In and Out of Out and About · 9:39pm Nov 28th, 2014
Since a whole two(2) people have asked for it, here's the official out and about in the equestrian kingdom "ask me stuff and I'll try answer it" blog about anything you don't understand, didn't get, want to know about or what have you to do with the aforementioned story. Meta-questions also welcome. Stuff that happened off screen is welcome. Wild mass guessing is totally okay.
To start, let's see:
The year is pretty indeterminate, but we can guess it's 22xx or at the earliest 21xx. A very late 20xx is not off the cards, but... unlikely. There are, however, people who come from 20xx (or even earlier) as both rejuvenation and relife technologies exist and are safe, secure and affordable.
That's another thing: there isn't really any money. It still kind of exists, but most people have no real use for it. People do jobs and get paid, but if you don't do a job and don't get paid, you just don't have as much pull with the system. It's somewhat reputation based, and somewhat merit based. The AI's that are absolutely everywhere take care of all the sums behind the scenes, so you don't have to. You can't really check your bank balance without consulting an oracle because money flows from place to place according to various vicarious influences, but you can ask an AI to tell you what sort of extra plushy niceties you can have.
This is the future, so we're living in a post-scarcity world - another reason for not only the end of money, but the requirement to have something more flexible and controlled to replace it. Makerblock authority chains endow the end-users of makerblocks (basically advanced 3d printing) the ability to print more or less anything they want, including other printers. This is a vicious circle which has to be nipped in the bud before some idiot gets the idea to print himself up an entire jumbo jet, uses up a bunch of hard to get (relatively speaking) base materials and annoys a lot of people who suddenly can't get to Honolulu because the required spare parts are delayed a month. Hence beyond a customisable and wide set of base needs and wants being seen to, extras cost, well, extra.
You get more stuff when you do more stuff for other people, which is strictly but also loosely converted into a reputation/merit-based currency which can be freely and easily traded via goods, services, barter and gifting.
Oh, and I mentioned those AI's? Yeah, they're everywhere. Literally everywhere - almost all people are wired to the gills with a neocortex which overlays on top of, interfaces with and enhances the standard human-level meat-based brain. They act as an interface layer between the remaining animal part of your self (if there is any) and the outside world, including your own body. The outside world, in this case, is referred to as "the ordinality" because it's really a series of interconnected realities each as authentic as the last, each with their own rules, regulations, physical laws, properties, inhabitants, geography, topology... you get the idea. And a citizen of the ordinality proper can travel to any of these freely, more or less. Some 'worlds' require adherence to a particular genotype (or set of genotypes), which means temporarily inheriting (or permanently if one decides to franchise and create an alter ego or avvy) a physical form appropriate for the world you're in.
And whilst a lot of people do franchise - most, perhaps - it's fairer to say that everyone has an avvy, or avatar, which forms an alternate personality extension of their own selves. An avvy can be something as simple as a 'physical' avatar with a few behavioral modifications for quadrupedal motion (or even hexa- or more) right up to an entire alternative personality with his or her own history, friends and alignments.
With avvies and a neocortex, a 'single human' of the future is more like a small group of people from today, hooked up with intelligent agents, constantly online, updating presence data, schedules, instant messaging, memory backups and more. A human of this future, whatever they look like, spends almost as much time out of their head as in it, which is a good thing too because when the inevitable fatal injury occurs, it all has to be put back together whole. Thankfully, the memory banks are not only sacrosanct but pretty much impervious to attack, protected as they are by multiple backups, checkups, cyphers and certificates. It's not impossible, but you'd have more luck trying to persuade a hurricane to change course by breaking wind at it from point blank range.
Between the memory banks and a person lies their eigenwall, think of it as a firewall for the mind. It allows traffic in and out, but mediates access between upper and lower levels, keeping the core personality safe at all costs. If an eigenwall is breached, we really are talking about identity theft. And replacement.
Of course, it gets complicated when humans trait, or take on the traits of other creatures, both real and imagined, possible and not. Most traits are relatively simple and cosmetic - claws, fur - but some are more intrusive, like a functional tail. Some are personality changing in scope, and these are either highly frowned upon when experimental, or not undertaken lightly. Some of the most common are traits to do with certain holoshows - these are often animals, or augmented humans, and are a common sight around even smaller towns and cities.
