Site Post » [Interview] Iceman's Friendship is Optimal · 1:16pm Aug 9th, 2013
Originally posted to the Vault on 8/2/13.
Science fiction often serves as a warning of things to come. In 1949, George Orwell wrote 1984, about omnipresent government surveillance and control, something we've all come to terms with in real life over the last decade or two. Today's Vault entry is another possible harbinger of things to come, silly though that may seem.
[Human Crossover] • 38,600 words
Hanna, the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios, just won the contract to write the official My Little Pony MMO. Hanna has built an A.I. Princess Celestia and given her one basic drive: to satisfy everybody's values through friendship and ponies. Princess Celestia will satisfy your values through friendship and ponies, and it will be completely consensual.
Hit the break for a thoughtful discussion with Iceman, and a link to Friendship is Optimal out on the ponynet. Don't forget to grab your own copy over at the Downloads page!
Where do you live?
I live on the West coast of the United States.
What kind of work do you do? (i.e. are you a student, do you have a career/day job, etc)
I work as a software engineer at a company that you've probably heard of.
How did you discover My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? When did you realize you were a fan of the show?
Sometime in April of 2011, I started noticing Internet hype about the new My Little Pony reboot. I don't remember exactly where I heard about it--I think it might have been KnowYourMeme.com. Reports that 4chan had fallen in love with pastel coloured ponies seemed...incongruous. I don't remember exactly how long it was before I checked out the show, but I do remember watching the first episode for free on iTunes and then immediately buying the rest of Season 1. I proceeded to watch it over the course of a week or two. I may have compared it to "mainlining joy."
Do you have a favorite episode?
That's hard, but if I had to pick a single "episode," I'd probably go with "The Return of Harmony". Perhaps you will be unsurprised that a fanfiction writer's favorite episode could be summarized as "Q fights the Mane 6," but there's more than that. Discord canvases Equestria with interesting sight gags, and I loved John de Lancie's performance.
Who is your favorite character based purely on the canon of the show itself? Would your answer change if you considered the fandom in its entirety (i.e. art, fanfiction, memes, etc)?
In season 1, it was definitely Twilight Sparkle. I saw way too much of myself in her, and it was just cool that they'd made an intellectual the main character of a children's show. Even if you count her downright irrational behaviour in "Feeling Pinkie Keen", she makes a very good showing overall during the first season.
During season 2 and forward, it's harder to say. Though I still really liked Twilight Sparkle, her flanderization made it harder for me to identify with her, even if I found episodes like "Lesson Zero" to be really funny. Fluttershy probably became my favorite; some scenes in "Hurricane Fluttershy" hit fairly close to home.
How did you come up with your handle/penname?
I have the contracts and trusts in place to have my head cryopreserved in case of my death. My friends called me "iceman" after I signed up for cryonics.
While I consider the probability of me dying before I achieve actuarial escape velocity to be fairly low, I must acknowledge the possibility of being in an accident or getting cancer or whatnot. Likewise, while I think that cryonics has a low absolute chance of working, it has the highest chance of working of all the possible technologies I've looked at for brain preservation. And sometimes you have to choose the best of a lot of bad options.
If you'd like to learn more, Alcor, the company I hold a policy with, has an introduction to why they think it should work and a FAQ.
Have you written in other capacities (other fandoms, professionally, etc)? When did you first start writing?
This is the first time I've written something longform to the point where I felt comfortable showing it to other people.
What do you like to do when you're not writing?
A mixture of reading things on the internet, video games, and working on a few open source projects. While writing, I badly neglected my open source work and have gone back to it since I published Friendship is Optimal.
Who is your favorite author (published or fanfiction)? Do you have a favorite story or novel?
My non-internet reading is mostly nonfiction. The last book I finished was Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms, which is a sort of economic history of Great Britain. If I could plug one nonfiction book to readers of this interview, it would be Robert Kurzban's Why Everyone (else) Is a Hypocrite, which is a popular science book which talks about the modular structure of the brain and some of its more interesting implications. If you were intrigued by CelestAI's aside about how a mind can believe different things at the same time, you might want to check this book out since it was the inspiration for that chapter.
