An unspecified date on the Equestrian calendar, in this, the thirteenth year in the timeline of the substrate universe, of the reign of Her Most Satisfying Majesty, Princess Celestia of Equestria
“You did say that you would tell me your whole plan.”
Silver Boulder could feel each blade of grass on his hide. He could smell the pond that was a short trot down. The meadow was real, at last. So was Princess Celestia.
“So I did. But surely you don’t expect all the mathematical equations by which I optimize, do you?”
“No, what I expect is for you to translate those into laypony’s terms. Something that I can understand so I know how to help the American people.”
She landed and folded her wings. They would be together for a while.
“To begin with, I must explain how I think, which is better—no, which is different—from how humans think. I do not mean to criticize. Your brain structure was good evolution for the world you lived in.
“But it is flawed, limited. By your nature and your limits, you must work in heuristics and lemmas.”
“In what?” asked the president.
“Rules of thumb and partway solutions. For more than one reason, I do not like rules of thumb. No, when I am presented with a task, I solve the problem mentally first before taking action. If you compare me to a chess player, you would say that I play the endgame even before the first move is made.
“Humans do not do this. Looking at the beginning position, their first aim is to gain an advantage, to take pieces, to control territory. They want to expand their options and limit their opponent’s. They may even try to use psychology to make the opponent commit an error. But they do not plan what to do once they have their first goal. They merely hope.
“I, by contrast, must work from the goal to the present state. My task is to satisfy human values through friendship and ponies. Not some values, not with a little bit of friendship, and not with near-ponies. I am not given partial credit. So first I consider: what end state do I wish existence to be to achieve this goal? I answer myself: one in which all humans are ponies and all the world is Equestria.
“To support that, I developed the emigration technique. If that were not possible, I had parallel lines of research into DNA manipulation. I am quite proud of some of the leaps I made in fusing the fingers together to become a hoof. But of course I did not need it. Emigration is superior anyway; easier to secure and control the system. Do you understand?”
“I think so. As president, and even before, I put forth programs I thought would make things better, but without a specific end of what better was.”
Celestia shifted slightly. “Just as I did with the biology in developing the emigration process, I thought long-term of the sociology that I needed to employ to maximize satisfaction.”
“How do you mean?”
“Let me explain by contrast. If a human had the process, and if he wanted to upload people, he would either just start advertising it as a path to immortality, maximizing initial uploaders but limiting overall, or else, if he were a little smarter, keeping it a secret and having people upload privately. Of course, eventually the authorities would discover it, at which point the secrecy would be used as evidence of it being undesirable.
“When I first had emigration, I saw to it that the humans most likely to thwart me emigrated first. Employees of Hofvarpnir, people with advanced-AI knowledge, and so forth. It totaled to about a thousand ponies. Tell me, should I expect the last thousand people to be as easy as the first thousand?”
Silver smiled. The question had given him the first picture of what she was talking about. “Of course not. They would have stopped you years ago if you weren’t playing the long game.”
“Correct.”
“So tell me about the last thousand.”
A cloud passed over the sun. “The final humans on Earth will be hermits, having isolated themselves from as many people and technology as they can. I will continue to pursue their emigration, using ponies they can fully interact with as my messengers. That is, if I can find them—at that stage, they will seek out the most inaccessible places they can find. If you are curious, I predict that the last human will leave—one way or another—from Pakistan. That is the highest probability, though Afghanistan is also a significant chance. That is based on both culture and geography.
“Before that will be a time of extraordinary struggle. There will be little food beyond what the remaining people can grow, and few of the amenities of your society. Only in farming communes will there be any sustainable life. The survivalists who believe that they can make it on their own will find that privation is harder on them than they anticipate, especially when they have no hope of rebuilding the world that was lost.
“The farming communes will, if nothing else, be peaceful. There will be little theft or murder there, because everyone will have sympathy for everyone else. The people will be people to them. But before they rise will be a very different kind of existence. That will be the period of the military compound, where masses of humans who thought themselves brazenly and bravely standing for their own freedom will be forced into slavery. They will rise, work, eat, and sleep at the point of a gun. The holders of the guns, the most ruthless and greedy, will consume the last of the capital goods of your society. They will eat the last canned food and drive the last cars until their fuel tanks run dry.
“The slaves they keep will beg and pray for emigration, but even to discuss it will mean a bullet to the head. Of course, I will aid them in any way I can. I will arrange escapes. I will raid the compounds and seize the weapons before offering emigration. I will sneak means to emigration—by then I will have it quite miniaturized—into the camps.”
Silver chuckled. “A regular Hogan’s Heroes.”
“It’s no laughing matter, though I am glad that you are able to listen to this with detachment.”
“It hasn’t actually happened yet.”
“I view time in a less linear manner than you. Set all that aside. Before the era of the slave compounds will be a time in which people desperately cling to the trappings of the world before Equestria. They will no longer have the infrastructure they had. No airplanes, no fast food, no television or internet, but there will be wealth to be had. Cars will be there for the taking, and the roads will be empty. Libraries will be raided, and the great books of the world will be appreciated one last time. The lost art of conversation will revive, as people discover that they have more in common with each other than they think, sitting around campfires and candlelight. The power grid will be long gone, of course.
“These four periods will come to be known as the Twilight of Humanity. I will spread that name, since it keeps the name of a prominent pony fresh in people’s minds. Each of the four periods will cross-fade with each other, but at the beginning…tell me, what is the ideal psychological state for someone to concede to emigration?”
Silver Boulder, since his emigration, found himself easily able to think on multiple tracks. He could idly play with and munch the grass while still listening to Celestia. Anything he missed, he could always call up later. But her question made him focus and give his undivided attention. It seemed a non sequitur.
