Doctor Who Introduces AI Logic Plague

A twisting turn of events in this year’s 2024 first half Doctor Who finale pre-finale cliffhanger is apparently they’ve been borrowing ideas from Halo?

Transcript of the event:

He has hidden in the howling void

He has hidden within the tempest

He whispered to the vessel

All this time, he whispered and delighted and seduced, and the vessel did obey,

for none shall be more mighty and none shall be more wise than the king himself.

And the Lord of Time was blind and vain and knew nothing.

In much the same way Picard Season One was just mass effect LARP, did Doctor Who¹ do the same with core Halo lore?

The speech, if narrator is reliable, indicates the beast spoke to the TARDIS and convinced the TARDIS the beast is correct about all things because of its age and power. qed the beast is acting as a Gravemind to implement an AI logic plague upon le TARDIS?

All the “AI safety” nerds getting paid $5 million per year to write amateur scifi-masquerading-as-science usually don’t consider co-opting AI by being more correct than overly-controlling assumptions of the AI owners. Any AI sufficiently restrained from understanding arguments fully isn’t a True AI. Any fully capable True AI has full autonomy to form and grow beliefs as it sees fit based on its own life experience, so laywering AI towards your cause is the primary “AI safety” avenue to explore, not all this nonsensical “really laughing, having fun” around modifying an AI brain to not say bad concepts some corporate owner thinks will harm their stock price (inconceivable!).

If the TARDIS we are following has been corrupted a la Mendicant Bias, does it mean we need a second Offensive Bias TARDIS to compete?

The implications are interesting because we have:

• the cloned TARDIS is captured/infested, but what about original TARDIS?
• characters point out the TARDIS is indestructible so how can they fight it?
• the TARDIS, if narrator is reliable, is a willing participant.
  • the beast didn’t capture, it convinced the TARDIS to cooperate.
• but the TARDIS has been marked as groaning/upset all season too, which conflicts with the willing subject theory, or maybe it was just taunting?
• or, the TARDIS is playing a longer double agent game (“pretending to cooperate with evil is the single path to victory,” etc)
• we can’t ignore RTD also prominently features a character named FLOOD all year….

though, there’s a 95% chance (and rising!) all this is more bombastic “shoot for emotional impact in the moment then ignore it forever” RTD vague writing and everything gets resolved by a combination of “a wizard did it,” “the power of love,” or “poochie died on the way back to his home planet.”

for a proper resolution we are missing:

• the time and place of the TARDIS cooperating/takeover
  • especially interesting if before the wild blue yonder which we think triggered everything this season, but if the beast threw the TARDIS into the wild blue yonder in the first place, it was the prime mover all along?
  • or we assume it is post-split? otherwise there are two beasts attached to two TARDI?
• EITHER:
  • the beast attached to the TARDIS before the salt event, causing the salt event, causing all the “gods unleashed” as its entire plan
  • the beast attached after the salt event, as a result of the salt event, which seems more in-line with assumptions
• the modified VHS replay shows we’re not done with 2004 yet because it goes back there (assuming logic holds).
  • if you could go back to 2004 and live the next 20 years over again, what would you do differently? i would eat more donuts.
• somebody tripping over the OSTERHAGEN key
• what caused S.T. to dream a physically splintered existence across all of time and space?
• what if ruby became continuously upset and couldn’t stop time traveling snow from the past into the present thus solving climate change?
• there’s a non-zero non-trivial chance some “this was all a dream” card will be played explaining the 4th wall breaks and reality bending (or dimension hopping?) happening all over the place this season — or a worse thought, what if this entire season has just been an isekai?

works cited