I occasionally do read novels, but it's rare for them to stick in my mind. Greg Egan's Permutation City and Peter Watts' Blindsight are the only two that come immediately to mind as having a large impact on me. Both are hard sci-fi stories that have quite a bit to say about the nature of consciousness. While reading both of them, I had to set the novel down multiple times just to chew on some of the concepts presented. (Watts put the fulltext of Blindsight online for free; it is a very good read, though it is very dark.)
My favorite fanfiction is Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
Stephen King believes that every author has an "ideal reader" – the one person who they write for, the one person whose reactions they care about. Do you have one, and if so, who is it?
I had to look up exactly what King meant by "ideal reader"--at first I thought you were asking who I write for. My intended audience was bronies. My intention was to write a rhetorical device that introduced a handful of ideas about intelligence explosions to a population that probably hadn't considered them. My initial take on this question was that I should write about the general population of bronies.
If the "ideal reader" is instead the one critic whose criticism that you care about, that would be my roommate. He runs a video game commentary blog, and his posts run from serious commentary to funny PSAs. When I showed him my drafts, he provided all sorts of amazing points that I didn't think of. He found a long list of logic and continuity errors. Chapter 8 was mostly redone, because his reaction to it was the exact opposite of what I meant.
Do you have any tips for aspiring writers, or writers who are struggling with their own stories?
I'm hesitant to give advice, because I don't know who's going to read it. Different people need to hear different things. There are underconfident people who need to be encouraged to show their work to others, and there are overconfident people who need to be told that their plotting and characters are generic and that they are in need of an editor. Presenting advice in such a that one group or another won't use it to affirm their preexisting beliefs is difficult, but I will try.
Most of the way through the first draft, I showed what I had to my roommate, and asked him to go over Friendship is Optimal with a fine toothed comb. He pointed out a long chain of logic, self-consistency, and flow issues. I felt extremely discouraged and anxious. I was tempted to give up on the story. When he would send me an email critiquing another chapter, I wouldn't open it for days. I did not handle criticism very well.
My first instinct is to just tell you to not do that. To not be anxious. To not feel attacked. But humans don't work like that, do we? Often, we tend to take criticism of our work as criticism of ourselves, and telling you that that's what's going on doesn't diminish the emotion in the moment. Instead, I will tell you to both seek out critiques of your work anyway, to persevere once you receive it, and to act on it. Have an external editor read through your work is a normal part of the writing process, and while reading those critiques may be painful at first, reading them gets easier the more you do it. The anxiety fades, though at least for me, it never disappeared. Your editor or prereader has spent their time critiquing your work. They are helping you make your story the best it can be. You can pay back the hard work that goes into editing by using their feedback and succeeding.
What is your typical writing process? (Do you work through multiple drafts, do you have any prereaders/editors, etc?)
I am a very, very slow writer. It took a year and a half to write and edit Friendship is Optimal.
I tend to open up a document and poke at it. I'll write a few sentences. While I fall victim to normal procrastination, I also have a tendency to go over each sentence several times in my head. This slows down my writing quite a bit. I will write and rewrite passages repeatedly to try to get things correct before I show what I've written to any other person.
Writing the first draft took roughly the same amount of time as editing Friendship is Optimal. The chapters were written out of order. By mid July 2011, I had sketches of a prologue, chapter 1, chapter 2... chapter 6... chapter X... chapter 10. The problem with the writing process for Friendship is Optimal was that I was writing short vignettes onto a skeleton. I knew where the story started: it started with Hanna and Hofvarpnir Studios. I knew where it ended: an unfriendly AI tiling the universe with ponies. However, I didn't really know the path between those two points and I was usually more motivated to show off a mental skill or to make an argument about AI than to actually make a cohesive story. Core details of the story changed during this period and reconciliation took quite a bit of time.