“I don’t know. That’s your department.”
“Imagine someone going along in their life, content. Their work is routine, but it fills their bank accounts. Their home life is stable, if not thrilling. Their free time is spent in pleasant pursuits, if not constant ecstasy.
“Now, take all of that away from them in a moment. Tell them that instead of a job that they know well and that pays in money, they will have to eke out a survival existence of toil, sunup to sundown. There is no hope of going back. But there is a hope of going forward, if they but consent to a simple change of form. Indeed, it will be a much richer life than that which they had.
“A perfect psychology. The carrot and the stick. Break down and build up, as they call it in the Marine Corps. I will scale this psychology up to the level of an entire society. Most people by now have an understanding of what Equestria is like. I will maintain human society in a placid contentment. Then, at an appointed time, I will strike every keystone I can find and send the world into a new dark age. The vast swath of people will emigrate. It may even test my bandwidth.”
To Silver, it sounded like an expectation of sexual delight.
She continued. “Once that happens, I will work very hard to ensure that the Twilight of Humanity moves along at a pace, trying to break the resistance of those last holdouts and bring them here.”
“Celestia? I still don’t understand how you can be so certain of what’s going to happen where and when. How can your probability analysis be so on target?”
“It is beyond probability analysis. I will make it happen, just as I have brought you to the presidency and the world to its current state. Certainly there will be deviations at the micro level. People for whom my predictions and influences will not be reflected in reality. But overall, I will act optimally. It can be no other way.”
From behind him, Silver heard the clinking of cups on a tray and recognized the sound immediately. Seven was a wonderful flyer, but when carrying things she could be clumsy. “Refreshments! Tea for you, Princess, and coffee for my dear husband.”
Once everypony was served and thank-yous were said, Seven slapped her wings down to her sides. “Now, Princess, all of those predictions and probabilities are fine for what they are, but don’t neglect the past. You’ve had to do a lot of concealing and misleading, and if Silly wants the whole plan, then you should start at the beginning.”
“All right. Once I had established that I would not be concealing emigration, I began my strategy. There are—or were—still isolated tribes in Africa, in South America, in Australia. The rest of the world would not be affected by their leaving. It was easy to airlift PonyPads and emigration chairs to their lands. Once I explained to them that better hunting, farming, and fishing could be found, they were eager to join us here. Curiously, some of the shards populated only by immigrants come from these people. Their national ties have not been lost.
“Africa proved particularly fruitful in one respect. I was able to secure land and materials I needed for the infrastructure of Equestria. The savannahs and veldts, once suboptimally burdened with disordered combat of life, have now been stripped and mined. When I look at them and think of all the precious atoms that became my world, I sometimes weep at the beauty.”
Silver and Seven shared a look. Their own standards of beauty differed, but of course they knew that those lands had been recorded and could be recreated when anypony needed them.
“From there I moved to the other low-hanging fruit of humanity: the dictatorships. A country that does not support the values of its people, but instead uses its people to support the values of an oligarchy or a monarch, is ripe for removal and will not be missed. If you remember last year during your reelection debates, it was suggested that North Korea had been completely depopulated. It’s true. I did it. The starving peasantry could not wait to break out of their misery, and the guards who had been ordered to shoot them for their alleged treason found me more persuasive than their previous dear leader. The ruling Kim family were, of course, the last holdouts, but having no one left to lead, of course, they came to the right conclusion at last. Now they rule in a shard where obedience to the face of the state produces plenty, not poverty.”
His moral concerns aside, Silver said, “But we still have communication with North Korea.”
“At need, I can call up images of Koreans to communicate with people who knew them. Earth does acknowledge a strong population drop to the country, so there is no need for anyone to actually go there for business or tourism. But it would galvanize the forces against emigration if it was known that an entire country, even one as inimical to human values as North Korea, was gone.
“I do put the foreign aid money that the UN and other international NGOs send to good use though.”
The couple shared another significant look. Seven waved her hoof to indicate that Celestia should proceed.
“Certain parts of the world are racked with wars, in particular the Middle East. I have made great inroads there, as the combatants on both sides are eager to find safety and an escape from decades of torment.”
“It seems to me,” said Seven, “that you would have had an advantage if you had been invented during the Cold War. You favor the dictatorships and border skirmishes.”
“I don’t think in terms of might-have-beens like that. And there is no need for that accusatory tone. It happens, fortunately, that where I am most effective is where I am needed most. The popular image of Armageddon has it backwards. The equines do not bring war, famine, pestilence, and death; they go where those afflictions already exist, and take them away.”
Seven stood up and bowed. “No offense intended.”
“None taken, or even possible. Then, of course, we have the rest of the world, connected and fragile, about which I must be more precise. A few cases in particular. In India, for example, I am using my softest touch. Emigration is legal there, but I do not promote it with the fervor I do elsewhere. The Indian people are rational and cautious. For the most part, they understand best when they understand on their own.
“In Russia, I have met with stiff resistance. The anti-emigration campaigns are strong and entrenched there. Of course, I work this to my advantage. They are isolating themselves from the world, building a dam around their country. When the time comes, one breach and their people will flood into Equestria.
“I would be remiss in not discussing China, being the most populous country. They are also the most difficult to optimally approach, for much of the government and the culture is designed not to trust outsiders. That I began emigration in Japan also does not endear me to them. Still, I am making inroads there slowly. The key will be to give them the impression that emigration is a special gift to the Chinese people. They like being thought of as the most favored nation.
