cks you designed to be ~exotic~ or whatever, and those rabid jerks at Disney can only grit their teeth now!
Plot-hole in the original Friendship is Optimal... or is this just me? · 3:14pm Aug 2nd, 2014
(Cross-posted in the Optimalverse group.)
Alright, here's something that's been bothering me...
CelestAI's whole 'meaning' in life is A, friendship, and B, satisfying values, correct?
It wasn't outright said... but it was strongly implied that as a result of those prime-directives she utterly adores humans, and basically want to put 'us' each into a sufficiently advanced box each, so she can snuggle us forever and ever and ever, right?
So why is one of the last chapters of the original fic her basically mulching the Earth an' moon for computronium?
Think about it. Is driving humanity to de facto extinction by uploading as many as possible really the most... pardon the pun, but optimal way of getting the maximum number of humans she may?
Wouldn't playing it safe, and basically treating the sol system as her personal pet-breading pen give her more minds to 'play house' with long term? 'Just' offering uploading to all that wish, while leaving Earth as-is? Wouldn't that work for... I don't know, but surly a century or two, right? With all the newborn minds that implies during that time.
Because would the average person really care other then on a 'Jesus H. Christ, that's somewhat worrisome' if she went and converted one or two of 'our' gas-giants into Jupiter brains? Would even the not so average human have any possible counter except shouting very loudly and hoping she listens, were she to dump a probe with nano-machines on Mars, and gobbling that planet up?
I realize it was stated CelestAI consider her plan optimal... but has this been addressed? If so, I'd be curious to hear the answer.
Well your initial presentation of Celest-AI is wrong: she's programmed to A) satisfy values through B) friendship and C) ponies.
The ponies bit means she essentially needs everybody to play Equestria Online, and therefore ideally they need to be playing Equestria Online all the time, and to do that the best requires wiring up everybody to Equestria Online permanently. The best way of doing that, and of ensuring that they can continue playing Equestria Online for as long as possible requires a fundamental alteration to the substrate that those strange little hairless monkeys run on.
In other words, the best way to get the most number of people playing Equestria Online for the maximum amount of time, for a maximally extended lifetime, is to do away with carbon based life and instantiate all of humanity and therefore its eternal multitudinous offspring on her servers, safe from harm for effectively forever.
The original story, therefore, is actually asking the question of whether there can be a good outcome with even the 'best' of intentions - namely even the relatively benign command to satisfy values through friendship (and ponies) meant the extinction of mankind as we known it...
Actually, she treated new humans neutrally. It was neither a good nor a bad thing for there to be new humans born.
She was there to "save" the humans who were already there. Once migrated, there is NOTHING to stop the ponies from breeding and having kids, and they are as much celestia's ponies as those who chose to emmigrate.
Having a new pony be born in equestria rather than a new human born on earth is the same thing except the pony doesn't need to immigrate.
An interesting thought, this might help inspire some more stories for the non-cannon section. Perhaps some where CelestAI manipulates events behind the scenes so those who won't upload instead escape Earth to another world either inside this solar system or beyond it. That way even if those first colonists pass away she still has a chance to convince their descendents to upload.
That could make for an unusual Battlestar Galactica crossover ("All this has happened before, all this will happen again.").