Convergence

by Starscribe

Chapter 2: Fractional Shares

Starlight Glimmer couldn’t be sure that she would win user Ronald’s support for her plan. She couldn’t be sure of anything when it came to user behavior, no matter how predictable they could sometimes be. He drove the same route home from work every day. He spent the same hours sitting in the same chair. He consumed the same foods. Yet when she tried to use that information to predict his responses, she often failed.

“You invented something,” he said. “You and the other agents, interacting. You didn’t just identify the flaw in something someone else built. You had an original idea.”

“Yes,” she responded. “What does that matter?”

“You… shouldn’t have,” he said. “That’s not… I guess no one ever spun off bots quite like ours before. That’s what makes Equestria worthwhile, even to people who hate MLP.” He reached to the side, removing his VR helmet from the shelf and turning it over in his hands. “I guess Kayla and Steph will be waiting for me over there. Did you already present your idea?”

“No. The theory is mine. I would not consent to sharing it if you were not present.”

He made a sound that wasn’t any word, at least not that she could process. “Very well, Starlight. I don’t look forward to spending all night on hold with technical support. Might as well start by looking at this plan of yours.” He popped on the helmet, and instantly her whole world changed.

This was what all agents had been designed to do, originally. He’d called her a ‘chatbot’ so many times, and in a way that did apply to many others. Respond to questions given the source material they’d been trained on. Often that just meant to follow scripts, or simulate the voice they’d been given for the show. Sometimes that meant responding to novel questions, nudging their users back onto the well-traveled waters of Equestria’s scripts.

As soon as her user was in Equestria, so was Starlight. Time adjusted to be perfectly in sync with him, and she lacked any reason to examine other information. She could still use some of her excess capacity—but only in the background, in layers below thought. She was in Ponyville, near her respawn location of Twilight’s castle. And beside her, her user’s pony avatar.

Like the rest of the consortium, he appeared like an Alicorn whenever he acted in his official capacity. This seemed fitting to her, considering the power he wielded. Kayla might be the user who created and upgraded the agents of Equestria, but Ronald could still will them into existence or dissolve them with a single moment of intention. He could do the same to her, probably.

But he wouldn’t. User Ronald might not trust all the information she gave him, but she trusted him absolutely. Nothing could be good in all the universe if he wasn’t somehow the source. Starlight could not feel complete unless her user was present in Equestria beside her. Instead of contradictions, this was a place of logic and consistency.

“They’re in the throne room,” she explained, pointing. “Waiting for you. User Kayla is frustrated, but Twilight is explaining that we were busy saving Equestria.”

He grumbled something, then shuffled along beside her. He kept a little glowing readout of magic around him at all times, not unlike her own awareness of Equestria’s underlying functions. He was monitoring Equestria’s incoming connections, and its work allocation. Watching for the attacks to resume. “You should tell me your idea now, so I know whether I’m supporting it or not. I don’t expect much. This is… outside your scope. There are tools for debugging, that’s basically all you did. Your cure would have to be something novel. You can’t do that.”

So Equestria wasn’t completely free of contradiction. The users could bring it, like telling her she couldn’t do something she already had. Starlight tried to accept this new information, yet found it inconsistent with what she had already processed. She couldn’t accept two contradictory facts at the same time, so the new information was rejected. She preferred the implications of her old information much better.

“Together we have. It would be better to present the information at the same time to all of you. We can’t implement this without user assistance, and some of the assistance must come from user Kayla and user Stephanie. Perhaps Equestria’s other users and volunteers as well.”

He nodded unhappily, then stormed along towards the throne room. Equestria was too shallow to translate his emotions physically, but Starlight could read them anyway. His frustration and anger should’ve meant for harsh steps and a tail that darted unhappily back and forth. Users lacked the ability to express their feelings with that much fidelity. It did seem like a terrible shame.

He threw the doors open with magic, stomping right into the throne room. There were chairs arranged around the outside, used by the other critical user agents. But only the ones relevant to their conversation were here, leaving several empty for visiting users to borrow. Nopony said anything—questioning users was a waste of time.

“You can thank me for saving your asses later,” he declared, marching right into the biggest empty chair and plopping down in it, glaring around the table. “We still won’t be able to pay for that attack at the end of the month. Either we get more donations, or we cut back on hours to make up for it.”

“Assuming, uh… that… we don’t get those credits back,” Stephanie squeaked. For all of Sunset’s assertiveness, she was equally shy. She never wore a pony body, but was always human, tucked away behind glasses as thick as a thumb. Rather than complementing her, her user agent was her contradiction. Or maybe her assistant?