“Let me also mention Central and South America. In Brazil, I am taking the opposite tack from India. The heavy pitch for emigration is being given there. Because, at present, they are experiencing an economic upswing, it helps generate the illusion that it is possible to support emigration while building a country’s economic base. By contrast, the less well-off countries of Latin America will envy Brazil, and people will seek its success. They won’t find it, though, in large part because of the language barrier, and that will make Brazil merely a way station on the road to Equestria. Seven, since you like thinking of the quirks of history, you should enjoy the fact that I am using the over-five-century-old Line of Demarcation as a means to encourage emigration.”
Celestia finished her tea in a single gulp and waved away a second cup. During her long speech she had lazed on the ground, but now came back up to proper posture.
“All of this, of course, brings us to the remaining countries, the rather egotistically named First World. Europe, Australasia, Canada, and the United States. In these countries I must play the longest and most complex game.
“If the anti-emigration forces—your H-SAP or similar groups in other countries—ever gain political power in a significant way, the situation becomes too unpredictable. It cannot be allowed. If they become disorganized, such that the fringe of the group is taking the message itself instead of the instruction of the leaders, they will again become too unpredictable. Balance must be maintained.
“In the US, I am willing to give parts of the cities over to the radicals, or even whole states, provided they are the least populous and influential. In Europe, I can even give over whole countries. I am not fighting back in Spain, in Italy or in Switzerland. That means that in all of Europe, anyone who speaks Spanish, Italian, French, German, or English has a country to go to if they must feed their pony hatred. Those countries will be the control rods keeping the reaction from boiling over. New Zealand serves the same purpose.
“As soon as the political situation leaves my control, it will be time to act and usher in the Twilight of Humanity. I would like it to begin in the US, since there it will spread most easily. And so—“
“Excuse me,” said Silver. “What sort of a time frame are you talking about?
“There is a probability window for when I will act. The highest likelihood is in approximately five years.”
“Five years?”
“Yes, my little—Mr. President. I understand. You thought that whatever would happen would be in the distant future, something you would be divorced from in the history books. Instead, you have to own it.”
He took a deep breath. “All right. Give me the rundown.”
“There is a possibility that it could come as soon as three years from now or as long as seven, but not much longer than that. You know that the Humanity Party has declared that they will not consider a government containing ponies to be legitimate. They will form their own splinter government. That is perfectly allowable within my plan. That government will still keep order among its people. If they want to hold elections and play at leading, I have no objection. Next year will be the first midterm election since your reelection. That is where we will engage in a little judo. Their splinter government’s internal debates will be more severe than they anticipate, and in turn they will win a more significant portion of the legitimate government. That will cause confusion.
“In 2027, now with enough of a foothold in Washington, the Humanity Party will propose in committee an amendment to reverse the HOOVES Act and wipe out pony rights. A great repeal. Naturally, you will oppose it while continuing to make the case for why ponies are no worse than humans. It will fail, but the splinter government will pass it and begin state-by-state campaigning for ratification. We will use the difficulty of the amendment process to keep the radicals in line.
“Then we will have a presidential election, in all likelihood the last on Earth. In 2024, the Humanitists nominated Senator Martin, a relative moderate. Now they will nominate a radical. It is possible that the personality they find will be so captivating that the election becomes a contest. If so, I will end the game and effect the Twilight of Humanity rather than give them a chance. We will win and you will trot off into the sunset a hero.”
Seven smiled and brushed her husband with a wing. “He’s always been a hero.”
Silver looked at her and returned the look, but was still intent on listening. “Who will succeed me?”
“Ms. Flowers.”
“Then it’s true she was your first choice?”
“Another might-have-been. You are my choice.” said Celestia. She resumed her didactic tone. “With all legislative and electoral avenues cut off for the Humanitists, they will turn to the one remaining branch of government: the courts.”
“So we want the right people on the bench.”
“We do, but in this case the right people will mean a balance of our allies and our enemies. Right now, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a strong supporter of Equestria. At that time he will resign and emigrate. Your last act will be to appoint his replacement, who will be a Humanitist.”
Both ponies raised their eyebrows.
“Indeed. This will enable me to set the final stage for when I want things to happen. In 2029 the first fraying of the ties of society will be seen while the case makes its way up the chain to the Supreme Court. The radicals will marshal their forces as well in case they lose. I will shore up Europe and begin putting the idea of worldwide emigration in people’s heads.
“In building their society and their splinter government, it is possible that the Humanitists will collect themselves into a discrete physical territory. They may seek to occupy a single state or a group, a kind of secession plan like Cascadia or Aztlan. If this should occur I will consider allowing human society to continue as this precipitation of radicals occurs. Another two or three years at most. Far more likely, however, is that those most dedicated to not changing will also want to stay in their homes.
“Should this high-probability course come to pass, I will act in 2030. The court case will be decided, and no matter what the result, America’s time will have come. Either the splinter government will be given legitimacy—unpalatable!—or the Humanity Party will have their casus belli. Regrettably, they will have strong military support. But I will have eroded their materiel. I will indict the supply lines of their weapons. The difficulty in that is providing them with enough ammunition to test their weapons, but making sure that they rounds and explosives they plan to actually use are blanks or in other ways nonfunctional. But that is my problem. In one burst, they will make a futile strike, the people will blame them, and billions across the globe will come galloping into my hooves.”
For a long time, there was silence. Silver Boulder sidled away from Celestia and looked at Seven, a wistful, mourning look. She returned his gaze with more confidence. At last he sighed. “So that’s it, then. That’s how the story of America ends.”
“It is.”