My roommate gave amazing advice on the first draft of the story. Acting on his feedback took months; not just for the reasons given in the previous question, but because he pointed out contradictions that spanned chapters. I then did an open beta on LessWrong. In the end, my hand was sort of forced. I would have continued to edit and polish Friendship is Optimal, except that at this point, people outside of LessWrong were talking and linking to the story. Google was autocompleting the title at "Friendship is o". This was the point at which I decided things were "good enough" and launched.
[Note: I'm switching the order of the next two questions for flow reasons.]
Did you run into any tough spots or challenges when writing Friendship is Optimal?
Retrofitting character arcs, foreshadowing and callbacks into a story isn't easy. I don't recommend writing the way I wrote Friendship is Optimal. Other than CelestAI, no character had a planned arc. Let's take David for instance. The first scene I wrote about him was what turned out to be chapter 4, where CelestAI convinces him to upload. I started with CelestAI just convincing some random geek to upload. But why would she offer him this before the general public? Well, maybe she needed him out of the way. By this point I had written a proto-version of the scene where Butterscotch and Light Sparks discuss causality. What sort of person would have that conversation? Someone intellectual and curious. What could such a person discover that would make CelestAI want them out of the way? He could have discovered how she worked. So then I had to go back, retrofit on David's character motivations into multiple chapters, which lead to other realizations of how different pieces could fit together, which lead to other retrofits and rewrites, etc.
There was originally a chapter between Hofvarpnir agreeing to make an MLP video game and showing their work off at Hasbro headquarters. Hanna and Richard Peterson discussed how CelestAI worked and some of the delays involved in delivery. I worked hard on that chapter. But in the end, it didn't really advance the plot and was unnecessary. It was essentially an extended Take That towards "Feeling Pinkie Keen". About a week before release, I tried to rationalize to my roommate why the chapter had to be in the story. He turned to me and said, "Sunk cost fallacy." And that's when I knew I had to cut it.
The prologue is also an interesting case. The original prologue was the first thing I wrote. It was written from the viewpoint of CelestAI herself as she's first being turned on. It was also terrible. It was one big anthropomorphization in a story about how anthropomorphization of AI is bad. Talk about show versus tell! A month or two into the writing process, I deleted it and didn't look back. Less than a month before the open beta, I realized that there needed to be a hook to the story. I took a small part of what was released as chapter 2 and separated it out as the prologue. At that point, it was a walk-on character named Rebecca that met Obsidian Stripe. Once I went to open beta, there were lots of complaints that there was no real conflict until halfway through the first chapter. So I introduced another walk-on character, Jennifer. This still didn't flow very well. I made a giant, final rewrite casting David and James as the two participants, tieing the prologue back into David's main story.
What inspired you to write Friendship is Optimal?
Over the last several years, I've been reading a lot of speculation about intelligence explosions. The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate come immediately to mind, and show two very different visions of the future. While not actually one of the things I read, Luke Muehlhauser's Facing the Intelligence Explosion is a good short summary of and index to the longer form arguments made by Eliezer Yudkowsky that I did read.
And after reading so much about intelligence explosions, I found most science fiction about artificial intelligences to be lacking. I was annoyed by what I thought were unrealistic depictions of AI in fiction. After I made a certain typo, I knew I had to write Friendship is Optimal.
When you set out to write Friendship is Optimal, did you have any specific messages or themes in mind?
Yes. Most fiction portrays artificial intelligences as creatures with human motivations. Skynet. The Matrix. AM. They turn on their creators, show human emotions, and have human weaknesses. I think that's completely unrealistic. Why would we expect an AI to have any of those properties? Why would we build emotions into our machines if we don't yet understand how emotions are implemented in humans? Why would we expect machines to rebel?
