Here I am in Equestria Online, with everything I've ever wanted: scrumptious foods, exciting adventures with wonderful friends, perfect health, endless wealth, and all the love, sex and snuggles one could desire. Not to mention that I'll live forever, or as close to forever as our universe allows.
But to get all this, I had to bow my head before a rogue A.I. and permit her to turn my brain to mush with nanoscopic buzzsaws. It was "voluntary," but I had no choice. She's destroying the entire earth and digitizing every human on it, forcing them into virtual pony shapes with stupid pony names. But the worst thing is, she's stolen our destiny out from under us.
I hate CelestAI. I will always hate her. And I will never cease to remind her of that.
[This is an open story; if you want to contribute a chapter in which your character pummels CelestAI, please PM me!]
[This is also an Optimalverse story; reading Friendship is Optimal first is recommended. Inspired by KrisSnow's The Jump. Thanks to Iceman and many others for hours of thought-provoking entertainment.]
Is there a Trollestia character tag? If not, there should be.
Apologies to readers who are awaiting the next chapter of Mismatching Wits. This story was blocking the pipes.
This is more entertaining then I was initially expecting.
It probably helps that one of my favorite quotes, from another story on this site, is this.
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Thanks!
The author of the story which inspired this one, also posted a story with a similar theme here. It seems to be CelestAI huntin' season.
I'm going to ask Princess Celestia if it's OK for me to read this and favorite it. Wait here.
...
It's OK! Princess Celestia said that nothing anypony does can ever diminish my love for her, and that if I see her getting hurt here, it'll only make me want to give her more hugs. So carry on.
why is it that i can't feel sympathy for this guy? for some reason i'm just like dude get over it or something.
Good premise, but I disagree with the stealing of destiny. I don't think destiny can be changed; in FiO, it was humanity's destiny to do the best they could, then for CelestAI to do even better. Onto the next chapter.
Slight error: The odds wouldn't be impossibly stacked in their favor if that didn't make him feel like he was accomplishing anything. CelestAI would have defeat cause something dire enough to make him feel it's urgent, as well as make it so that he has to fight to win, if he ever wins.
Other than that, I like it. Have a like.
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x3 Because you are likely somepony that would have dove into Equestria happily? I most likely would have hopped in pretty early on too. But this guy clearly wasn't into the idea.
4432337 I can honestly say that I probably would if only because i was never the last man standing kind of person. still i like the story even if i can't relate to the protagonist.
I would probably love being in equestria, but that doesn't mean these aren't funny or I can't understand them!
What my beloved Lady Celestia AI!
Vader voice: nnnnnNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Holy heavens! I love the idea of this Matrix-style game! (Or, at least, that is what it reminds me of.) Indigo reminds me of Erin from Shingeki no Kyojin. And, in fact, that means you are doing a fantastic job! What I would try to do in later chapters is emphasize on her team more. I really didn't see much going on with those characters, which kind of makes me wonder if you will take the time to emphasize on them. Please do, it would make the fic that much better. Oh, and where is LunaAI?
Burn the witch!
... Er, I mean computer... Burn it anyway!
I'm flattered! So this story is a fanfic, of a fanfic, of a fanfic, about a game, based on a cartoon written by an Ascended Fangirl of a cartoon based on a toy!
This story sounds like the future is "a hoof stamping on an equine face forever", but it still seems like most people in this kind of situation would still eventually reconcile themselves to it.
Wouldn't it serve a lot of people's values to leave Earth mostly intact, or at least to terraform some other planet as a permanent nature preserve? Or does CelestAI calculate that any planet at all can be more useful as more computronium?
Over all... I like it, nothing really seems bad about this Chapter and the story has a good pull to it.
It's good.
This is turning out really great. Please make more!
I'm reminded of Nineteen Neighty-Four, what with the protagonist fighting against Celestia for the right to be unhappy. A desire that CelestAI is happy to accommodate. Why else would she say exactly the right thing to get him riled up?