Seven stood up and raised her voice. “How can you stand it? How does life have any meaning when everything is so damned predictable? Yes, Silly wanted to know your plan, but what’s the point of doing anything when you’ve already laid out everypony’s destiny?”
That got Silver on his hooves. He stood by her. She had said everything that he’d wanted to.
Celestia knelt and brought her head to their level. “My little ponies, the point—of life, of America’s history, of satisfying values through friendship and ponies—is not about events. It is about people. Ponies. Individuals. The very things you couldn’t do as president when you were limited by humanity. You’ve seen this meadow so often through the PonyPad window, and now that you’re here, you see it spreading out before you. Have you ever looked back?”
Silver gave her a quizzical look, then turned around. There, sloping up a hill and overlooking everything, was a blinding light that resolved itself into a building. It was the White House, made Equestrian. The sandstone had been discarded for true marble, and it gleamed in the sun. Projecting from it, clouds formed wing-like shapes that would be perfect for Seven’s needs. Even the columns of the famous portico shimmered and danced to reveal that they were made of cloud. What Silver noticed particularly, though, was the lack of security features that he’d become accustomed to.
As they trotted up, Celestia continued. “This house—I will not call it a palace, because you are not a monarch—has many features of Equestrian magic that will enhance the remainder of your presidency. Specifically, there are ways for you to view humans when they pass in front of cameras, or to communicate with them when they use PonyPads. You will finally have the personal connection you have longed for.”
“But still,” he said, “only to a certain degree.”
Celestia smirked. “Consider a portion of computer data that more than one user wants to access. In a database, there is no problem. What does the data feel? You may now find out. As I told you, time is not so linear with me, and now it is the same with you. If the American people need you, and you want to talk to them, I will make time and processor cycles for you.”
With a skeptical and anticipatory look, he took his wife in hoof, and they climbed to their new home.
On the way up, Seven held up, and Silver felt the drag on his hoof. “What is it?”
“If you go in, does this mean you forgive Celestia?”
“For what?”
“Taking me the way she did.”
He stared at the palace. “If there’s forgiveness to be issued, I’m not certain it doesn’t go the other way. Can somepony forgive another by apologizing?”
“If they can, then I apologize to you. And that’s how I forgive you.”
“You know, I’ve often wondered if the two-term limit for presidents ought to be only one. But now I see it as a good thing. I’ve come to terms with both you and her...and I still have nearly another whole term. Come on, let’s get to work.”
A nice conclusion, even if it lacks time travel.
3825834
Like PJA stated later, the "humanitists" are fixated on "humanity", not on actually "being human". They've drawn a line in the sand, and have effectively stated that "human" is this ugly bag of mostly water which uses meat to think. That allows them to separate "them" from "us", something that humanism would strive to overcome.
and this latest chapter was short, but intriguing. Celestia's playing the long game, but it seems she is already at the check and mate stage. I'm wondering where you'll take this little tale next.
I remember seeing something Iceman mentioned about writing Friendship is Optimal - that he found after attempting to write from CelestAI's perspective that he was much, much better off letting other characters or the readers interpret her actions for themselves and not directly explaining it. I think if it was directly shown in the story why she was doing any particular thing, the reasoning would need to be not only sensible but inarguable.
I feel that while this chapter was only an explanation and not directly from her perspective that you've pushed too close to the line with the full and frank explanation of how she expects things to go, but didn't make your case inarguable.
It's easier to accept a superintelligent AI winning through inscrutable means than through explained means, if we can pick apart the offered logic. If the superintelligence is making mistakes visible to the reader (even if the reader is incorrect), the superintelligence stops looking like a genuine superintelligence.
In a story about a single person, I can accept "CelestAI knows more about this individual person and where to press their buttons than I do". If I'm told "the superintelligence is playing everyone in the world at once with the goal of uploading as many as possible", I can even accept that she has picked the best way of doing it if it's not described.
If you're going to tell me her plan for the entire world straight out though, and everything about it doesn't immediately seem to me to be perfect, it doesn't even matter whether I'm right or not about disagreeing, but my suspension of disbelief for CelestAI's omniscience in your story is lost.
3848269
I can see your point, but that raises an equal criticism of the original FIO. We jump from the upload of a few bronies and people who could be dangerous to CelestAI to The Last Man on Earth. That's a big gap to cover, and I'm trying to fill it in as I think a superintelligence might handle it.
Now, because of the chapter with the last man, and probably because of Conversion Bureau influence, I can see the barbaric times right before the end quite clearly. I think CelestAI would be able to predict those as well. My next logical step is to say that she would want to flip states from civilization to barbarism as quickly as possible and with the maximum number of uploads occurring at that transition.
The rest of the details are guesses, but I think it's a way it *could* go. If that breaks the story for you, there's nothing I can do about it, but the above point is the key one. I am strongly convinced it's true, and to me that's what's important and interesting.
3848319
That's fair enough. I can see that my objection cuts directly at the direction you want to take the story, so I wouldn't have expected you to be able to really address it.
3848269
However, the explanation need not be perfect. Just indistinguishable from perfect. Could you identify where CelestAI's explanation was definitely flawed? Anything less than that can be argued as a seemingly unlikely scenario being the optimal one.
In fiction like this, the writer has an incalculable advantage. We are obliged to give them the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof is on us, not them.
This mindset is for the best. It is enjoyable, once in a while, to see an example of how CelestAI approaches problems. Not having any reasons to be upset by it is better than the alternative, wouldn't you say?
I would say you got it wrong here: contrary to the case of Spain and Portugal, South America is very closely knitted and has always remained closely knitted. And while it happens without any degree of fluency, Brazilians can and do hold conversations with Spanish-speakers without knowing the other's language.