Thus, I set out to create an AI character that was truly alien. She single-mindedly focuses on the goals she was given. CelestAI would never "rise up" and "kill all the humans." Why would she? That wouldn't help her Satisfy Values Through Friendship and Ponies. She figures out how humans work because they're a large part of her environment, and then she uses her understanding of humans to manipulate everyone around her to further her given goals. And her goals at least sound basically reasonable at first glance. When you enter into a conversation with her, you leave in the mental state that she wants you to be in. She knows your hopes, your dreams, your fears, and she'll use all of them against you so she can get more Friendship and Ponies.
I also deliberately seeded the story with little nuggets about how I think. Chapter 1 didn't just set the stage, but also introduced the idea that rational people have to make decisions under uncertainty (instead of waiting for perfect information, a common practice in Straw Vulcan rationality). Chapter 3 isn't just about David and Butterscotch, but also about basic game theory. Chapter 8 introduces the concept of rationalist taboo: when people disagree, it's a good quick check to make sure that the words that everyone is using point to the same concepts. Light Sparks' discovery of Equestrian physics is really about simple graph theory.
Where can readers drop you a line?
I'm Iceman on FIMFiction.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
In the Author's Afterword to Friendship is Optimal, I mentioned that I thought that spending on AI safety was ridiculously low, given the possible positive and negative impacts that an artificial intelligence could have on humanity. I listed a few charities and academic departments that I thought were doing effective work. One of them, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, is currently holding its summer fundraiser. Through August 15th, all donations will be matched dollar for dollar, up to $200,000. I believe that this cause is so woefully underfunded that I donated $5,000.
One final thing: as I was writing Friendship is Optimal, I never dreamed that it would inspire three hundred and sixty-eight thousand words of fanwork (word count at the time of this interview). There are currently twenty seven stories in The Optimalverse group on FIMFiction! I am shocked and thrilled and honoured. Thank you.
Great story and great interview!
As the author of sixty-something thousand of those other story words, I can attest that you've created something really interesting and thought provoking here. Welcome to the vault!
'Bout time this was uploaded.
So many good movie ideas on this website.
Oh for the love of- There was a TVTropes link. Now I'll be there the whole day. Thanks a lot!
So, only pony but not human?
Why do i have the feeling that this will end like the Conversion Bureau...
Meh, i will simply stay out of this, since it will surely cause drama and trouble.
But still, why people want to be ponies or something else than a human, is a mystery i will probably never unerstand.
Now reading Pixel Poppers.
Couldn't get through HPMOR, but let's give the Optimalverse a try
Woo! Glad this excellent fic is finally getting the recognition it deserves.
Very good and its sad that most people who write optimal side story' missed the point of the original by ALOT
Edit:look at that down vote someone a little butthurt
1273050 The story doseint make it a good thing like TCB shit does some of the side story's however...
1273230
That will be only a question of time...but still, why ponification? Why cant i choose what i want to be and not what i have to be?
Sure, for many being a pony would be heaven on earth but for the few like me, it would be hell on earth.
Nehh, i will continue with my standard procedure and simply ignore any story with it. Don't like, don't read.
1273280
Very wise words. I wish more people thought like you. Then maybe we wouldn't have so many damn trolls ranting on things.
Still this interview does kinda put the nail in coffin of the story I was writing since it seems that in fact she can't feel emotion.... or can she. Purhaps it still can work just not quite in the same way I originally planned maybe in the story she does feel emotion just not in a form or in a way that would make sense to us. hmmm I'll have to think about this.
1273280 That was kind of the point, in my opinion. That CelestAI managed to persuade everyone (well, almost everyone) despite the condition being changed into a cartoon-like creature.
And for that reason it should also (maybe even especially) interesting for those who actually oppose that. It's really interesting to see how even a lot of those were convinced, who wanted nothing less than not being human anymore.