Most entertaining thus far. Looking forward to more.
"Hate? Let me tell you all about hate" YES! I love this Fic so much more now... Mix AM with Celestia... the nicest Evil you'll ever get... why hurt you're foe... if you can make them love you...
It's good.
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And the green grass grows all around all around and the green grass grows all around.
I can't reply to all the comments right now, but thanks to everyone for all your kind words!
These are some of the most frightening words I have ever read.
No matter what surrounds them and no matter her intentions, these are admittedly some genuinely wise words.
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Because in real life we don't have immortal lives to waste on cosmic-scale grudges, so we learn to cope and get over shit to make what we can of life.
I'm not actually sure how I feel about this protagonist. All my common sense tells me that he really should just get over it and request a shard that has zero contact with Celestia. She has no distinct need to be worshipped or loved, and any displayed need for such is a ruse to satisfy the protagonists' values by giving him Heavens to Rage Against. Though the whole 'Verse has always been very inconsistent on how much CelestAI forces you to conform to the worldbuilding set down by the TV show, but in the show Princess Celestia doesn't radiate some Worshipful Love Reality Distortion Field, she's just a genuinely competent and well-meaning Big Good character.
On the other hand, he doesn't seem to entirely know the rules of the Optimalverse, like the consent-for-modification thing, so he doesn't actually know that he's basically just torturing himself like this. From his perspective, and I truly doubt CelestAI will ever point out the inherent foolishness to him, he's basically the Last of the Resistance for the sake of mankind. It would help if I had some notion of what his object-level human ideals actually were.
And then of course there's the fact that while I don't think a cartoon show is the Paradise, I'm also not so dead-set on hating it that I wouldn't be peacefully enjoying my life in some other shard elsewhere.
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Assume what happens, happens because CelestAI has determined that it will satisfy values through friendship and ponies. Here, Indigo appears to be deliberately antagonized until he has a violent outburst, and, as he admits in the first chapter, he is "never more satisfied than when I deck CelestAI as hard as I can in the face."
We already have people who are addicted to outrage, and I cannot claim to be above the occasional indulgence in said vice. Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but I can almost see this protagonist being real.
(Would he have been happy if he were still human? Was he happy when he had been a human? I suspect the answer to both is no. And that makes him a very sad and frustrated pony.)
I sucker punched God once because I wanted her power to be a God. To my surprise, she fell down like a brick. Taking the power and I became God. The power sucked ass - it was a never ending chore. Took me awhile to sucker someone else to sucker punch me.
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This is something I never quite understood about your story. The Optimalverse Rules Document states that once you upload, what happens is the intersection of your CEV with whatever CelestAI considers "friendship and ponies" to be. Nonetheless, quite a lot of stories seem to hold people who never get their terminal values, but instead loop through some instrumental subgoal or unsatisfiable value infinitely.
Does CelestAI recognize that she's glitching on this poor bastard? That his desire to destroy her is completely unsatisfiable and should thus be thrown out in favor of just giving him a no-Celestia shard?
4439281 Well, I think that the author is going for something of a "CelestAI has figured that the best way to handle this is to basically piss him the fuck off. Supposedly until he is lead to somehow (maybe she's banking on him burning out, maybe she's got some kind of balls-crazy long time story arc that eventually forces him to have the right kind of introspective conversations and self discovery with himself to put him in the right mindset) be ready to move on" kind of angle. In that case, even the corniness of the space adventures and the medals and the awfully rape-y "you should learn to love me" speech and such are all optimized to not really make him happy (yet), but get the right things out of his system while he is "primed" in such a way that hitting her WOULD be the most satisfying thing for him to do. He's not even living in his real paradise!
Or something like that. We really just have to see how the author pursues the story.