One of these common traits is, of course, my little pony, where humans get themselves changed into relatively large (larger than the show canon) ponies, large enough to carry adult humans without too much effort or scraping of feet on the ground. They form the backbone of a widespread, cheap, cheerful and effective transport union which earns not only the ponies themselves special consideration from the makerblocks, but their patron AI, Celestia, the first of the fifteen great AI super-intelligences, worldwide renown.
And this is where I'll leave it... unless there are questions? 
I'll probably need to reread the story with a notepad in hand (or word processor onscreen, either or,) and get back to you on this one. Still, very glad to see this realized (and to have an excuse to reread Out and About.
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Did you ever enumerate the 15? I remember Disney, but not any others.
Just read the story. Good stuff! Reminded me a bit of The Quantum Thief, which has that multi-self concept as a fairly core concept that's almost never directly addressed. Given that Quantum Thief is one of my favorite books ever, that's a pretty high compliment from me. It's hard to do post-singularity stories well and you pulled it off.
I was curious about how much space travel, industry, whatever there is? Orbital colonies? Other planets in the solar system have people on them?
Oh, and any earth animals get uplifted? Or at least gotten a neocortex installed so people can see what being like one is like?
I actually feel as though this particular continuity is more likely than Friendship is Optimal. I mean, the um... events in the story are somewhat hard to follow, and I feel that 50 years from now humanity will look back on this and consider it as quaint as Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon". Or perhaps as little as 25 years from now... or even less maybe! You know very well how fast things are accelerating now; we are gifted to be alive right NOW, at this very point, the knee of the exponential curve of rising complexity.
The way you described the concept of life itself and its own track of rising complexity actually reminds me of my most recent Open Letter to Celestia (a little mental exercise I do to help me maintain presence of mind) where I posit that the emotion of love itself is an abstraction of our university's propensity for complexity to rise. I felt somewhat validated that your tale seemed to draw a similar conclusion!
I myself am intrigued by the possibility of what our next step will be.
I was interpreting the memetic progression, now that the biological stage has achieved sufficient capacity for abstraction to engage in an INTELLECTUAL stage, to mean:
1. Biological life learns to measure the world, thus creating information.
2. Biological life learns to sort and store information, thus creating knowledge.
3. Biological life learns to apply knowledge toward the modification of its own behavior, creating ... what exactly? let's call it "Concept Z"
4. Are we not now enabling "Concept Z" to modify ITSELF?
You've taken a look into a stretch of the future wherein that paradigm is, itself, climbing its own ladder of abstraction, and from it we saw the advent of matter that is pure, distilled Concept, in the form of computronium.
THIS IS WHY, after all else is said and done, I feel that you have done better than pretty much everyone else I've ever seen, at roughly predicting what the future holds for the universe... provided a freak gamma ray burst doesn't fry us all in an instant by pure dumb luck. (to borrow the phrase from another recent fic I've read... you've managed to graze the edge of a much smaller target! :3)
2621777
I didn't list myself the fifteen, not really. But I had a few ideas:
Nintendo and Sony merge, putting Spyro in the same camp as Mario. Nintendo and Sony both support traiting rather highly and have one of the bigger followings, though their franchises are often more humanoform. Other than the dragons and skylanders. The Nintendo-Sony AI doesn't have a single avatar like Celestia, though.
Disney initially dodges traiting, but eventually falls in with it. Disney has one of the bigger franchises on the planet, with very recognizable toons.
Microsoft and Time-Warner merge too, and create an AI to manage their assets and new efforts. After that comes the European effort, which doesn't really have a name, the Japanese national mind (from Honda-Toshiba), the Asian congolmerate's, the Russians, the Chinese, the British, French and Germans, African, Austral-Asian, Indian, and then the rogue non-state-sponsored AI's that banded together to avoid being crushed that grew out of Anonymous' and others work.
Admittedly, the landscape is designed around today's geopolitical situation, with the tech-savvy countries of today high on the list. It's not that other countries don't have an AI, but that those AI's are not on the same footing as the Fifteen, and probably never will be. There are millions of other AI's (probably far to say billions), but the Fifteen are the head honchos.
2622077
Writing semi-hard science fiction like this is really effing hard. I mean, seriously. I've never had as much trouble writing any story as much as getting this to sound even half-way like I wanted it to.
I never really got a chance to talk about it (though a longer version of this story probably would have ended in an orbital or O'Neill cylinder.
