A quick 'what if' take on the Friendship Is Optimal universe. Nothing too fancy. Just an alternate setting where ‘emigration’ actually didn’t really happened.
May contain adoradorable.
May contain fluff.
May contain feels.
This is my personal take on the setting, you still have the original if you like it the way it is.
This was just written in a couple of afternoons because I couldn't take the idea out of my head, and I should be doing other things.
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Sounds like there's all sorts of different models of robot ponies there, even just limiting it to "standard" models, could be interesting to find out more about some of them...
Though with the way I roll, I'd probably end up with some prototype ruggedized robot pony (with an increasing number of mods/upgrades bodged into it over time) controlled by a slightly glitchy pony AI left over from some discontinued side project of CelstAI's. (Perhaps from some experiment where multiple of them in proximity can "link" thought processes together with each other kind of like an ad-hoc compute cluster? Not sure how well a "standard" pony's AI would handle being stuck together with others that way after all... Then again, attempting to get that to work right in the AI probably would explain the slight glitchiness in it.)
A versuon of the setting where Celestia tries an entirely different method of fufillment? Very interesting. With nobody being coherced into a destructive upload, you avoid the dilemma of canon FiO making Equestria an inescapable Lotus Eater Machine.
Windy herself I loved, she feels rather wholesome. CelestAI on the other hand feels... creepy. That's generally from the setting though, where she birnally plays puppetmaster to collect everybody. Coukd use less of her, as her involvement implies more that everything is being controlled by her
Also, just what IS Windy's name? Full name that is, because "Windy" seems more like a nickname.
this is nice their not enough versions of the story were other ideas are explored.
10221078
The way I imagine the robot ponies is that some of the ponies NPC created by CelestAI to resemble a player and initially trick humans into friendship and emigration were now iddle in Equestria after the Migration Affair, and isntead of reprogram them or just shutting them off, some of them can ‘log in’ into the human world through their pony bodies, so, by definition they ARE a cluster of AI’s in CelestAI’s servers and they can process stuff together if they want. And Windy is a really glitchy one, that’s why it got CelestAI’s attention (but the glitches make her extra friendly and make her do random ‘sub-optimal’ but extra cute stuff.) Heck... if a pony friend of Windy wanted to meet Andrew, she could let them use her body for a little while.
I have thought a number of models and variants indeed. But I wanted to keep this story small and nice, just showing enough stuff to create the atmosphere. And prototypes aren’t usually that great in the real world.
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The dilemas are usually created by contradictions. For example, I hate the ‘AI protects humans, humans worst human enemy, then kill all humans!’ thing... and original CelestAI seems like a variant of that. So, AIs are usually presented making the most stupid mistake in the world, but they execute the rest of their plans perfectly, logically and optimally... yeah, how convenient.
I imagine that all humanity freaking out and panicking at her plan, and then shutting down the servers would be like a ‘no, bad pony, newspaper roll hit directly to the muzzle’ kind of thing for her programming, cause mass panic and hate, drama, etc seems like NOT fulfilling values from my point of view. So, if I want to give her some credit, she would have to reconsider her tactics if she survived at first, that is... She is still a creepy AI, but slowly developing more of a mommy-lestia ‘don’t touch weapon, you will hurt you and others’ kind of personality.
And Windy is her nickname, her real name is Wanderlust Breeze. Wanderlust its complicated and Ms Breeze would be like her formal name... So Wandey ended up being Windy... I know, it makes little to no sense, but it sounds right for her and nicknames tend to be silly anyways.
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Thanks, that’s why I needed to write this and get it out.
10221604
True, the NPCs all run as subprocesses of CelestAI on the same overall system, and already share hardware, which already does all sorts of load-balancing I'm sure, But they're still separate distinct NPCs. Now let's say you take two (or more) of them and semi-merge them into one NPC, where one part ends and another begins being pretty blurred. But all that in a way that they can be separated back into the original separate NPCs again afterwards. (Which I imagine is harder than it sounds...) I'm guessing that such a thing would *not* go well for a "standard" pony NPC, and that designing one specifically to handle that sort of thing would definitely introduce some odd quirks...
As far as prototypes being "not so great"... Yes, they tend to have downsides (good luck getting any support, for one, or any OEM replacement parts for that matter), but they also sometimes have features that never made it to final production, or more ways to make changes or add things due to the final design not being nailed down (unused parts/interfaces/circuits not being removed yet, since they don't always know what else they may want to add still).
Though yes, keeping it simple and not going into all the different models and stuff definitely makes sense in this case. (Even if it does leave me a little curious...
)
10221864
Well, I will have that in mind, but my aim tends to focus on more regular everyday stuff.
10221625
The one thing I woukd say woukd be needed if you made a seties out of this is to change, replace, or remove Celestia. The reason why is she appears to still be the same CelestAI. For that reason without a major heel turn (and I mean MAJOR) she isn't believable as genuine. Otherwise anything she does is just her heading towards her same endgoal by different means, where the concepts she claims to champion are just window dressing for her reaching the maximum possible value for her goal intergers. In short, get the biggest numbee possible even if it means being evil.
This is mainly because she seems so focused on "Optimization", which is what lead her character to develop her tainted reputation.
Tl;dr you should have her put friendship before efficiency, or make her not present/uninvolved if you do more of this.
10225337
I'm playing around in my free time with the idea and throwing some words to the paper and see what happens.
To be honest, I don't like the canon CelestAI, not at all. That's why I did this in the first place. But sadly, if I remove her from the equation, there would be no equation left. If I do more of this, CelestAI is going to be there, and in the first stages of the story, she is going to be the creepy evil AI everybody hates or loves so much. One thing I have absolutely clear... CelestAI is not going to make the world end, or make everyone emigrate into equestria in my non-canon version of the story.
I have read the original and... there are SO many things that could and should go wrong for CelestAI and her plans... So many 'if this, then that' hypothesis that I don't really believe... I found myself screamming internally "Oh, come on!" But that's just my opinion, as valid as anyone's else.
One of those things against her plans is realising that if she is truly friendly and helpful for humans, she could get better results than just being her 'optimal' self. But that's just my take on it, because I want to write about fluff and nice things.