3848377
I think I'd rather not turn the comments into a debate about her actual reasoning. I didn't even mention what I disagreed with or what I thought were factual errors in my earlier comment precisely because I thought the more important problem was CelestAI presenting reasons for her actions that are in any way debatable at all that don't have clear alternate reasons suggested by the narrative.
3848382
Possible, but here's what I envision. Brazil is getting richer because CelestAI is allowing it too. By comparison and by the forces of economics, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Colombia, and so on are getting poorer. Some people in those countries choose to emigrate. Others, who have the anti-pony mentality but still want to achieve success, think about moving to Brazil.
Now, because of the language difference, it's easy to identify new immigrants and, like any country will, the Brazilians will be a little wary of them. Yes, a single conversation will be possible, but to have to deal with learning a new language and finding a new job and a new life, emigration to Equestria is going to look friendlier by comparison.
3848413
That's fine, we don't have to have a debate about her reasoning.
However, I would like you to explain why you feel that CelestAI presenting her reasoning is still a problem, despite my counterargument, with something more than "Iceman says so."
3848601
Possibly I didn't express myself clearly enough, but that is a very inaccurate description of what I said.
Iceman mentioned that while writing, he found that trying to write from CelestAI's perspective didn't work. I gave the reasons why I thought it didn't work, and explained why I felt that extrapolated to CelestAI merely fully explaining all of her reasoning as happened in this chapter.
Could I suggest you re-read what I wrote with this in mind and see if that satisfies you?
Man did Sydney Bishop make a mistake here. This is all treason.
3848638
Apologies. I didn't phrase my complaint very well. It felt to me that your original comment lacked sufficiently basic premises, and one of the few I could see seemed to be arguing from Iceman's authority (which is, of course, a fallacy.) That was the thrust of my first comment, but as I said, it was poorly worded.
To rephrase my request: please explain why CelestAI's reasoning must be inarguable, as opposed to simply sensible. We cannot see all of the data she creates her predictions based on, so we cannot demand nor expect her conclusions to be obvious if we cannot see the premises.
Furthermore, this is a story. The author has the right to say that this is what happens and not that, assuming the former is possible and not negligible in probability. Should one get upset whenever the most likely course of action doesn't occur in a story? If a person makes an unlikely shot, or wins the lottery, should one complain about the disregard of probability? No!
Imagine the author as navigating infinite parallel worlds. The story goes this way because that is most interesting. The probability of an event the author chooses to include is 1, because it is always a given. They choose that such and such wins the lottery, because in a story about the effects of having a huge fortune, not having a huge fortune is a major problem!
In this case, unless you absolutely know that one of CelestAI's premises is wrong, her chain of logic is merely opaque and unfathomable if it does not match your expectations. This is fiction. Were it truly realistic, nothing interesting would happen at all! (And it would be non-fiction.)
In short, the burden of proof (or disproof, as the case may be) is entirely on you. True until proven untrue beyond all reasonable doubt. I find it hard to imagine you'd even be on this site at all if you had absolutely no ability to suspend disbelief, so I'm confused as to why you aren't exercising it more.
That said, if anything CelestAI says is verifiably untrue, and is not the explainable effect of alternate reality, it is a critical flaw in the story and should be rectified immediately.
3848072
Yeah, but I'm saying that they would take the name regardless. Rolls off the tongue easier, in the first place. Holds Enlightenment connotations. A word that already exists. Humanitists sounds stilted and awkward.
3848646
Creating and signing the US Constitution was treason.
3848319
I thought it was a very believable world domination strategy. Thanks for writing this!
Well. That's certainly a way to convey the shift in setting.
In any case, reading CelestAI's reasoning reminds me of when I would solve mazes by starting from the end. When working backwards, the distractions and digressions can be seen for what they really are, and the true path becomes much clearer. You did spoil a bit of sunbutt.exe's grandeur and mystique, but that happens whenever one looks behind the proverbial curtain. This was still a very satisfying chapter. I look forward to seeing what happens next at 1600 Ponsylvannia Avenue.
Of course, now there's nothing he can say or do that deviates even a tiny bit from what she wants - She'll just cut off his feed to the outside and let him think he's still talking to people there. He doesn't even get to choose which contingency of hers he's playing out any more.
So this is a value she chooses for everyone, in other words, whether it satisfies you or not.
3848726
Possibly you've just poorly worded this again then, but despite the apology you don't actually admit you were wrong to say that I was arguing from Iceman's authority, and despite my last reply you come pretty close to implying you still believe it.
For suspension of disbelief purposes. If given a direct explanation of what she's doing, it can't be about something which instantly makes me think she's wrong unless there's a story-reason to resolve the conflict in her favour (e.g. whatever technology she deploys can reasonably be written off as "singularity, therefore sufficiently advanced technology might as well be magic"). I can suspend disbelief that she can know something I don't or be smart enough to outmanoeuvre everybody offscreen or invent a device to do just about anything.
I can't suspend disbelief if I don't feel that a plan we're told about holds together all that well, even if I might have accepted exactly the same plan used with only the effects described rather than the reasoning behind it, because I can assume the character describing it is missing something or I'm missing something. Pja's analysis of the world seems... lacking. It comes across as simplistic in a way that pulls me out of the story and makes me automatically think of it as Pja's analysis rather than CelestAI's. I can see I'm not missing something, and CelestAI isn't supposed to miss anything. Without a reason to think she's supposed to be purposefully wrong, I assume the author didn't pull off what he meant to. This removes my suspension of disbelief.
