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Ghostkeel is specifically said to have an sentient integrated AI that their pilots bond over to the point they prefer the company of the AI over other Tau.
Tau has technology to upload a Tau's mind into a battlesuit.

So why aren't the Tau not only making full AI battlesuits, but also not copying and pasting insanely powerful warriors like Shas'o Kais (war of secrets) into all of their battlesuits?

Because the Tau have no shortage of warriors, and the technology isn't quite there yet - there's a prototype AI in The Eight.

Some of the farsight novels actually touch on some of this.

The short version is they are still developing the technology to be able to make the high quality high detail scans of brains to allow the person to be replicated as an AI.

Oblotai (not sure on the spelling) one of Farsight's Eight is actually a mind cloned AI of his (dead) old broadsaide commander, who fights in an advance XV88 suit autonomously. The suit can still take a Living Tau Pilot aswell and the story seems to make it sound like the Combo of Skilled living Tau and Advanced AI is actually faster than either alone. However farsight often makes comments on the limitations of the Oblotai AI compaired to his memories of the old Tau Oblotai.

I think Programing Drones and such from scratch is definataly something Tau have mastered but the top level of AI required to be fully autonomous seems to still be beyond them at the time of the novels. And the mind cloning seems to be extremely risky/difficult and only attempted on diying Tau.

Although I will say I can see this changing as the farsight fluff is probably a hundred or so years old in universe timeline now we are in the 5th sphere expansion.

It's widely held that the eths control the tau populace thru pheromones or something like them. This has been used to explain the battlesuit psychosis condition because a warrior who is in a sealed suit a lot isn't getting his RDA of eth pheromones to keep him under control.

An AI would logically be immune to pheromone control, and thus might make the eths a little uncomfortable.

Except that the ethereal can have a software backdoor programmed into the things easily enough. Pheromones through wifi. Niiiiice...

 Flinty wrote:
Except that the ethereal can have a software backdoor programmed into the things easily enough. Pheromones through wifi. Niiiiice...

Yeah - but it's the Earth caste who create the AI, so how do they get it in there unnoticed.

beast_gts wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Except that the ethereal can have a software backdoor programmed into the things easily enough. Pheromones through wifi. Niiiiice...

Yeah - but it's the Earth caste who create the AI, so how do they get it in there unnoticed.

It doesn't have to be unnoticed. If the Ethereals say to put a backdoor like that in there, the Earth Caste obey(whether they want to or not, Ethereals can literally control other Tau's bodies).

beast_gts wrote:
Because the Tau have no shortage of warriors, and the technology isn't quite there yet - there's a prototype AI in The Eight.

Well, they do have one very good AI...

@OP, as is said above; most Tau AI is simply not intelligent enough/worth it/able to be produced in large numbers to do that just yet. Drones are said in the first Tau codex to have roughly the intelligence level of a Ptera-squirrel.

 Platuan4th wrote:

beast_gts wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Except that the ethereal can have a software backdoor programmed into the things easily enough. Pheromones through wifi. Niiiiice...

Yeah - but it's the Earth caste who create the AI, so how do they get it in there unnoticed.

It doesn't have to be unnoticed. If the Ethereals say to put a backdoor like that in there, the Earth Caste obey(whether they want to or not, Ethereals can literally control other Tau's bodies).

I don't think the fluff agrees that it's that direct it's more like Tau want to say yes and it takes a significant amount of individual will to say No, but their is sideways references to certain Firewarrior of old age and bitter experiance being able to say No to Etherials and the young etherials being confused as to why they arn't obayed without question.

It also seems to be able to be entirely overwehelmed by terror.

The Tau do not seem to be stupid and will have done their homework in trying to research the history of the 40k universe, have so many Gui'vessa I would guess that they are aware of the myths of old night and would possibly be aware of the ban on AI by humans due to the Men of iron, perhaps not in name but smart enough to recognise AI as AI in the legends.

They would likely have encountered scrap code too from traitor marines or Dark mech and would likely have lost drones and other simple AI to it.

And even more they would have had dealings with Necrons who are able to manipulate or disrupt AI and advanced computers/cogitators.

Long story short they may not have full AI for the same reason the Imperium does not, they are not stupid and understand the vulnerability it could leave them in, I would not want full AI battlesuits in the 40k universe given how many threats could possess, disrupt or destroy AI.

Ice_can wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:

beast_gts wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Except that the ethereal can have a software backdoor programmed into the things easily enough. Pheromones through wifi. Niiiiice...

Yeah - but it's the Earth caste who create the AI, so how do they get it in there unnoticed.

It doesn't have to be unnoticed. If the Ethereals say to put a backdoor like that in there, the Earth Caste obey(whether they want to or not, Ethereals can literally control other Tau's bodies).

I don't think the fluff agrees that it's that direct it's more like Tau want to say yes and it takes a significant amount of individual will to say No, but their is sideways references to certain Firewarrior of old age and bitter experiance being able to say No to Etherials and the young etherials being confused as to why they arn't obayed without question.

It also seems to be able to be entirely overwehelmed by terror.

I would imagine that the Earth Caste would be entirely alright with putting a backdoor in to prevent their AI babies from wiping out the Tau. And given that the Ethereals are fuzzy wonderful beings and the Earth Caste want to keep on having the fuzzy feelings from making the Ethereals happy, they would be delighted to make sure that it's the Ethereals that have the root access order 66 level of control.

 Grimtuff wrote:

beast_gts wrote:
Because the Tau have no shortage of warriors, and the technology isn't quite there yet - there's a prototype AI in The Eight.

Well, they do have one very good AI...

@OP, as is said above; most Tau AI is simply not intelligent enough/worth it/able to be produced in large numbers to do that just yet. Drones are said in the first Tau codex to have roughly the intelligence level of a Ptera-squirrel.