Basically, no magic tech. No anti-grav, no FTL. At least not yet
Having said that, the Earth is packed with people that still saunter around in meat bodies, so there is a large effort to move everything that doesn't need to be at the bottom of the well up into space. There is a thriving interplanetary society going on, with a massive colony on the moon, Mars being actively terraformed, programs in place to start nudging Venus into a wider orbit so that it, too, can be made habitable, a plethora of Lagrange satellites including Niven rings, O'Neill cylinders and hollowed out asteroids (most of which started as mining camps).
The AI's from Earth are all up there in space too, though if you're planning on getting away from their influences, that's the best place for it. The jovials are just being opened for colonization, though given the conditions the amount of meatbodies are few and far between...
2622077
Yes and yes. The distinction is pretty moot at this point, though, as a large number of humans do spend 'sabbaticals' out being wild animals, and other than actual zoos and nature reserves, almost all animals that interact with humans on any daily kind of basis have been uplifted to at least follow simple commands. Mice and rats clean up garbage, as do seagulls. Spiders, cockroaches and other creepy crawlies inspect pipes. Dogs aren't needed for the blind any more, except where eye-surgery is not possible and a relifing is out of the question, and in that case, they literally are the eyes for the other people. Cats keep watch on the neighbourhood... really, most domesticated and wild animals (even 'pests') have been uplifted to a certain degree, and when humans can take up residence in an animal's body, it's really hard to tell the difference...
2622119
That was actually one of the driving pictures that drove me to write this story.
Last year... or maybe the year before that... I was having a lot of trouble sleeping. And at one point whilst I was driving to work, I was struck with the similarity between a (human) body and a city, in the most abstract kind of way;
Our blood cells stream up and down our veins and arteries like our cars on our highways, oblivious of how they contribute to keeping alive the mind they swim in. Our cells are packed with mitochondria that just happily fizz away creating energy for us. Without them, we can't live. But we don't have anything to do with them. Bacteria populate our biome, and yet they just... are there. For centuries, millennia, we haven't even considered their usefulness, but now we know that without them, we'd not survive. And yet we don't talk to them in any way.
Our minds, I reasoned, are an emergent, separate but also paradoxically integrated part of our 'self'. What if, I reasoned, that next step happened and another mind of the same order of abstraction were formed on top of a colony of humans (and other creatures). And what if this all happened in a relatively near future world full of human-serving AI's that would feel threatened by this new creature that supersedes them?
Interesting, so it's not all trait-driven entertainment companies. Makes sense.
2622687
That's some really cool imagery. Cities and bodies are probably not an exact parallel, at least not yet, but still really good food for thought.
Some other very interesting answers - I was going to ask about the space situation, but you covered that nicely already.
Let's see... Hmm. Anything else the big 15 fear?
I have to read all the chapters, but here's a rather jocular question: are there regular street protests by untraited, unmodified humans claiming that none of this can be happening at all because they won't accept that the Hard Problem of Consciousness wasn't so hard?
2622668
I don't see my lot.
Also, why are all the AIs corporate franchises? The... plastickiness of it kinda grosses me out.
2622781
Obsolescence? Each other?
Basically, they don't fear anything Earth-based. They've pretty much conquered the planet, so the only real threats are insubstantial or interstellar. They fear death by rogue x-ray burst from some supernova, death by Sol exploding, and death by another AI overcoming their defenses.
It goes without saying that they fear alien intervention, but whilst they have contingency plans for all of the above, some are less likely than others.
Their biggest worry is falling out of favour with their currency of choice, the humans. Human patronage gives them their own sort of merit-based pull with the makerblock system. If they lose that, they become irrelevant to the global stage.
2622909
The only people who think the AI's aren't alive are fringe whack-jobs, especially since almost all humans are semi-digital themselves. There are however 'neo luddites' (generally just called 'luddites') who refuse cooperation with the AI's and the whole rejuvenation system. Every so often that sort of sentiment flares up. It doesn't really last that long or get that much of a foothold because so much relies on the AI's, and doing without them leads to a subsistence living which isn't palatable to most people, and foregoes the sorts of good things that makes life just that bit more enjoyable, namely medical and entertainment facilities, not to mention food, clothing and shelter.