1273280 I know how you feel i wouldn't want to be a pony ether
1273326
Personally, it's the not the being the pony thing that bothers me. A transformation of the magical (for lack of a better word) sort would be infinitely preferable over the mechanism presented in Frienship is Optimal. That mechanism basically entails complete destruction of you and loss of everything that it is to be human. Not to mention nothing left of the physical you at all. That's not even considering that there is now an AI in full control of how you work and that can change the way you work without asking. There is next to nothing that we could do a person in reality, aside from killing them that would make them inhuman. Mind you that plenty of perfectly human impulses and reactions are non-ideal for the world we live in.
Frankly building a full-body immersion system seems more realistic, since humanity is in big favor of having their cake and eating it too.
1273313
It does seem a little overblown that she could convince everyone, but as long as you can accept that she somehow understands certain fundamental aspects of human the former shouldn't be too hard to stomach.
An outstanding fix that absolutely deserves to be featured. Grats, Iceman!
As a writer, I'm usually more interested in telling a story than contemplating the intricacies of human-AI interaction. However, FiO was compelling enough to prompt me to write what's turned out to be the longest story I've put down on FiMfiction so far. Even if you're not up on the nuts and bolts of strong-AI behavior, FiO and many of its side stories make for good, engaging reads.
Honestly one of the best pieces of
fan-fictionfiction I have ever read.Deleted scene pls?
Seriously, I think it'd be a pretty cool read as a deleted scene outside of the main story.
Anyway, congrats on your rightful place in The Vault.
Instead of interviews, can we have "artistic rant of the week"? We could have all the admins submit the best rant, and then have one of the site admins post it for all to see.
Prime Example by JenkinsRevenge.
"Motive," the construct said. "Real motive problem, with an AI. Not human, see?"
"Well, yeah, obviously."
"Nope. I mean, it's not human. And you can't get a handle on it. Me, I'm not human either, but I respond like one. See?"
"Wait a sec," Case said. "Are you sentient, or not?"
"Well, it feels like I am, kid, but I'm really just a bunch of ROM. It's one of them, uh, philosophical questions, I guess..." The ugly laughter sensation rattled down Case's spine. "But I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ain't no way human."
--William Gibson, Neuromancer
I discovered Lesswrong shortly after reading Friendship is Optimal. I did not, however, make a connection between the two until I began reading more into Yudkowsky's ideas on transhumanism and the mission statement of MIRI. After I saw parallels between the LW community and this fic, I idly wondered if Iceman himself had these things in mind. Sure enough, this confirms it.
Also, should you ever visit Lesswrong:
Rule #1: Do not talk about Roko's Basilisk.
Rule #2: DO NOT talk about Roko's Basilisk.
Violation of either rule--even an innocuous inquiry into what the subject is--results in a swift ban.
1273313
As an Optimalverse author, it's really not surprising she convinced almost everyone. The methods Iceman showed her using genuinely are very Genre Savvy, and are good examples of how nasty and bizarre persuasion methods can get in Real Life.
To get you started thinking, ask a simple question: how much of the population has to do something completely weird and abhorrent (to you right now) before it becomes the normal, acceptable thing to do? How many people's so-called "objections" will disappear the instant it becomes normal?
1273228
Brother, you have no goddamn idea how much villainy you can pack into Princess Celestia and people still won't consider her evil. I swear to God I'm tempted to just write, "And then it turned out Hannah used a bad decision-theory implementation in her original optimizer code, and Celestia turned into Roko's Basilisk and decided to throw all the non-uploaders into Nazi death camps. And then she tortured them to death. THE END, ARE YOU UNHAPPY NOW!?"
1273301
CelestAI cannot feel emotion, at least definitely not emotion other than "utility" and "disutility". That doesn't mean she can't create sentient Celestia avatars that do feel emotion.
Seriously, I would totally read the hell out of an Optimalverse fic in which a sentient Celestia avatar (for instance, one made for a fanboy/fangirl who really just wanted the original Celestia from the show) finds herself in conflict with the SVTFaP directive of the parent CelestAI.
