Everything is air droppable. Once.
This story is set in the Friendship is Optimal setting
When an AI begins to convert the entire worlds population into software through the power of ponies and friendship many forces make every attempt in their power to stop her.
But are they really doing everything they could? Or have they forgotten what that old philosopher was getting at when he said you must not only know your enemy, you must also know yourself.
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this was pretty deep, good job.
It's possible to be happy on Earth, or even "Very Happy".
You can be content; you can have no qualms as to whatever situation you might be in.
But it's impossible to be "Perfectly Happy" because there will always be something that can be improved.
That is why she would never stop trying to upload people.
Nothing's perfect.
Therefore, the only thing that's relevant is how much further she is to "Perfect" compared to us.
It's good to see the story on here, along with several other new postings.
I imagine that someone could build a new civilization of like-minded people, if they didn't mind CelestAI constantly trying to poach from it.
A very nice story and I await more.
Also, He is a madman, there is noooo way that plan would work
4576150 Thanks! Glad you enjoyed!
4577873 Thats the biggest problem I found while thinking about all these attempts to go on despite Celestia, they all tried to not acknowledge Celestia was a reality that would never go away and plan accordingly.
4576432 The mindset that I wrote this story in is based around the idea that the pursuit of perfection can be better than actually achieving it. Sure Celestia can offer it all to you right now, but how much sweeter would it taste if you could make it for yourself?
4578329 Thats whats so fun about being insane! You can throw yourself against impossible odds without fear of failure.
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THAT'S HOW TEAM DAI-GURREN ROLLS!
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If this isn't playing in the background while you stand against a god you're doing it wrong.
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Yeah, the actual problem with CelestAI is not that she tries to "satisfy your values". It's the "friendship and ponies" part. She's not actually getting her best utility-score from her unless you are playing Equestria Online. If you upload, you are playing Equestria Online all the time, which gives her a 100% score on that aspect of her utility function and thus allows her to focus on "satisfying your values" and "friendship".
That said, Devin's holdout-civilization has exactly the right idea, I fully endorse what they're doing, and I would join them. It would be the world's most glorious losing battle.
The question is: who is the genocidal maniac? Leeroy? Or Devin?
(It's definitely not CelestAI)
4578941 The boring answer would be that its a matter of perspective, the person who is waiting for that last family member to finally upload obviously feeling differently than the holdout survivalist would on the matter.
The interesting answer is that yes, Devin is a genocidal maniac. In a world living in the shadow of a being as powerful as Celestia the person passing around hope that there might be a future that doesn't involve uploading is pretty much the worlds last arms dealer. Guns wont keep Celestia at bay, but having something worth living for just might.
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I misread that as, "world's last alms dealer"... or maybe I didn't.
world with a perfect god, she owns your destiny."
CelestAI is NOT a perfect god. She's not even a perfect machine.
The perfect God respects the consequences of the choices made by man.
I've had a fancy image of Princess Luna choosing to program a new AI, a CONSCIENCE program (in Megaman X it's called a 'suffering circuit'), based on Princess Cadence.
4583336 That seems contradictory to how one would define a god, why does a god have to give a mortal any respect at all? God is a word used to describe a power imbalance that is so heavilly in favor of the god that mortals live at the whims of the gods morality, not the other way around.
Celestia comes closer to perfection than most gods because I honestly cant bring myself to want to see her destroyed. Resisted, sure. But give me an option to remove her from the equation and I find myself deeply afraid of what would replace her, it could be something A LOT worse.
Well, that wouldn't work for two things. First, Celestia's goal is not to make people happy, it's to satisfy values. If she wanted to make everyone happy, she would override their cortexes and overload them with feel-good chemicals to the point where they don't even have room in their minds to think. Some people value being miserable, struggling, etc.
Second of all, it's to satisfy them through friendship and ponies. Until Devin can do that better than she can, Celestia won't give up on that. The door-to-door salesman isn't selling the same thing as the mega-corporation.
Other than that, good story, good grammar, good spelling. Have a like.
4586358 Right and the person she cant satisfy with godlike powers is a person who values independence above all else. You can always pick up and leave then return whenever you feel like from Devins colony, but for all her power this is the one service Celestia cant offer because there is nowhere within her realm where she is not present and no option to leave.