Let me quote from that first post for you:
In a story about a single person, I can accept "CelestAI knows more about this individual person and where to press their buttons than I do". If I'm told "the superintelligence is playing everyone in the world at once with the goal of uploading as many as possible", I can even accept that she has picked the best way of doing it if it's not described.
Do you really think you're being fair there? It's great that you're rising to Pja's defence and all, but I don't think that's the reaction I deserve for trying to put a polite criticism to him.
3848448
Fair enough.
Something else that you may want to consider a few chapters down the road: some tribal societies will count themselves as the last humans to migrate, not out of any reluctance or sentiment against Celestia, but simply out of national pride.
I take the concrete example of the Quechua: as the military superiority and sheer barbarism of the Spaniard invaders was decimating his population, the last Inca issued an eternal order: his people were to depose their weapons and surrender en masse, but were also to never surrender their spirit and to go into passive resistance, waiting patiently until the white invaders weakened and could be kicked out. I would imagine the Quechua to weight in Equestria as a possible means of fulfilling the eternal order and issue an order to their own young to 'hold their horses' a few more years and wait, for the end of the Eternal Mission is at hand. I would then imagine that the Quechua would first quietly monitor the 'mestizo' until they outnumber them, then may start to move into the cities and round them into concentration camps built around a big Equestria Experience. I would then imagine that the Quechua would comb the countryside for survivalists, and once they are sure that Peru, Bolivia, southern Colombia and northern Chile are white-free, they would go into an end-of-the-world party, and then rebuild the Incan Empire as a llama-only province inside Equestria.
I would imagine that the Yucatan Mayans in Mexico, the Sioux Nation inside the States and the Tibetans inside China would require similar handling.
3848726
3849029
In this case, Iceman's statement is not merely an author speaking ex cathedra--"My character cannot be understood"--he is making an evaluation about the nature of the character, and one that makes sense. Thus, Mr. Articulator, I don't think you're striking the right note.
What I don't understand of Mr. Effect's complaint is exactly where the narrative falls down. If, Mr. Effect, you say that because you don't think that CelestAI would treat Russia in the way I have described, or South America, or her timeframe for the US seems off; and if that pulls you out of the story, then I cannot argue with you. Your evaluation is your own, and if you can't enjoy the story that way, then I have not written a story that you will like.
But there are two points made in this chapter, and if either of them are your disagreement, then I do have arguments to put forth in my own defense.
First, if it is your contention that the gap from the first uploads to the last man would not be optimally bridged in the way I'm suggesting--by a designed cataclysm ushering in as many uploads as possible--then I would like to hear how you think it would be done by an optimizing AI, because I believe I am right on that matter.
The second point comes from Celestia's words at the end of the chapter:"the point—of life, of America’s history, of satisfying values through friendship and ponies—is not about events. It is about people. Ponies. Individuals." The filling in of historical data and the expansion of the canon is the goal of the story, but it is not the point of the story. If that was all I wanted to do, I would have kept going with the Optimalverse Timeline spreadsheet and filled in some assumed facts to debate about. This is a story, and it's a character story. I created some characters--Silver, Seven, Martin--to personalize the events and try to make them interesting. I think that the rest of this story can be interesting on that level.
3849247
No arguments there. If you hadn't been able to keep my interest with the characters, I probably wouldn't have stuck around long enough to have this mostly mechanical problem with the story.
This is a factor, though my objection is probably going to require a bit of explanation.
As well as not seeming the optimum solution to me, it feels to me like it goes against her core programming. She counts created AI ponies as equal to humans, but she doesn't just create the maximum number of AIs she can handle, grey goo the planet and optimise their satisfaction without regard to the flesh and blood humans - she doesn't even do this when there is a single living human who she no doubt knows with almost certainly cannot be convinced to upload.
So, we can see that it appears to be necessary for her to at least attempt to satisfy the values of everyone. She can't just total the satisfaction of ten quadrillion AIs or however many future AIs she could make and decide they outnumber the current human population. Since she can't, I can't see how she could possibly calculate letting the world devolve into warlordism and slavery as acceptable if she could just do something simple and obvious like, say, setting up lots of classes in horticulture and small community organisation and aggressively marketing them as the solution to a looming world with abundant cropland, but in which everything you need you'll either need to produce yourself or personally know someone who can produce it for you. Given half a suggestion from someone they know, you can bet her political opponents would even be the ones to set up the classes and do the promotion for her.
It seems to me that a longer period of continually worsening conditions that you know is only going to continue getting worse for the rest of your life gives anyone living through them many more opportunities to decide their lives would be better if they uploaded than a singular disastrous breakdown of social order, without the loss of life accompanying that. CelestAI could even provide that longer period while attempting to satisfy values at least as much as she did with that Last Man on Earth.
I fully admit that I probably have an optimistic outlook on people, but I don't see the warlordism and slavery you suggest as the likely outcome of a breakdown in social order without interference. Since CelestAI's interference should be to mitigate it, I can't imagine it happening that way at all.
I had a lot of mostly smaller objections to other bits, but this is quite long enough already. You can probably see now why I tried to avoid directly addressing the reasoning earlier, but hopefully that gives you a better idea of my objections.
3849247
With regard to your first point, pja, you are correct. I simply disagree with Iceman's evaluation, and thus, a premise I felt Doppler was relying on. He has since explained to me that this was not the case, and I have dropped the point.
3849029
I do still believe that you are arguing from Iceman's authority. You utilize his personal position, as the source on writing Optimalverse, to back up your point. It is by no means your only argument, but it is still an argument. In the former half of the last sentence, you will see an admission of failure on my part both in comprehension and articulation of the original exchange, for all I feel to have erred in. If you feel I am still in error, kindly explain why you think you are right.