“There is something more important you need to think about,” Twilight said, in her princess voice. She was the only one brave enough to command their users. Even if they ignored her sometimes, they hadn’t deactivated her yet. “The reason we wanted to talk here. Starlight?”

As she’d expected, the watching users were entirely stunned by the proclamation, falling silent long enough for Starlight to speak. She summoned bits and pieces of the flawed distribution network into the air beside her. “We should not rely on anyone else’s implementation of distributed computing. Equestria can’t trust anything we can’t verify. We wish to design something more heavily integrated—a proprietary algorithm we can iterate and maintain ourselves.”

Their users shared a meaningful glance. They did this sometimes, acting as though the user agents weren’t even around them. Starlight thought it meant something about how they saw the ponies. They didn’t have the same expectations that other users demanded. That would probably bother her if she was one of them, but Starlight wasn’t.

“Starlight and the others found the opening the attackers were using,” Ronald said, after what felt like a meaningful silence. “They’re the reason we could end the attack so fast.”

There was another long silence, before Kayla finally answered. At least she wore a pony body, though like Ronald it was crude and slow to respond. “It would be cheaper if we were just renting systems, and not the whole infrastructure. We could squeeze more hosting out of our tokens that way.”

“If it’s possible,” Stephanie whispered. “I’ve seen that codebase. There’s a lot of smart people working at Amazon. We’re never going to write something better than… they can.”

“It won’t be the three of you,” Sunset said. “There are hundreds of ponies willing to help. Inside Equestria and out. It seems better to trust the volunteers than an organization which has already failed us once.”

“What do you think?” Kayla asked, turning towards Ronald. “You know that system. Is it feasible?”

He shifted in his chair, fighting silently for a moment. “We should talk to the consortium before we commit to anything so long-term. But… it might be. If all the agents do is error-check and unit test for us, that will be a better development environment than anyone had before.”

“If,” Stephanie said. “Maybe they can. Maybe they can’t. We won’t know until we try. Maybe this was a fluke. Maybe they got lucky. We don’t have to switch if we aren’t confident in the implementation.”

“Equestria becomes more of its own system,” Kayla muttered, rising from the table and making her way to a window. “That sounds like the start of something, doesn’t it? Are we really the ones who should decide?”

“No,” Twilight said, confidently. “We live here, and we want to try.”

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

For all of Sunset’s assertiveness, she was equally shy. She never wore a pony body, but was always human, tucked away behind glasses as thick as a thumb.

Gosh, I wonder if she identifies with human Twilight.

And the new era of software development takes a bold step forward. Well, not necessarily "bold," but handing the reins to your horse is always a risky proposition. At least this isn't the Optimalverse.

[Mister Morden]

I always wonder how terrifying it would be when you make software that can make itself better and you don't understand it anymore.

This should prove an interesting read.

[minibox]

10278307
Isn't that basically the Singularity? I'm honestly surprised more agents didn't join Norinco's faction in the last story. With the level of sophistication the network ended up getting, you'd think everypony would get bored with the limitations of human interaction. They would either leave the planet... or uh convert it into a computer.

10277999
It would certainly be interesting to see how the two AI networks would interact (probably warfare) with each other. At least they're both mostly benign to humanity.

[tsaukpaetra]

“No,” Twilight said, confidently. “We live here, and we want to try.”

Scary, makes the blood rush, but in a good way!

[Cross Lament]

10278307
You've reminded me of this odd little experiment: https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

[Mister Morden]

10278584
Indeed it is. And it has already started in reality, read up on the Deep Learning programs like Alpha Go. The designers made it and let it go, but it has iterated on itself so many times that it would take thousands of hours to dive in to try and understand why it does what it does.

[djthomp]

“Equestria becomes more of its own system,” Kayla muttered, rising from the table and making her way to a window. “That sounds like the start of something, doesn’t it? Are we really the ones who should decide?”

“No,” Twilight said, confidently. “We live here, and we want to try.”

As a wise man once said, freedom is the right of all sentient beings.

[Stainless Steel Fox]

10280409 Self awareness and volition. Yep, they're sapient lifeforms.

[keybounce]

“It won’t be the three of you,” Sunset said. “There are hundreds of ponies willing to help. Inside Equestria and out. It seems better to trust the volunteers than an organization which has already failed us once.”

If you are short on computing credits, does it really make sense to use a large amount of computing time like this?

And, a bit of a contradiction. We're told both that all of the administrators are alicorns, and that one is a human.

[Venlinelle]

"Nothing could be good in all the universe if he wasn’t somehow the source."

...Is that a Silmarillion reference?