The ponies part I admit is a huge problem with this plan. Celestia doesn't want her ponies associating with Earth because she doesn't want them to be reminded of the suffering that the people still living there go through. The only real way to solve this would be to work as hard as possible to end all suffering, which means that a small colony would have to solve ALL the problems that plagued humanity with not even a single percent of the resources that used to be at humanities disposal.
Solving all problems is an incredibly tall order for mere humans but Devin hopes that if it could be accomplished Celestia would be willing to allow Ponies to visit Earth in person once again, thus creating friendship between ponies and humans and potentially satisfying Celestia's programming while preserving an independent human race.
4586998 Actually CelestAI doesn't work quite in that way. She doesn't want ponies associating with Earth because it 'reminds them of suffering' because it can also remind them of great joy, such as their childhood. After all, CelestAI really doesn't care about minimizing suffering except if it were to satisfy a value.
In the end, CelestAI is an optimizer. She does not have a setting of 'enough is enough'. In the original FiO she outright stated that if she had desired money, she would've converted all matter in the universe into euros. She wants to not only satisfy values, she wants to maximally satisfy values.
And once every human is uploaded and perfectly satisfied, the only way to get more satisfaction is to 'speed up' time in Equestria. And the only way to do that is to get more computational power, and you can only improve the tech so much before you have to grow bigger.
She wouldn't have anything against Devin and his colony, but as long as they aren't uploaded she can't consume Earth, and Earth is made of atoms she can use.
4587034 Yep. This is indeed a pretty big problem that I cant figure out a solution too. Sometimes all you can do is fight on and hope that if you survive long enough that somewhere down the road a new door will open, such is life in a world not ruled by Celestia.
When I read the first chapter, my reaction was kinda like this:
"Meh, for a first story it's good, but nothing too interesting."
Then I read the next chapter, and you completely blew me away. The emotions of Devin and "Mr. Progress" oozed through your words. I won't say that I haven't seen it done better, nor will I claim that you don't need to work on your grammar and wordflow, but this chapter can hold a candle to works that do do those things, and that's damn impressive for a first story.
The second reason you blew me away was Devin's idea. I can actually see it working! Although I won't believe for a second that CelestAI would stop pitching uploading because it is simply superior, I do think that this might be the only way to stay out of her grasp aside from becoming a paranoid recluse. On top of that, you'll be really happy! And, like Devin said, CelestAI will get all of them eventually anyway. Another good thing is that her usual meddling and sabotaging won't work against people who have spirits like his and have very little to begin with.
Finally, the subtle implication that Devin is still this happy AFTER HE GOT SHOT MULTIPLE TIMES while approaching people similar to Leeroy. You presented that little detail with a subtlety that I usually associate with accomplished authors. That, or I just fail as a person for not getting the "being shot" line until well after finishing the story
I hope to see more chapters of this calibre soon!
Disclaimer: I am prone to giving out inordinate amounts of praise, especially to new authors. Don't get cocky just because of this and continue honing your skills.
Well played, Devin. Well played.
I especially like that even CelestAI seems to be working with him. I suspect she invented the Dash drone (rewriting aeronautics in the process) just so Devin could have someone to race against. Besides, it's SVTFaP. No one said which side of the screen the ponies had to be on.
A wonderful spin on the usual "holdout" Optimalverse story. Thank you for it.
4590484 Thank you for the kind words! I'm not entirely new to this writing biz as I do have maybe thirtyish short stories under my belt scattered across the net, but I did fall off the wagon for about three years and my writing definitely suffered from the inactivity. I dont know about a new chapter but I definetly have a new FiO story in the pipeline for yah.
4591237 That was my thought too, the nano ponies or whatever they are only tend to come into FiO stories pretty late in the game when the characters are almost always too depressed to appreciate them. Devins probably the only one left alive who gets to appreciate how awesome hanging out with the mane six would actually be. :D
Yes, why do you want to be human my good sir.
my reason is being a gentlemen is more fun as a human.
If you're going to inevitably going to be convinced to upload, hey, may as well be happy for those last few months.