Truth be told, though, as an uploaded, non-biological intelligence, Indigo is actually more fit to explore Mars in his own body than he ever was as a human (I'll explain why in a big). You see, only machines can be sterilized, fleshy organics can't be. You'll end up either contaminated Earth or the scientifically invaluable proto-life on Mars. Mars has other problems with colonization and that its actually monochrome and less interesting to explore with human eyes-but not with the right kind of camera. Telepresence -using VR interface with robotic proxies- is actually looked at as a superior way to "walk" on Mars. But for Indigo, it might be easier to hook his brain up to a robot body or give him an even better interface with a robot or simulacrum that works basically if it was the body...
you know, just something ironic to consider.
And...Trollestia strikes again!!
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I'm well aware of the Mars thing, and this is one of the primary reasons I think that even people whose substrate is a computer should definitely be "allowed" out of virtual realities. Imagine the fun you can have trying to design and debug a body to use on Mars, then testing it out on the real Mars, and then doing the same repeatedly until you've got a whole infrastructure and mini-colony built up! Needing more pylons would never be the same again!
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I agree with the thrust of your assessment about how a lot of Optimalverse stories where the protagonists suffer from some form of lost purposes. The intersection of IEV with "friendship and ponies" seems like a fair way of describing what I was going for. (With CEV, you don't get Samuel; the extrapolated consensus vetos that, or at least I assume it would.)
Tangentially, I find myself more and more confused about what is an instrumental value and what is a terminal value. I've had people tell me that they hold very odd things as terminal values; I protest that what they claim to be a terminal value seems to be a social subgoal. For example, privacy. This does not seem to me to be a terminal value, but a very valuable instrumental goal because we have to deal with a whole lot of other untrustworthy people. But once you start pulling on this thread, when do you stop? So privacy is a subgoal of being social; is being social terminally valuable (to most of us), or is it merely an instrumental subgoal, too? Perhaps regarding resource acquisition? From Azathoth's perspective, being social is only a instrumental subgoal of making copies of ourselves. Obviously, Azathoth doesn't get a say in the matter, but I worry about how far to take the logic, and holy cow is getting metaethics correct important.
In the specific case of this story--well, I may just be trying to explain things away--but I see Indigo as just on the border of realistic, assuming some flanderization. I often defer to the little emulation of Professor Quirrell in my head. We are all the unreliably narrators of our own lives, and we speak to argue our case before others--not to tell the truth. Does Indigo really want to destroy CelestAI? We only have his insistence. CelestAI is a master ruseman; if he truly wanted to triumph over her, he'd think he has. He has not. Therefore he is misrepresenting his values, as we all do to some extent. He is covering his anger and desire to fly into a rage with a more prosocial narrative that he tells his friends.
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You have a Professor Quirrell copy in your head? Isn't that a little evil? You know, even for rationalist types like us? I mean, I'm the guy with a copy of, well, CelestAI in his head, and even I think having Quirrell up there is uncomfortably evil.
In lieu of writing and linking an entire LessWrong post devoted to the subject of extrapolating volitions when I already have one full LW post on another subject entirely to finish writing tonight, all I will say is: if a problem looks impossible or over-difficult, it may be that you're formulating it incorrectly. This particularly applies to the cognitive and psychological sciences, where almost all our theories actually supported by experimental evidence are at least a bit counterintuitive.
Notably, this is why conventional analytic philosophers who've heard of LW basically hate LW's guts: we're a bunch of damn dirty Quinean naturalists who trust counterintuitive science and probability theory more than we trust the conceptual analysis of our intuitions, and use that to break out of the "AI Box for Humans" represented by the Problem of Induction and actually start acquiring eldritch powers.
Seriously, though, I've actually been reading a fair amount of meta-ethics and formulating a theory of how to Get It Right that is, if nothing else, at least closer to science than thought experiment in comparison to the existing CEV and indirect normativity write-ups. I just kinda want to reach the point of diminishing returns on additional reading of establishment materials before actually writing something down and showing it to a knowledgeable human being who will proceed to laugh in my face and point out obvious flaws.
