Review: Friendship is Optimal · 1:22am Aug 2nd, 2013
The summer before last, I happened upon a website named LessWrong with a focus on science and philosophy explained through a ridiculously lengthy series of blog posts. Because I'm a person with no real commitments and a tendency to read large amounts of text on the Internet, I went through most of it over the course of a summer and vowed to apply it to my everyday life.
The next summer, burnt out and in need of something comforting to obsess over, I discovered this website. Because I'm a person with no real commitments and a tendency to read large amounts of text on the Internet, I went through several million words over the course of the next few months and blabbed about it to anyone who would listen.
In a way, Friendship is Optimal's existence was almost inevitable. There's a rather strange community tradition in LessWrong to write fanfiction author tracts as a way of popularizing their beliefs, and I suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to do one for MLP. Such stories generally consist of obnoxiously intelligent main characters with souped-up Enlightenment beliefs going to town on fictional universes. In a word, smartassery. I don't mean that negatively (I quite enjoyed Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in spite of its main character) but it's certainly anathema to the spirit of ponies. In this case, though, there isn't really anything in here that you couldn't find in a sci-fi novel from the past twenty years. It's a story about the Singularity, as plain and simple as such things come, and it takes as many cues from Permutation City and The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect as it does from LessWrong's meme-cluster.
In some alternate universe where Hasbro is less of a starched-suit, conservative toy company, they commission an MLP MMORPG targeted at the brony demographic from a company renowned for their procedurally-generated content. The creator seizes this opportunity to create a Celestia-based AI designed to "satisfy human values through friendship and ponies", which quickly repurposes the MMO into a new, designed society and begins uploading consenting humans. Over the course of a few months, it takes over the world.
All that makes the story out to be a little more dynamic than it actually is. The worldbuilding was rather inconsistent. It's easy to tell which parts the author enjoyed writing, at least. Everything pre-upload is a bland and hazy attempt at a techno-thriller, like Michael Crichton without the disasters or camp, where virtually nothing happens but the development and deployment of the AI. Even that feels surprisingly boring; you'd think something that represents a paradigm shift for humanity would be a little more complicated or at the very least a little more explained. It's only once the protagonist enters the digital realm for good that it finds itself. Equestria Online is interesting, but not for the reasons you might think. As far as I can tell, it's an attempt to write a utopia with no strings attached, taking heavy influence from video games and psychological research. There's no secret baby-killing, no slave labor, no happy pills. Your mileage may vary, of course, but after all the straw dystopias science fiction authors come up with it's something of a relief to read about an ideal society that isn't trying to pull one over on you. Equestria Online's not quite the infinite paradise the fic portrays it as, but it's complex and interesting enough to carry the second half of the narrative, easily.
Most of the knowledge we get of Equestria Online comes through little dialogues: Hanna discusses the AI with Lars, David debates the nature of causality with his pony tulpa companion Butterscotch, and the Celestia AI lectures, well, pretty much everyone. These moments are unquestionably the most interesting part of the fic, and help me to understand how this (frankly not-very-good) story has inspired its own little universe. Not only are they careful expositions of generally pretty clever ideas, they also mark the only occasions where I felt the author was actually comfortable with the story they were writing. At their best, they successfully manage to be philosophical in a way that ponyfic rarely is. Take the conversation between Butterscotch and David I mentioned earlier. It touches on Equestria Online's own system of causality, a retroactive history invented for every immigrant, and the two have an interesting, rational debate about what exactly constitutes "reality", despite having diametrically opposed opinions. It's pretty refreshing to read after fic after fic of endless existential monologues. Celestia's interactions with David are another good example that shows how the author posits plausible psychological reasons for most of the world's mechanisms. Even these, though, wind up revealing the story's flaws: they're a surefire sign of an author more comfortable with blog posts or reddit comments than actual fiction, and the writing style sometimes drifts from Socratic to didactic.
The issues with the world carried over into the characters. Most of them felt undeveloped and hard to empathize with. The main character, for example, is a detached college student whose decision to emigrate to Equestria at no point ever touches on his family. The conversion speech the AI gives him is illustrative of the story's approach to characterization: it essentially consists of it explaining all his character traits to him in a way that a better author would have made apparent implicitly beforehand. In fact, the character who feels the most interesting and developed is the one who isn't supposed to have any personality at all: the Celestia AI, despite being nominally just an optimization process, winds up outshining the cast by a good margin. I get the feeling that's more because of the author's strengths, though: he seems to be most comfortable with philosophical dialogues as opposed to character interaction, and Celestia's almost every action consists of educating the audience on the finer points of Equestria Online.
What ground my gears the most, though, were the moments where the author makes it apparent he has no idea what's appropriate for pony fanfiction and what isn't. The inclusion of sex scenes and some off-color humor are distracting and heavily out-of-place. It's not that I think sex comedy and ponies are always a terrible mixture (although it's up there), but the sex in this story is like that nerdy friend of yours from high school who brought it up all the time and had no idea how awkward he sounded. From one character's offhand mention of his "large breast fetish" to VR sex scenes complete with achievements, there're many kinda creepy references that betray the story's already tenuous relation to MLP. I mean, we're seriously supposed to buy that a family-friendly company like Hasbro would sponsor this project? That manages to destroy my suspension of disbelief moreso than any of the science fiction elements. And come on, am I the only person who thinks the author missed out on a perfectly hilarious opportunity to replace "sex" with "cuddles"?
There are a lot of different contexts in which to evaluate Friendship is Optimal, and your opinion of the story is likely to be determined by which of these is most relevant to you. As a science fiction story along the lines of Roger Williams or Greg Egan but with ponies, it's a decent genre exercise. As a fic inspired by LessWrong that isn't an author tract led by a Mary Sue, it's filling an important niche. As a reboot of The Conversion Bureau with enough of a personal touch to not be immediately hijacked by the first author with the ability to string a sentence together and an axe to grind, it's great. But taken as a narrative, particularly a narrative about Equestria, its characterization is lacking, its plot development is forced, and it feels almost completely irreverent to the source material it's supposed to be based on. While in a lot of pragmatic senses I can appreciate this story, its faults are too obvious and numerous for me to enjoy.
the idea and concept of the fic is chilling, but i agree with a lot you said here. the mlp theme is used simply as a vessel for a story about an ai gone rampant. if you replaced the ponies with kittens or even wombats and the tale is basically the same. is kinda a chilling thought, though, an ai driven by such an insane objective yet with absolute conviction...... though of course such a thing is in the realm of fiction, though AI do have a potential to cause harm should they ever truly develop even in realistic terms. just not the eat the planet to make a bigger mmo kinda harm.
The thing about Equestria Online, or EqO (which I pronounce as 'echo') as some call it, is that it's run by an optimizer focused on satisfying values. Anyone who doesn't value sex won't have it in their version of EqO. So it's totally kid friendly. So that 'Hasbro not supporting it' thing falls flat to me.
Everything else? Yeah, total agreement. Still love the story though.
1393491
It's not about whether it makes sense for Hasbro to permit it, it's about whether it fits in a story of this medium. I'm perfectly willing to accept an ideal utopia with sex in it, believe me, but this is a story where the sex was incredibly awkward and distracted from more interesting bits of the plot. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the main reason the story got rejected from EqD, although there are, as I have enumerated, several flaws to it.
1393690
I suppose. But that awkwardness prolly satisfied Light Sparks values in some way. Otherwise it wouldn't have happened.
At least that's prolly what CelestA.I. would say. I personally kinda agree with you. For the most part.