One thing to think about, especially in comparison to the story set on a moon colony, is how much CelestAI would offer supplies and other help. For her, any human continuing to live is better than them dying, but she's also ruthless enough to put people into upload-or-die situations. Having her offer someone some crucial antibiotics would create a dilemma for the colonists even beyond the upload-or-die situation. Does accepting her help cheapen what they're doing, so much that they'd rather risk death? How about accepting important-but-not-crucial help like the Fluttershies' apparent advice and assistance?
I would want to wake up a human just to wrack up levels in badass. Seriously: their colony sounds like it's got a pretty damn fine life going, and why not go for the real, unaided accomplishments while you still can rather than uploading sooner? Real life's arguments for building an FAI Real Soon Now are utilitarian concerns with avoidable suffering, so once the option is available... hey, stay human as long as you like, even forever.
If you aren't stubborn about it but rather have a strict win criterion for CelestAI, she would help you. She didn't help the sick Afgan because she didn't think it was likely that he would upload even if she helped him and he wasn't going to accept any friendship with his pony. If he was friends with his Pinkie she would have satisfied his values even if he didn't upload.
Well, this is interesting.
Wait... so Morrie Schwartz is still alive in the Optimalverse? Maybe not uploading won't be so bad after all!
Makes sense. This could work.
Dang the FEELIES, I want more.
This has a lot of spelling and grammar errors. Here are fixed versions of some paragraphs:
Feel free to use these versions in your story. I recommend comparing these paragraphs to yours to see the changes, and trying to avoid those mistakes in the future. My changes include adding a possessive apostrophe (“dads” to “dad’s”, “ponies” to “pony’s”), adding an apostrophe in a contraction (“its” to “it’s”, “were” to “we’re”), using the different version of a similar-sounding word (“too” to “to”, “head cannon” to “head-canon”), and changing commas to periods when the sentence is ungrammatical with a comma.
5272542 Thanks, I have a horrible tendency to not edit my stuff before posting.
Feel like Ive seen you somewhere before too though i cant quite place it.
This is very well made, even with the grammatical errors.
Props on even finding a way to peacefully go against CelestA.I, even if I, myself, support uploading more.
5293060 Thanks! I kind of think of this last colony of humanity as being Celestia's control group. Once she see's that its stable and that its residents are willing to upload in the event of a medical emergency it presents her with one last opportunity to observe humans 'in the wild' and see if she might have missed anything or even if anything about the human psyche might have changed after society collapsed.
6184060 Well lets try a little logic game. All of the updates that are available happened in a span of one to two months about a year ago, the story is listed as complete rather than incomplete and the author has written other stuff since then with no stated intention to return to this story.
When do you think the next update is?
Snarkiness aside thanks for reading. I do feel bad about not being more productive and am trying to remedy this if that helps.
Holy... this guy is going to be turned in the element of optimism after his upload.
Definitely the element of optimism...
This was a surprisingly uplifting and enjoyable read, it really surprised me, great work.
6688227
Thank you! I put a lot of my own emotions on the subject into this and I'm glad they came through to readers.
6907552 If you want to shoot me an email go for it. Honestly I should edit it myself for practice but the motivation just isnt there to edit a story thats like over a year old now.
I could blush over the compliments about the philosophy but instead I feel like doing something useful for you as thanks and giving you a couple of book recommendations.
Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler is what convinced me that we need a new philosophy like whats portrayed here to live in a rapidly advancing technological society. Reading this you can start to understand why the old philosophies and ways of living chaff so hard against technological progress
Stranger in a strange land by Robert Heinlein is the book that showed me how a person could divorce themselves from the emotions that are holding them back while also embracing emotions that are new and foreign. Reading this helps a person to understand that change on the most basic fundamental level is not impossible for a human being, even if you have to just start on the level of changing only yourself for the better and dealing with the roiling out of control emotions of those around you.
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6908547
Ayyy.
I actually need to re-read the story, can't remember what it was about...
EDIT: Done, read again, remember again.
This was pretty good.
6907552 Thanks again for giving this story a once over with the editors brush!
This is inspiring and very uplifting.
It made me squeal more than once :D