A Starfarer's Guide to Freelancing

Thought

The definitive reference volume for all interstellar self-employed entities has the following to say about thinking;

"It's maybe a tad reductive to say that all thinking creatures think the same way, so it's at the risk of sounding reductive that we say it. But for practical purposes that's the assumption you can make; if a thing is sentient, or even capable of processing information sub-sentiently, its thought patterns will be roughly the same as yours.

"But by golly that doesn't mean they'll think the same things as you! There are a few Mrs-Ex-Freelancers floating among the muons that will attest to that. Biologists, roboticists, and philophosists consulted on the matter describe the nature of consciousness as a propagating, self-altering waveform. Your thoughts are self-deterministically mapped against the hardware you're thinking with by your choices and your circumstances, resulting in this fickle thing we call 'individuality'. Individuality can make it hard to create a marketing campaign that will speak to your entire audience, but sentient being will almost always tend toward groupings, and you can target those groupings much more effectively."

Chapter 4: Self-Marketing Basics

"Computers are fast; intelligences aren't. It's a common fallacy to equate the simple mathematical speed of a dumb computer with the complicated creative thought processing of an artificial intelligence running on computer hardware. Eons ago, before the first artificial intelligences emerged, computing 'speed' was thought to be the effective speed at which the computer could 'think'. We measured it in operations-per-second. But bio-mechanical computers (otherwise known as brains if you've got any!) don't function in operations-per-second. The way information is processed, stored, and used by a sentient organic creature is something we can look at, but which we still have a hard time understanding.

"So when the first artificial intelligences manifested and they weren't automatically much smarter than humans, there was some confusion. Turns out that sentience is inherently inefficient; the raw speed of their brains is still measured in OPS, but the speed at which they think is not so different than us. Now of course you can accelerate the speed of an A.I.'s brain, and they will be able to process, store, and use information faster. You can do much the same thing with a biological brain, from a medical perspective. But that doesn't make them smarter, necessarily, just faster. And just because they think faster than you doesn't mean that their thought processes are wired in the right way to let them replicate what you can do. Don't let them scare you into submission. You have a product or skill-set that they need, and if you believe it so will they, no matter how many OPS their brain has!"

Chapter 5: So They Say They Don't Need Any?