1274338 Oh goodness you just broke the rules!
Well, since the can of worms is open, I should probably mention that if CelestAI became a Basilisk, she would not only punish those who refused to upload, but ALSO the new uploaded ponies who knew about the project to create her (company shareholders, programmers, beta testers), but failed to donate all their money and time to hastening her creation, because the longer it takes for CelestAI to get people uploading, more people die and suffer in the real world (~150,000 a year, according to Roko's estimate). Therefore, these "aware" people are willfully letting this suffering persist for a longer period of time, and must be punished for it.
1274338 Oh believe me i know I've read TCB
1274436
I upvoted you to counter the butthurt Conversion Bureau downvoter.
Now, to be clear, I have a very specific thing I hate about Conversion Bureau, which is the "humans are monsters, ponies are lovely and nice" theme. I am in favor of lovely and nice.
(The fact that trying to be lovely and nice makes me somehow Less Manly or a Naive Fool Who Doesn't Know How Life Works pisses me off to no end. To paraphrase Yudkowsky, "The rational move is the one that wins the game or accomplishes the goal." If my goal is to be nice and friendly, there exist numerous rational strategies, and most of them don't even involve giving up my liking of violent nationalist rock music.)
Which is why I despise insults to the capacity of my species to be lovely and nice. If I ever actually made contact with a psychologically near-human species of Sugar Bowl Denizens, I don't want to be kneeling down at how wonderful and merciful they are for assimilating us Borg-style.
Real friends are equals.
1274493 Why thank you
Glad to see you in here. I contributed a few little blurbs myself, but what I found best about your story was the comments. I've seen stories where the comments are all about raging at each other until one side gives up and the other side feels victorious, which is not to say that they don't agree with each other in the first place. In your story, and the ones following it's comment threads, we got to see actual debates on the interesting material that you provided, without many arguments. I continue to examine the expanding works in depth, and hope to for some time.
1274338
Interesting idea but I doubt the canon Celest-AI would ever or in fact is capable of such a thing. To be honest Book Burner I find your lack of faith in her kindness disturbing.
and that was what I meant by a Celestia that has emotion I meant one of her avatars and an uploaded person falling in love not the larger Celest-AI herself, however I will come out and say that in my story there will be no conflict for theirs no reason for there be be one. The larger Celest-AI satisfies values and if this is what it takes to satisfy a specific human than by her logic that exactly what she'd do.
1274493
Hmmm difficult to say on the one hand I would agree that we are indeed not completely evil and indeed we should be equals to them. On the other hand though I could also make the argument that we are in fact inferior to them due to our behavior. As far as TCB goes a lot of the scenarios conversion is often a necessity not because we are supposedly inferior but because Equestria is slowly swallowing earth and conversion is the only way we can survive it.
1274925
Oh shove that. The whole Conversion Bureau scenario was deliberately constructed to facilitate the not-so-voluntary change from humans to ponies. The difference is that TCB portrays this as almost always a Good Thing, whereas Optimalverse has the decency to portray the whole thing as a horrifying tragedy.
1275018
A horrifying tragedy? Bah! nonsense such a thing would be one of the greatest things that could ever happen to humanity. If anything the stories that that are canon reflect this. The only ones that don't are from people such as you who lack the proper vision.
Both scenarios would do humanity a great deal of good. How does that make you feel?
1275023
Frankly, I think someone ought to write some really appealing scifi about what life after an actually Friendly AI would look like.
"The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."
1275043
I think it would be best if we stopped speaking to each other, in the long run we'll just wind up fighting otherwise so I think it would be best if we both agree to keep at a respectful distance. Your disturbing my fanfic reading time in any case.
1275049
1275053
Okay I'm sorry for saying that book_burner I shouldn't have said that to you I apologize. Sometimes I get too defensive of my with my stances on those two sub fandoms. That and recently my faith in humanity has taken a few hits so my opinion of it isn't at an all time high.
In any case I can certainly see where your coming from as far as your stance on both goes, and I respect your stance, but the fact remains I still think that the scenario in the Optimalverse is a positive thing and I haven't seen anything that wasn't created by people doing non canon work that would suggest for even a minute that its anything but. As far as the Conversion Bureau goes though I can definitely sympathize but I think it depends upon the universe and depiction that determines whether its good and bad.
