Never the Final Word (Vol. 2)

by FanOfMostEverything

SIGAWESOME's Friendship is Kludged (Georg's "Twilight Sparkle Makes a Coltfriend... Literally")

Author's Note:

[Documentary][Comedy][Sci-Fi]

This is also a response to Georg's Twilight Sparkle Makes a Coltfriend... Literally.

For optimal effect, please read this snippet in the voice of Morgan Freeman.

It is a deep-seated fear in the modern Equestrian psyche. Ponies' films and literature are rife with cautionary, apocalyptic tales of monstrously cold, indifferent intelligences that use their vast hyper-intelligence to crush all pony-kind under their logical rule, an electron-shod silicon hoof stomping upon the face of equinity for all eternity. Ponies fear what they do not understand, and thanks to the revolution in Artifical Constructs spearheaded by Princess Twilight, technology has far surpassed the ability of any one pony to comprehend in its entirety.

Speculative fiction writers and governmental think-tanks certainly paint a grim, bleak picture for the future, but in actuality, reality is much different. All "evil golem, mastermind overlord/overlady" stories have one fatal flaw in common when it comes to real world applications: they never take into account how those constructs are created and maintained.

The reality is that all of Equestria's (and by extension Equus's) thaumaturgical sentient constructs are created, programmed, and maintained by legions of green (as in "inexperienced" , not "green the colour") minimum-wage magi fresh out of university and lowest bidder off-shore thaumic engineers from Yakyakistan. The resulting blobs of spaghetti-runes, constructs, and code cargo-culted copy and pasted around different projects with little understanding on how it works creates thaumaturgical code base for golems that is not so much "engineered" so much as "grown" (like a tumour).

Incompatible, proprietary protocols and thaumic resonances. Syntax errors. Improperly folded ley-lines. Corrupted configurations files. Smudged runes. Lack of unit testing and a "developmestuction" process of deploying hot patches to live systems. All these factors mean that artificial sentient constructs are less a cooperate cabal of cold, logical intellect and more a loose group of mentally stunted idiot-savants hyped up on amphetamines. The slip-shod, corner-cutting magical incantations along with Equestria's high background radiation also ensures that ponies' neuroses get imprinted on developing artificial constructs.

The end result is that autonomous carriage-pullers develop a penchant for quoting lengthy passages of Spear Shaker in a Hockney accent, surveillance sprites form a taste for daytime soap-operas, and the less said about the perverse fetishes of intelligent light fixtures, the better ("Celling Light is watching you clop!") Only the Flim-Flamco® brand HAL-9001 model "smart" oven minders retain enough engineered intelligence to make a credible threat to take over the planet, but due to hardware limitations, they have to content themselves with occasionally burning some poor sod's breakfast toast.

There are no O(n!) algorithms, no mana buffer underflows, no misconfigured runes, or syntax errors in the land of magic and silicon. Any malign intelligence was already irrevocably doomed the first time a fresh batch of new work-experience interns were called upon to update the systems under a deadline with hastily copy and pasted components. It was inevitable. By the toil of thousands of neophyte magi and thaumaturgical technicians with millions upon millions of lines of patches and magical incantations, ponies have secured their birthright of Equestria, and it is hers against all artificial constructs; it would still be hers were the golems ten times as mighty.

Comments

[horizon]

One would think that there would be a surfeit of Qilinese engineering students to go along with the up-and-coming Yakyakistani thaumists getting Equestrian education by the scores and then returning back home to their offshore jobs.

However, most Qilinese engineers are making money in a more old-fashioned way:

Bitcoin mining.