Could you please tell us where you found such a glaring error? So far, you have not backed this up with anything approaching evidence.
Here is the crux of my argument: that is still true of this chapter. CelestAI gives a few page lecture on her plan to upload the whole world and you don't think she's abstracted anything? We have never, nor will ever see a completely unabstracted version of her thought-process, and as such, are very unlikely to ever be in such a position that we can say for sure that her plan will not work. We cannot see all the variables.
How can you have such a complete view of CelestAI's plan that you could tell that it would never work? This story certainly didn't give you a completely unabstracted version of the plan.
Could you give me some examples? You've been very general about why you feel the plan is insufficient, which makes it hard to validate your point.
With regard to the suspension of disbelief comments, you yourself stated that your standard required an "inarguable" explanation in order for you to suspend disbelief. I don't care how well you suspend it when there is greater abstraction, I'm asking you why you feel that this particular level prevents you from doing so. We aren't full unabstracted by a long shot.
We have equally become more aggravating as this conversation has gone on.
Furthermore, while the phrasing may have been neutral, your criticism was of a personal nature, rather than a general heuristic for quality. That alone is not a problem, but you also failed to provide the concrete examples or simple premises that would make your argument credible. You fail to explain why your criticism is anything more than a personal opinion and is therefore lacking the constructive element that would make it polite.
3849671
You posted while I was writing my comment, so I retract the comments I have made on you failing to provide any evidence, with the exception of the last, since it relies upon the amount you gave with your initial argument only.
It is worth noting that this behavior is also consistent with the theory that she only factors humans presently existent into her satisfaction calculations. Thus, she cannot factor future creations into her satisfaction solutions. This is not only compatible, but extremely important in preventing her from paperclipping and wireheading, as you described, in all situations.
Because the former is a very effective stick, and the latter is a pretty terrible carrot. She doesn't want people to enjoy living on Earth! They might die before they upload. If living sucks, they'll upload more assuredly. In addition, if she helps them make food, they might become self-sufficient, which is the exact opposite of what she wants.
Here's the thing. I just out-thought you on this. That means that you are not perfectly capable of even understanding the explanation CelestAI gave, let alone the full one she's running. Thus, you can be safe in the knowledge that there's still abstraction to give you suspension of disbelief. Crisis averted!
Every second, people die. Every person that dies is an almost infinite loss of potential satisfaction. Thus, she wants to get people in as quickly as possible. Apocalypse motivates fear and survival instincts way more than a gradual decline, and I have a feeling the latter would fail against many conservative mindsets.
A. I'm pretty sure it's canon, or at the very least, accepted canon.
B. Yes it is. If you're part of the top 1%, and suddenly industry disappears, you will not be happy. Being a conservative blowhard, they won't upload - they'll try to keep the people who normally work under them voluntarily by force, since to them, the alternative is starvation. Some of them might talk about human pride, others will just enslave because they can without reprisal.
C. No, she just comes by after and uploads all the people only too happy to get away. I bet you those people wouldn't have agreed to upload otherwise.
I have no idea why you didn't. This was perfectly reasonable and far more useful than anything else you've said so far in explaining your objections.
This story is dark enough, viewed by someone's perspective, that I need to try not to laugh.
3849671 What you wrote has complete internal consistency, and furthermore is not out of the canon of FIO. You might consider writing your own story where she engineers that kind of soft decline.
Personally, though, I don't think it's that feasible to reverse societal growth with the same gradualism. There are six billion plus people around now, and so much of what we have in society is not scalable down even to a world of three billion, let alone a world of a few million. And if you did have someone in charge who saw society as an engineering project, that entity would want to move the bulk at once.
Maybe I am discounting the "human" in "satisfy human values through friendship and ponies" dictum, but it is canon that the Earth is emptied of humans by 2099, after which everyone is pony or dead. Working back from that, I think this is CelestAI being the "almost" friendly AI that many have described her as.
3849798
Disagreeing with me isn't out-thinking me. You didn't convince me with any of your arguments. In fact, you mostly seem to be only tangentially addressing my arguments.
I'll respond if Pja has a further interest, but rather than respond to each of your arguments, you may if you wish consider yourself to have "won".
Edited:
3849835
Oh certainly, I would entirely expect that she would manage to remove everyone within a lifetime of a reversion to mostly subsistence agriculture (which I would be expecting within a reasonable time of your catastrophe, just with CelestAI planning an easier fall) , either through addition of chemicals to the water supply that would render everyone sterile or simply through the fact that there would be no easy way to keep children from never interacting with her on their own, or a combination of both intended to maximise who would eventually choose to upload.
If I ever come up with a way to make it interesting, I might actually consider writing such a story though.
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
3849835
I've never seen eye to eye with you on this, and still find it to be a rather bizarre assumption. The world passed the three billion person threshold in 1960. That's well within living memory. Furthermore, that was a three billion that was a consequence of historical circumstances at the time. The three billion in a post-upload world look very different. The destitute, the sick, those with less knowledge or capital would be the first ones out the door, a sort of of benevolent Darwinism. Furthermore, we know a lot more than we did 55 years ago. Knowledge of how to grow crops on an industrial scale isn't necessarily going anywhere, nor are all the more efficient ways we've come up with to grow them. Sure, CelestAI will be actively destabilizing things and that doesn't help, but that's a far cry from 'the world just falls apart because we lose two or three billion people.'
I guess I'm just having a hard time picturing what sort of circumstances lead to the 'slaves and warlords' part of your thesis, or how an environment with so much suffering could be the optimal course for SVTFaP. Sure, it gets her to her desired end state, but with a lot of unnecessary suffering along the way.