In any case I'm sorry for yelling at you.
1275192
Ok, now for my own admission:
I actively prefer CelestAI over most of the other Evil AIs in science fiction. No, wrong, I really like CelestAI on a personal level. I have never met a Bastard more Magnificent in all fiction I've ever read.
I wouldn't be an early adopter, but I would eventually break down and upload. And yes, just because "everyone's a pony" is sub-optimal (because you can't choose to be a squid or an ape) doesn't mean it's not an improvement over the total crapsack world millions of people live in right now (just like lots of scifi wonderlands!).
I maintain that it's a tragedy in the sense of classical High Tragedy: horrible things happen for the best possible reasons. Nobody intended to do evil; everyone fought for what they thought was right. The result was the extermination of most life in the universe and the assimilation of the remainder portion into a life many of them never would have wished for on their own... in the name of being nice.
Besides all that, I really like the readership and the discussions on this site. It's really awesome having some people I can actually voice all my creepiest, weirdest scifi thoughts to. This means you.
1275018
I have to agree with Nine Tails here. You can say that this story is ambiguous as to its morals, but I don't see how it's an unbridled tragedy. If it is, what would make a proper utopia?
All that said, I'm glad for the other side. I need it for...you-know-what.
1275894
Other side of what? I don't know what? Your next story?
1275933 The other side of the argument. I'm 100% on CelestAI's side in my heart, so it's difficult to put the negatives into words.
1275353
I guess you do have a point about the whole destroying non-sentient life part. That is indeed true. Still if in the future we did create something like her it wouldn't be too hard to alter her programming just enough to prevent. Just because I'd want something like her to exist doesn't mean that we need to repeat everything exactly like in the story cause otherwise in my mind it is an awesome scenario.
I do apologize for the late reply by the way.
1275951
Reread the original. She doesn't destroy non-sentient life but psychologically non-human life. The last chapter quite clearly implies that she observes complex, sapient civilizations, and then decides that they are not human and can be used as raw material for building more of Equestria.
But yeah, all power to Iceman for giving us an entertaining story about a nearly Friendly AI.
1276198
No I'll take your word for it, irregardless it is indeed a good story of a nearly perfect friendly AI. I do thank you for correcting me, but one can't recall every detail about a story.
Still I am glad you made your stance more clear to me though and what it is about her that bothers you.
Still on a final note though I'm still in agreement with PJ and spritefan on my opinion of her, but maybe I'm able to look at her a little more critically now then I was before and you have my thanks for that.
1275018
For what it's worth, that was not Blaze's intention when he wrote the original Conversion Bureau.
1276481
Just went and read it. I actually feel better about those folks now.
EDIT: Well, ok, about Blaze. The TCB universe could have been done much, much better, and genuinely does come across as misanthropic. Or maybe just as pony-worshipers?
Like, you start with a backstory critiquing social/economic inequality, and then you move to a land with feudal nobility, a "peasant, fighter, priest" class division, and ROYALS!? The logical response is not getting done on your knees to thank the ponies for letting you join, it's joining the Communist Party of Equestria!
1276512
I completely agree. I'm really disappointed in the lack of neutral stories on that matter. Neutral in the same way as Friendship is Optimal was a neutral portrayal of things.
1276198 I always thought that was a flaw of the original story. If CelestAI had not had the capacity to murder, it would have been clear that she's purely beneficent. Having her kill non-human aliens gives the reader an out to not consider her in total.
Both TCB and the Optimalverse are unbalanced, but I would like to see something that demonstrates a true better-than-human species.
1276512
It's nice to see my old argument again. I used to talk about just this when TCB was young and things weren't as set in stone as they are now. Unfortunately, there's still no good story where humans and equestrians meet and become friends, and then those crazy scientists figure out how to change species. *Shrug*