Humor: GURPS Friendly AI
Found some hidden internet gold and thought I would share: http://sl4.org/wiki/GurpsFriendlyAI http://sl4.org/wiki/FriendlyAICriticalFailureTable GurpsFriendlyAI by EliezerYudkowsky Characters in GURPS Friendly AI may learn three new skills, the AI skill (Mental / Hard), the Seed AI skill (Mental / Very Hard), and the Friendly AI skill (Mental / Ridiculously Hard). AI skill: An ordinary failure wastes 1d6 years of time and 4d6 hundred thousand dollars. (Non-gamers: 4d6 means "roll four 6-sided dice and add the results".) A critical failure wastes 2d10 years and 2d6 million dollars. An ordinary success results in a successful company. A critical success leads to a roll on the Seed AI skill using AI skill -10, with any ordinary failure on that roll treated as an ordinary success on this roll, and any critical failure treated as an ordinary failure on this roll. Seed AI skill: An ordinary failure wastes 2d6 years of time and 8d6 hundred thousand dollars. A critical failure wastes 4d10 years and 4d6 million dollars. If the player has the Friendly AI skill, an ordinary success leads to a roll on the Friendly AI skill, and a critical success grants a +2 bonus on the Friendly AI roll. If the player does not have the Friendly AI skill, an ordinary success automatically destroys the world, and a critical success leads to a roll on the Friendly AI skill using Seed AI skill -10. (Note that if the player has only the AI skill, this roll will be made using AI skill -20!) Friendly AI skill: An ordinary success results in a Friendly Singularity. A critical success... ooh, that's tough. An ordinary failure destroys the world. And, of course, a critical failure means that the players roll 3d10 on the FriendlyAICriticalFailureTable Part of GurpsFriendlyAI. If you roll a critical failure on your Friendly AI roll, you then roll 6d6 (six six-sided dice) to obtain a result from the Friendly AI Critical Failure Table 6: Any spoken request is interpreted (literally
Completely wrong.
As a software engineer at a company with way too much work to go around, I can tell you that making a "good effort" goes a long way. 90% of the time you don't have to "make it work or get a zero". As long as you are showing progress you can generally keep the client happy (or at least not firing you) as you get things done, even if you are missing deadlines. And this seems very much normal to me. I'm not sure where in the market you have to "make it work or get a zero". I'm not even convinced that exists.