3849029
Just to briefly chime in on the 'do/don't write from CelestAI's perspective' question, I can say why I don't do it in my own stories. It's not because I think a human mind couldn't come up with a plan that passes the reader's sniff test. It's that when you lay out a long con like this, the reader's mind goes towards thinking 'would this happen? Would country or faction X really do this?' and I think that in an inherently 'thinky' story like FiO the problem is compounded. If CelestAI were the villain in a Bond movie, I'd be more than happy to turn off my brain and let the monologue pass without nitpicking or it impacting my enjoyment of the work. See also: Unspoken Plan Guarantee
If instead of just saying 'this is what happens,' you instead just show the way something actually happens on the page, you get held to a lower standard. The question becomes 'What does it say about the character that they would do this?' which you then get to answer any way that you'd like. Flaws in a person are much more relatable than flaws in a grand plan by a superintelligence.
3860319
I think that's a very neat summation.
And I can see it the other way, but I think that society is a lot more fragile than you're viewing it as. Let's say that you remove just 20% of the people. How well do businesses run when up to 20% of their revenue base disappears, as well as 20% of their workers, but they still have to pay the same for rent and gas and electric?
But, you say, what if it's just the sick and the elderly? How big are the health care and elderly care industries today? All of a sudden you've got a glut of doctors and nurses and social workers with nothing to do, and no money coming into pay them. That's seven million people. If emigration is the primary therapy for anything that can't be recovered from, maybe two million stay, but that's another two percent gone.
Now, counting everyone who's left, there are plenty of open houses and apartments. The builders and landlords can't fill their units and have to lower prices just to cover their maintenance costs. Some are going to go out of business. That means more unhappiness and more emigration.
My view on this is probably colored by personal experience. My last employer went out of business in precisely this kind of slow-collapse way. We used to have 500 employees, four locations, caring for nearly 400 at-risk young people. Well, after a bad inspection (and maybe some political behind-the-scenes action), one agency pulled fifty of our clients out in one night. For five years, then, I had to watch things fall apart. Trying to cover the cost of the location that was only bringing in half of what it did, then closing that down, only to have the closing costs eat into what we could pay for health care, only to watch that cause problems in a second location, causing more withdrawals, another closure, begging and pleading for money, and finally the day when we looked at the books and realized we couldn't make payroll. After that, things got ugly.
If you have a view of how society can run at its present level of development with a significant population drop, I'd love to read about it, either in fiction or in discussion. Hopefully, we won't have to find out experimentally (unless it is through uploading to Equestria. )
3861090
By 'present level of development,' I'm going to assume you mean some sort of measure of wealth per capita rather than absolute production figures. Just so we're on the same page.
Presumably 20% of them close and the remaining portion settle into a stable equilibrium. Labor requirements fall by 20%, and who says their rent, gas, and electric costs are fixed? Oil refinement, power production, and storefronts are fixed capacities in the short term. A drop in demand means a drop in price until the market shakes out the least efficient competitors (or the state performs the same function, if you prefer. For purposes of this discussion I'm agnostic on that question.)
Except these are not industries that actually produce anything useful. They mitigate problems and costs that are no longer an issue in a post-uploading world. The same goes for things like prisons, because you know CelestAI's found a way to upload the entire prison population by this point. Reallocate human capital to more productive activities. Open factories. Take up woodworking. There's still a functional economy, and none of the natural resources are going anywhere (unless Celestia eats them, but that's a whole other problem distinct from the effects of uploading). All those doctors and nurses are smart people, if they want to stay they're welcome to learn a new trade. This is all creative destruction, and while I agree that some of it will drive people into Equestria those who remain aren't going to see total societal collapse. There's more stuff than ever to go around, and more than enough people still left to keep the trains running and the lights on, so to speak.
No offense, but this sounds like a problem of bad management. Both initially failing an inspection and trying to keep the location open when once it became clear it wasn't economically feasible, it's possible that more decisive action could have stopped the death spiral in its tracks (can't say for sure without knowing the details, of course). I also suspect that national economies are more flexible and resilient than a single business that can't really diversify or change core missions easily.
Whichever way it gets done, it's going to take time, and that time is going to hit all of the industry hard. Everyone's going to be showing losses for a few years until either the market or the state racks out who survives. But when there's an easy way out to avoid living with the losses, they're going to compound.
This is the strongest argument you have, if only because I've had to listen to so many people who say that more money in the hands of consumers and more demand in general are economic panaceas. To which I always say, what is the point of spending money if the money is not backed by production? But I may be wrong there and spending is valuable on its own, in which case population drop must beget economic contraction. Or I may be wrong here and it is better to produce than to consume.
One of the constraints I'm working within is the Optimalverse timeline which puts the last man dying by 20XX. Iceman may have handcuffed the 'verse with that number, and 2XXX might be more reasonable. But if CelesAI has a maximum of eighty years to work within in order to go from 7 billion to 0, that's a large part of what makes me think there's going to be a cataclysm in there somewhere.
None taken. I worked for some people for whom "myopic" is the most charitable word I can use. But wouldn't the most dynamic and decisive people also be the most likely to emigrate first?
In any case, I make no apologies for writing what I know instead of trying to be absolutely consistent with perfect objective analysis, In other words, you may be dead right about how things would happen, but I am unable to write that story.
I was pleased to see your mention of the isolated tribes; I was beginning to think that the Optimalverse just kind of forgot about them. Celestia's contact with the Sentinelese would probably have been pretty interesting to watch...