules. aka
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... geMorality

Neutrino says they are sentient.
/thread

Good ol' Nanolathe, coming in for the kill.

Am I the only one who thoroughly enjoyed Total Annihilation's plot, when virtually every GOG review of it was "meh, it was but a shell of a plot..."? I think I am TOO interested in robotic interactions... Especially if they have the power to create and destroy. Crude "gods", if you will.

Ia ia, Deus Ex Machina!

Well.....TA's plot was the eternal war between 2 dead civilisations who weapons hadn't died yet.

Not about interactions between machines.....as the ARM were clones in battlesuits.

Ah, well, of course. I just tend to switch from the specific (Total Annihilation) to the general (any media where only robots appear, or are VERY prominent) without being obvious about it, sorry!

Huh, it's a shame that whole Fabber-cube thread died. Because knowing that the commanders are sentient makes that whole conversation even more interesting... Sentient, but they know what makes them sentient, then they get a whole new moral dilemma between teleportation and deconstruction and reconstruction... Like commanders could be afraid of their own mortality and be unwilling to go through a fabber cube, but the units they command, though sentient as well, would have no such delusions... Gameplay wise it would mean you'd need a rocket to get your commander off the planet, it would be easier on the player than reclaiming and refabricating your units on the planets you'd need them on, and it would possibly require extra power on activation as opposed to a constant drain the way a stargate would.

Sounds fun.

My commander's mission is going to be to find John Connor.