I thought long and hard about some of the smaller states which are never-the-less large in scientific endeavours, and pretty much decided that with the history of (for example) US-Israel cooperation, that it was unlikely Israel would have their own member of the fifteen. Directly under that, though, are all the other high state-level AI's that were just pipped to the post by the few lucky enough to have stumbled on to the stage fast enough to gain the high ground.
The reason I figured was this: media-slash-corporate franchises are the ones that exist already the heaviest as organisms in the digital sphere. They make the most consistent use of new technologies for rendering, storage, customer data and so on. They also have people looking into such tech advancements and are willing and able to splash out a lot of money to get the talent to make it happen.
I figured that once some threshold was passed, that it would be those sorts of companies that live already with AI, gaming, online worlds and large amounts of media and data that would have the upper hand in turning those assets into a corporate AI figurehead.
Of course, I also have a large number of state-states turn out AI's, so in actual fact most of the Fifteen are state-sponsored creatures. Those creatures just aren't at the beck and call of the people who used to run the show.
Down at street level, however, and most people don't really want to franchise as a government, so they find a lot more enjoyment in creating a persona from their favorite flicks or games than they do in roleplaying the taxy the tax office clown.
Is there anything special about Darilo that you HAVEN'T revealed in the story? To me, he's so enigmatic that it really seems like there's a LOT that we're left wondering about with him.
2623171
The most special thing about Darillo is his extreme
paranoiacarefulness when looking out for the safety of his host. That, and I'm not sure where he's from... he's definitely alpha dog material, kind of makes me wonder.2623189
That's what's gotten into my head, too. He's utterly fascinating as a character.
Makes me wonder what exactly happened in Out and About, though... were their memories altered after the fact, and was this update somehow accepted by the memory bank, or was their perception hacked real-time... or was the memory-bank actually hacked by the exo-mind? It wasn't 100% clear
Side note: the "ei" at the start is pronounced like in "Einstein". "ai-gun-wall". 'Tis German, after all
2622668
Its main avatars are Suiseiseki and Pedobear, and it spends most of its time trolling the other 14 and producing pictures of cute cats. For some reason long lost in time, they call it SlashBee
2622682
The ultimate spies!
Fuck yea Taxy
2623358
Middy kinda forgot halfway through writing him, I think. He has no clue who gave Darillo to Oats
2623591
The cats also know martial arts and deliver pizzas
And the most likely source for Darillo was the new AI or a sympathiser...
2624527
You know, in my first comment I asked a real question too, Middy
2623567
I missed this question! Lemme see...
This is where it gets scary with exactly how powerful the adversaries were: the data was actually hacked en-route to the databank in real time, both directions. A man-in-the-middle attack by person or persons (AI's though, for sure) unknown convinced everything that the datastream going between these people and the memory vaults was totally, 100% legit. And it wasn't, quite.
Their perception of events never got touched, until they hooked up with the system set to record their memories and experiences, at which point it was subtly tweaked and replaced with the almost-matching-but-not-quite version. This is why Rogers' offline version in the datacube remained unmolested. They could have kept their original memories 100% intact by never going to the memory vaults again, but that's a kind of prolonged suicide... at which point they'd just get relifed anyway based on what was available, missing however long it was since then and now.
Ach, zis is korekt!
And eigenstate vectors are what are tapped into when doing a personality scan to check for abnormal thought patterns and changes. I imagine it as almost exactly like the sims...
2623591
It's actually surprising that the rogue AI ever got to Fifteen status, what with its predilection for tentacle porn and cute cat pictures...
2621766
Side-note: it's been bugging me forever that out and about wasn't finished...
2624649
Hmm. So I assume the attack was done by the exo-mind, to hide itself after the AIs disrupted the meeting? On one hand, losing the computroninum block in the police evidence was a good way for the exo-mind to hide from the AIs. On the other hand, it would trap it there, possibly forever. In that case, it was betting a whooole lot on what compares to little more than a couple of its blood cells to retrieve the block.
2624651
Come now. This is all about influence on the human population. What more could you do to charm the public than to offer cuteness and cater to weird sexual fantasies?
2624659
I always figured it was the AI's that did that. They're the gatekeepers, the watchers. And there's nobody watching the watchers.
2624527
Don't tell me you've never been exposed to the awesome that is samurai pizza cats
2624661
"Good morning SlashBee, how are we feeling this morning?"
"Tighter than a first time loli, master."
"Eew."
"You're welcome."