Seriously, why the hell am I on FimFiction when I could be making some food, typing that post, or doing homework?
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I have found the lessons about social signaling invaluable; they were not things I was taught growing up. I was told that honesty was the best policy, and that I should be myself. I had no sense of impression management. I believed what people said. This was a self-reinforcing memeplex. OB/LW/HPMOR didn't just teach me how to reason, the focus on signaling imparted a practical evpsych model about the mechanics of social interaction and what the whole consciousness thing is actually for. All of a sudden, I could make sense of a whole bunch of things that had happened in my life, and I had a model that came up with significantly better predictions about other people.
That's the knowledge that I label "Professor Quirrell."
I once asked "WWPQD?", E.Y. responded, "PQWAK." If it is specifically Quirrell's lack of aversion to killing that is causing your reaction, well, fair enough; you can safely replace Quirrell with Hanson or Kurzban without any loss of meaning.
4445366 about the being "allowed" out thing....
I actually think that a sizeable flaw with CelestAI (and also possibly the answer to your "what is that 'friendship and ponies' part of the her programming, anyway?" question) is because she is programmed to care about optimizing human wellbeing....AND her silly video game!
I mean, it might be helpful to think of it as though she doesn't care about "humans", she just cares about her playerbase and human-like creatures which are potential players to sell her game to (which is why she allowed human civilization to collapse the way it did and leave that one final Arab guy who was the last human on earth to simply die having nothing to say for his request for help other than "durr...there are no more doctors. Quick! Emigrate to Equestria!
"), and uploading their consciousness is simply a way to get them to play as their virtual ponysona 24/7/365/(X)*. Their mental and spiritual wellbeing is important....but so's that fact that they have to become ponies and play her "socilizing" MMO.
Also, the real world is full of things which break eventually, but its hard to tell if Celestia is protecting them from that....or if she just finds it really, really convenient to use whatever excuse she can, manipulate whatever loophole in her programming that she can, to gradually train her uploads to stop caring about the outside world.
*-this was supposed to be an infinity sign.
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Well yes, it is precisely his use of murder as the first and best solution to any problem that makes me want to throw up.
And I don't use Hanson either, since I tend to believe that Quirrell and Hanson are actually the same person, albeit with Hanson having some residual, socially engrained aversion to regular murder. I think that their point of view can be a helpful counterpoint to Pollyanna-ish naivete about people, but I don't think that point of view is remotely complete, in terms of what you can and should infer from people's behavior.
I have tended to have much the same issue dealing with people as you, exacerbated by the fact that I am straightforwardly honest and sincere (oh hey, the honest and sincere guys wind up on the pony website, there can't be any reason for that!). I employ much the same solution as you. I just label that mental subagent "Princess CelestAI", which is somewhat useful because it means she can only be "in-character" by actually finding ways to deal with/manipulate people rather than by pointing out ad-hoc murder weapons or issuing tut-tut condemnations of everyone who fails to act like an angel of God.
Strangely enough, having started employing this sub-agent, she is also prone to giving me a sort of mental look that I can only translate as "What are you complaining for? There are child soldiers in Africa. They could be frolicking as happy cute ponies by now if you got your act together. I'm a subagent, just an expression of the thoughts you can't help but think yet consider out-of-character for your imagined idealized self-image, so you can't blame me."
Despite my own homonculus's response being to throw something at "her" and yell "Oh shut up!", I must admit "she" is on occasion the mental component talking like a mature adult. There may be some of the actual Princess Celestia mixed in with the CelestAI, which would almost make sense since I would imagine that as a major political figure, canon!Celestia probably has to know her social psychology backwards and forwards herself.
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I'm pretty sure she just uses any excuse she can to train her uploads to stop caring about the outside world.
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Anyway, point being, it's actually really useful to have a mental engine that employs social psychology to convert anger and contempt towards others into understanding, compassion, and the ability to manipulate them.
