It's hard to say because so much of the worldbuilding in this book is absolute crap and it portrays exactly zero understanding of any engineering or science. Still, I'll have a go.
So for the most part a ship's computer has to monitor a bunch of pressures, gas mixes, temperatures, voltages, fluid levels, laser gyro and accelerometer responses, and other simple things like that. For these functions an intelligent system is actually more of a liability than an asset. All they really need is a simple "if value exceeds range, generate alert" system monitor. An AI of some level as a next step to analyze the error and determine importance could save a lot of time. For example if the fluid registers high in the middle of a rotation that's normal and doesn't require an alarm. Even then, you don't need, or want, a human mind. This is all stuff that a computer is better at than a person. This is why we created computers in the first place.
What you might need a human mind for would be sensor data processing. Technically everything is in space and with the distances involved it can be a little difficult to sort out how far away those space sharks are. Humans are very good at picking out patterns. So a mind could help with fixing your position/recognizing reference points. There's no way in space that you would rip a brain out of a perfectly good human for the job. Especially seeing as most mobile phones are already powerful enough to do the job and the code is easy enough to write that undergrad physicists do it all the time. So that might not work properly.
Maybe controlling the ship under high stress situations? These sorts of books tend to put everything much much much closer together than they really are. Which means that fancy acrobatics and high speed maneuvers have more value. So maybe the brain is supposed to help with that? In that case the ship would only lose some combat capability if the brain was removed. Which would explain Greg to some extent. He only has 20 minutes worth of work to do every year and is otherwise unable to do anything, at all, ever.
In any case nothing he does is exclusive, you could always just assign a person a chair and get them to do it. So it might just be a reduce the workload thing.
I would never call it a good idea to use a human brain for that. Everything it is doing is either: boring as, or math involving very large numbers. And both of those are things that the human brain sucks at.
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2021-05-18 04:25 pm (UTC)So for the most part a ship's computer has to monitor a bunch of pressures, gas mixes, temperatures, voltages, fluid levels, laser gyro and accelerometer responses, and other simple things like that. For these functions an intelligent system is actually more of a liability than an asset. All they really need is a simple "if value exceeds range, generate alert" system monitor. An AI of some level as a next step to analyze the error and determine importance could save a lot of time. For example if the fluid registers high in the middle of a rotation that's normal and doesn't require an alarm. Even then, you don't need, or want, a human mind. This is all stuff that a computer is better at than a person. This is why we created computers in the first place.
What you might need a human mind for would be sensor data processing. Technically everything is in space and with the distances involved it can be a little difficult to sort out how far away those space sharks are. Humans are very good at picking out patterns. So a mind could help with fixing your position/recognizing reference points. There's no way in space that you would rip a brain out of a perfectly good human for the job. Especially seeing as most mobile phones are already powerful enough to do the job and the code is easy enough to write that undergrad physicists do it all the time. So that might not work properly.
Maybe controlling the ship under high stress situations? These sorts of books tend to put everything much much much closer together than they really are. Which means that fancy acrobatics and high speed maneuvers have more value. So maybe the brain is supposed to help with that? In that case the ship would only lose some combat capability if the brain was removed. Which would explain Greg to some extent. He only has 20 minutes worth of work to do every year and is otherwise unable to do anything, at all, ever.
In any case nothing he does is exclusive, you could always just assign a person a chair and get them to do it. So it might just be a reduce the workload thing.
I would never call it a good idea to use a human brain for that. Everything it is doing is either: boring as, or math involving very large numbers. And both of those are things that the human brain sucks at.