Exactly. If they can make a backup COPY of a DEAD Ethereal Supreme, there is literally no reason they can't just do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Shas'O Kais took down an entire space marine chapter on his own in a Ghostkeel through skillz. Copy and paste that over and over and over and over and over and over.

Makes no sense : (

Part of it will be cultural.

The four main castes are genuine sub-species of Tau (possibly fully on separate species within the Tau genus) and have substantial physiological differences. The Fire Caste needs to keep having a role (you can’t just shuffle them off elsewhere) and they lose that role if you replace them with AI.

As brutal as it sounds Tau society requires the Fire Caste to go out and fight and it makes no sense to replace them with AI to save their lives if you’ve got nothing else for them to do.

I suppose you could say why don’t the imperium field armies of servitors to find down the enemy before the IG go in. I think the answer is it wouldn’t be fun for us. Unless the AIs became fully sentient and characters within the fluff

mrFickle wrote:
I suppose you could say why don’t the imperium field armies of servitors to find down the enemy before the IG go in. I think the answer is it wouldn’t be fun for us. Unless the AIs became fully sentient and characters within the fluff

IG has an excuse. Guardsmen are cheaper than Servitors. Servitors are more expensive than guardsman.

A Ghostkeel AI that's capable of taking down an entire space marine chapter on the other hand, is cheaper than an army of Tau battlesuits that's required to accomplish the same thing.

roboemperor wrote:

Exactly. If they can make a backup COPY of a DEAD Ethereal Supreme, there is literally no reason they can't just do it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

They didnt make a copy of Aun'Va. They made the galaxy's best deepfake machine. And the Tau have already tried doing the whole "scan a brain, make it a chip". It ended with the lobotomization of every Fire Caste member involved (except one).

I'd also point out that Ob'lotai doesnt work for the Tau Empire. He works for the Enclaves. And Farsight is fully aware of the issues with pure AI.

Warhammer Adventures: Secrets of the Tau features a whole bunch of autonomous battlesuits in the service of Light ringer.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Warhammer Adventures: Secrets of the Tau features a whole bunch of autonomous battlesuits in the service of Light ringer.

Awesome! Could you go into a little more detail? Where and how did they appear and what did they do?

It's a matter of cost-effectiveness. A drone is treated as expendable because it is. A high-end XV-series is expensive enough to justify the additional 'cost' of a trained Shas'ui pilot - especially since battlesuits tend to be used in fast-paced, critical and complex operations where a simple order like "head that way and kill anything without a T'au IFF" isn't good enough, and you need a sentient mind there in the battlefield with zero comms delay.

See arguments between UAVs and piloted combat aircraft today.

 Flinty wrote:
Except that the ethereal can have a software backdoor programmed into the things easily enough. Pheromones through wifi. Niiiiice...

The problem there is the assumption the backdoor will work. If the AI is dumb then fine, but you can't trust it to achieve much tactically without supervision. Strong General AI is very difficult to 'cage' because it's inevitably a better programmer than the organic mind creating it, and its capability comes from emergent behaviour that's hard to predict.

Heck, even sentient-model AI programmed by the Necrontyr has a non-trivial track record of going bat-crud insane and trying to kill absolutely everything.....

Ice_can wrote:

 Platuan4th wrote:

beast_gts wrote:

 Flinty wrote:
Except that the ethereal can have a software backdoor programmed into the things easily enough. Pheromones through wifi. Niiiiice...

Yeah - but it's the Earth caste who create the AI, so how do they get it in there unnoticed.

It doesn't have to be unnoticed. If the Ethereals say to put a backdoor like that in there, the Earth Caste obey(whether they want to or not, Ethereals can literally control other Tau's bodies).

I don't think the fluff agrees that it's that direct it's more like Tau want to say yes and it takes a significant amount of individual will to say No, but their is sideways references to certain Firewarrior of old age and bitter experiance being able to say No to Etherials and the young etherials being confused as to why they arn't obayed without question.

It also seems to be able to be entirely overwehelmed by terror.

An Ethereal literally forced a high ranking Water Caste's body to kill herself despite her will and brain telling her body to do otherwise.

What book is that from?

Ice_can wrote:
What book is that from?

Crisis of Faith.

 Platuan4th wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
What book is that from?

Crisis of Faith.

That wasn't any etherial that was Aun'Va the oldest most powerful Etherial and yes the water cast does stab herself but only once.
The book make no reference to her resisting in anyway, it could as easily be explained by the greatergood having a parallel to bushideo.

Also both O'vesa and Farsight lie to the Etherials which seems to be at odds with having to blindly comply with an etherials will.

In Gladius, the tau storyline is...

You got an ruthless ethereal that wants to kill all non tau on the planet.
You are a commander and you
keep sparing the non tau like vespids. Whenever the Ethereal is around you obey him, when he is not, you spare everyone.

There is a girl commander Coldflame. You and her are knife bonded. Apparently its closer than family.

----

After the Ethereal study the stuff in Gladius, they found a weapon that will kill all non-tau on the planet. Coldflame is horrified and starts a rebellion with other Tau, Vespids, Humans, etc. altogether to stop the ethereal from committing mass genocide because non-tau deserve to live too and that is the greater good.

You agree with Coldflame but the Ethereal talks to you. he says she's a traitor and must die for the greater good. he keeps repeating this again and again and again and again. And you understand it. And you carry out your orders. And you kill Coldflame and the rest of the non-tau on the planet.

Afterwards the Ethereal praises you saying you are clear from suspicion and you did the right thing. But your knife bonded scar burns and endlessly bothers you. Eventually you take up Coldflame's cause and start a rebellion.

-----

In short, Ethereals have full on mind control on all Tau. It's not completely absolute, but its damn near close.