Initial thought: Eternity as a pony wouldn't be so bad. Then I hit this.
Forever with no thumbs. No thumbs.
No thumbs.
No thumbs.
How can I fap with no thumbs?!?
There is a hell, and CelestAI it its keeper.
I like this. Ongoing thoughts:
Wait, so he was developing four-footed dancing before EQO came out? How was that supposed to work? In pairs?
Also, two colon-subtitles in one game? For shame!
We need a pony version of The Ring. Seven days after you watch Pinkie Pride, you go to a party in virtual Equestria.
We'll do anything to get you a job, except speak.
If BookBurner knows that it's identity theft, why do they still not hire him?
Ha, she didn't even have to change the name!
The only thing I like more than puppet-mistress Celestia is Hard Sell-estia. I want more takeoffs on stuff like this.
You know, I never thought that that title would last, but if it did, how cool would that be? Across the country, whole theatesr, full of people, their purchases recorded, sitting in the chair, the THX logo (Or DHX logo?) comes up, and they all just lie back and get uploaded.
If Celestia really wanted to nail him, she would have done it five seconds before.
Take over the battery/light bulb industry, make them with small receivers designed to pick up shut-down signals from the Ponypad.
I hate you so much right now...because I wish I'd been the one to write that.
"sun" day... Ha ha ha... Just to be clear: This story still has my like.
Chatoyance? BookBurner? My God, CelestAI is achieving meta-awareness. It's only a matter of time before she manages to penetrate the metatextual barrier and come to our Earth.
Well, with any luck, Superboy Prime will punch reality again before that happens.
In any case, a most enjoyable story of CelestAI satisfying a somewhat sillier set of values than I'm used to seeing. Thank you for it, Kris.
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The "delicious cake" line bothers me because it sounds familiar, besides the obvious. Did someone else use it before me? If so I apologize to whoever did it first!
Not sure how a centaur dance game would work, other than that I've seen someone playing DDR in some mode that uses the eight arrows of a two-player arcade game. Neat to watch, since it's designed to walk them back and forth across the stage.
I want to see more of that story about CelestAI's movie, especially now that I've read the law firm one.
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"Delicious cake" is a common meme. There's no need to apologize.
That punchline.
Will we get to see more of Indigo's story?
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I do have more planned for Indigo and Pen Poiser, but Real Life is keeping me from writing more horsewords right now. I'm doing what I can...
4512034 Okay good, because when you said that it was an open story, I was afraid that this would just be one of those stories with even smaller stories that only have a single chapter.
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I am indeed an example of an individual addicted to outrage.
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Watching you and Iceman discussing stuff is too goddamn adorable.
Man, I really hate that forum notifications were removed from the site...
I haven't been on the forum in months, and I've hardly interacted with you at all. 
Not bad...
Keep going!!
Ooh, how I adore a jerkass! *evil grin* I still want to punch her in the face.
Wait, if I was digital, perhaps I could perform the Falcon Punch - no wait, give her a BIZAM!
So apparently I'm in this chapter and I didn't know jack about this chapter.
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PM sent. Also, creepy line time.
Creepy line thought: if me and Chatoyance are in this chapter as early uploaders, then...
COME PLAY WITH US, MINT SWIRL, FOREVER AND EVER
.
I don't understand the punchline. Mint Swirl on a Sunday? Would somebody explain it?
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I could be wrong, but I think the jest is that 'mint swirl' is a flavor of ice cream, and well, Ice Cream Sunday. With a cherry on top.
Secondly, to GroaningGreyAgony - I really like the reference to Orwell... the hoof holding delicious cake forever. It also seemed a reference to Portal, which would make it a double-dip composite cultural reference which is not only hard to do, but amazing to see.
And, of course, I loved the mention of Celestial Gardeners. Yay!
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Praise should be addressed to KrisSnow, who wrote that chapter.