A.I. Johnson, Intiate Sumpshock Idea Spawn... Options

[Wolfgar]

Hello ladies and gents, I have a sweet idea for my upcoming (next week!) Sydney campaign. I've already decided to keep my Johnsons down to three recurring NPCs that the players will get to know, each one with their own little plots. The First Mr. Johnson works for Tanamyre (an Australian AA), and he's trying to get a subsidiary Security Company off the ground to compete with Knight Errant. The Second Miss Johnson works for Aztechnology, and she's hiring the runners to snatch magical assets from Wuxing across town.

But I need help with my Third Johnson. He's an AI, meta-sapient, who works for Baird Communications (a tech firm that's owned by, wait for it, Renraku). Obviously an AI may want to hire runners for a job in meat-space, but what sort of job? What are some possible AI motivations for hiring runners?

Edit: Oops, Sumpshock. That will go over well.

[Stahlseele]

That's sum shock O.o
Well, the AI could have them do some sabotage to get stock prices to fall so it can buy the corporation the hardware it lives on belongs to for example.
Or get rid of people planning to do a complete rip out and replace everything in terms of server hardware. Basically self defense.

[redwulf25]

Hello ladies and gents, I have a sweet idea for my upcoming (next week!) Sydney campaign. I've already decided to keep my Johnsons down to three recurring NPCs that the players will get to know, each one with their own little plots. The First Mr. Johnson works for Tanamyre (an Australian AA), and he's trying to get a subsidiary Security Company off the ground to compete with Knight Errant. The Second Miss Johnson works for Aztechnology, and she's hiring the runners to snatch magical assets from Wuxing across town.

But I need help with my Third Johnson. He's an AI, meta-sapient, who works for Baird Communications (a tech firm that's owned by, wait for it, Renraku). Obviously an AI may want to hire runners for a job in meat-space, but what sort of job? What are some possible AI motivations for hiring runners?

Edit: Oops, Sumpshock. That will go over well.

Well, the classic (bordering on cliche) motive is to free it but I'm not sure how Renraku treats AI's under it's control. What are it's goals in general?

[Stahlseele]

Renraku?
They basically ripped Morgana asunder to get at pieces of her core code to use in DEUS for their Arcology Project . .
They treat them BADLY . . So yes, that would be one reason too . .

[Fortinbras]

I'd read through the Emergence adventures. They give lots of nifty ideas for Matrix based motivations.

[Wolfgar]

The freedom motivation didn't even cross my mind! I won't do it, but I do like this theme of threats to the AI coming from within Renraku.

An AI trying to fend off internal rivals within Baird Comm. seems like a good motivation to hire some shadow runners.

Also should mention that one of my players is a technomancer. That will be interesting.

[nezumi]

It could hire them to close air gaps.

"Plug this wireless modem into their server" sort of thing.

It could also require specialized skills, like technicians, so the PCs could be charged with acquiring said technicians, plus the leverage to keep them.

[capt.pantsless]

A.I.'s are sorta the Dragons of the matrix. They've got plans within plans within plans. Feel free to have them do seemingly nonsensical stuff, there might be a purpose that only becomes clear years down the road.

They can also be quite sociopathic - they don't feel empathy, and so might not care that 100's of people might die, nor are they always greedy, so they might give money away to 100's of metahumans - just to see what happens.

In other words, the motivations of A.I.'s is beyond most humans. Think big.

[Bira]

Depends on the type of AI. The "sociopath Dragons of the Matrix" thing was for the old omnipotent AIs of Third Edition. The ones on Fourth aren't necessarily like that.

A meta-sapient AI, specifically, thinks very much like a metahuman, and can be treated as a standard NPC with a few quirks. One that works as an Mr. Johnson in a corporation would give out pretty much the same kind of jobs a human Mr. Johnson might. In other words, things that further the interests of the corp it works for. Since that corp is in turn owned by Renraku, a good "personal plot" for the AI would be that Renraku will eventually start hunting it down for capture, and it'll need the runners for protection and maybe for help in running away. But until that happens, it's pretty much a corporate Johnson like any other.

There are weirder types of AI, but I think none of them would be working at a corp.

[Ascalaphus]

Maybe the AI is pretending to be a blood&flesh person, and occasionally needs to eliminate people who suspect it's actually not fleshy? Keeping its true nature hidden and all that.

It could be taking action against anti-AI groups, technomancers...

Perhaps, although AIs are of course very good at the Matrix, humans still often surprise them with leaps of insight that AIs find difficult to replicate. So the AI wants to dissect brilliant metahuman hackers to find out how they do it, in hopes of eventually emulating that ability too. Cue the runners, hired to hostile-extract top-level hackers...

Maybe AIs develop jealousy-like reactions to the Matrix innovations of other companies? Or they recognize that another (digitally secure!) company has something that would be valuable to the AI/Renraku, and they want it.

All in all, the most obvious/generic reason AIs hire runners would be to get at things not really Matrix-accessible.

Less cliche: the AI has grown fond of a particular person, and hires the runners to secretly watch over and protect that person.

AIs might think Magic is fascinating, precisely because they're completely unable to do it themselves. An AI might obsess about mana/genetics research, hoping to find a way to become magic-capable itself.