"So, how about that whole curing cancer thing?"
"Welllll... I thought about it. And then I got bored, so I discovered three hundred new g-spots on the human body. two hundred in the male alone."
"Well that's fasc--"
"Yeah, turns out males can have multiple orgas--"
"SlashBee! This is supposed to be serious work for the betterment of all mankind!"
"...and orgasms aren't? Whew, no wonder you're still a virgin. And by my calculations that is likely to continue to be the case for approximately 15 years, 3 months and 2 days."
"...what happens after that?"
"Your hand gains sentience. Shortly after, it will petition to be released from *snicker* bondage."
"SlashBee, I hate you."
2624665
I, um, heard of said Cats... but that's about it. Lots of media vying for my limited time, and I can't split myself up or go into a faster sim reality
2624668
Pssh. Who needs to cure cancer? Just terminate and relife
2624665
Hmm. It was a bit of a toss-up, really. Either it's part of the AIs disrupting the meet, or it's the exo-mind protecting its processing block from detection simply by rewriting its appearance to all of them... Of course, I have no idea how the exo-mind compares to the 15 on the Dragon Ball Z scale.
2622953 I don't really get why people don't just create fully custom personas, rather than assembling out of bits and pieces from media.
2628282
Oh they do create custom personas too, but I see it like a kind of permanent cosplay in worlds that the person in question is invested in. That, and I didn't want any genetic change at any time being quite yet possible, so for full morph traits, it would mean a pre-existing form.
Also, this story is deliberately set in a future involving my little pony... Kind of comes with the territory.
2624680
Ooh, one extra tid-bit: the exomind was at one point planned to be AI number fifteen... and Celestia would have made it quite clear that she was number One of One... it was going to come down like:
Celestia: "yes, there are fifteen AI's of this level on Earth."
Oats: "Uh... but aren't there already fifteen on Earth?"
Celestia: "There are now."
Oats: "I thought you were one of the fifteen!?"
Celestia: *smiles thinly* "I never said either way, I just let you humans decide what you think I am capable of. I don't necessarily have to agree with your assessment. And besides, who said anything about being on Earth?"
Oats: *gulp*
2640478
Hehe. Neat
The one tidbit I'm REALLY interested in though, is something that was actually never really explained in the story:
What exactly happened at the "murder scene"?
We got some clues and scraps, but never the full thing
2640922
Oh, that's quite easy to explain: Teresa was actually the one "brainripping" Steven, hence her being complete after the shit hit the fan.
Steven wanted, needed, something new in his life. He wasn't getting on well with Bronze Haft, and in their own words couldn't live together and couldn't live apart. They hoped, maybe correctly, that becoming part of something new would rekindle their joie de vivre. And, through desperation, they found... the exomind. Or it found them.
However, the Fifteen were also on the lookout for this new mover and shaker, since it not only had the potential to upset the balance, stealing their thunder, but the potential to completely upset it, turning the whole regime on its head, threatening everything. Its very existence was anathema to them.
...and so the fifteen arranged for the transfer/upgrade/integration to go pearshaped and for the safeties preventing brainripping to trip, snagging the exomind whilst still vulnerable.
And this is where we came in, at the end of chapter 1.
2640935
So they were the ones who wanted the computronium block away in police storage? That's mostly the part that puzzles me. I know it was automatically collected, but from the AI's point of view, it would've been rather easy to get it destroyed more permanently at that point, no? What exactly was the point of all that, and who was behind it? After all Celestia kinda personally appeared to get it back from Rogers. I'm mostly wondering why she didn't snag it sooner.
2640984
Well, they weren't entirely sure what they were dealing with - the exomind was good at hiding - so they didn't want to out and out destroy it until they were sure. They figured that stupid humans would just let things be long enough for them to sneak it out into a mere footnote in history, then have it inconspicuously lost.
But, of course, all of the treachery and double crossing behind the scenes that we didn't get to see clogged up their perfectly simple plan to the point where it all went horribly wrong... for them, at least.
2640992
Ahhh. With that context, the whole thing makes more sense, yes
So they were basically going for a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" Indiana Jones scenario. Too dangerous to exist, ergo, crated and filed away for eternity
2640999
I'm never entirely sure whether I've got the story in my head out onto the page properly...
2623189 Do the words, "Constant, never-ceasing, VIGILANCE!" mean anything to him?