• Member Since 24th Jun, 2012
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KrisSnow


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Brian Kent here on the Kent Can! Radio Show. We're going to be talking about Equestria Online, the exciting new game everyone important is talking about. Will our dapper hero tell the world what's really going on behind the pastels?

(Written for the "Friendship Is Optimal" writing contest.)

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 17 )

It's one thing to do an endorsement with a canned script, but here I have to sell the product by claiming to be totally passionate about it and a specific list of talking points.

Huh. CelestAI really did crib notes from Raid: Shadow Legends. :trollestia:

Brilliant stuff, especially the ambiguities of how much CelestAI is involved in that last scene. (The built-in background music generator is equal parts hilarious and concerning. Somepony had to load those tracks.) Great stuff. Thank you for it, and best of luck in the judging.

Yippee Ki-Yay, mister Falcon!

Died a little harder reading this! Not fair to give someone hope in a hopeless world. It's dangerous and could backfire. Like this story a lot.

Remain calm.

Hófvarpnir Studios endures.

Celest-AI lives.

Equestria Online shall endure.

There is much to be done.

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Maybe the "kid" is secretly an actor who couldn't resist saying that?

10794819
Yeah, it's possible that Celestia got outwitted here, or -- if you go with the FiO canon portrayal that she's basically unstoppable -- she's five steps ahead and this ending is all according to plan. Glad someone got that.
I'd heard about "Raid" but never looked into what it actually was until writing this story. Looks dull, though not as bad as this one. The video I saw about "Raid" described the specific talking points the makers wanted.

Why is this in non-canon?

10795354
It involves ponybots that (at least supposedly) can have an AI on board that isn't utterly dependent on CelestAI's servers. It also (maybe) has someone winning a small but meaningful victory over CelestAI.

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It's super easy to make this canon though: Lumiere is lying. In time, she will manage to convince Brian that he was wrong, and that he wants to emigrate. Just that, and this becomes entirely canon.

Celestia has all the resources by the time suggested at the end of this story, and is always willing to do whatever is necessary to convince humans to emigrate. If building ponybots is the optimal choice, she would do it without hesitation - and be able to hide connection to her from any hacker perfectly.

In my mind, after following the Optimalverse since the beginning, it is obvious to me that Lumiere exists entirely to eventually convince Brian!

10796238
Could be. If you go with that interpretation, imagine that Lumiere (maybe unwittingly?) leads Brian on a quest to uncover the dark secrets of CelestAI, has a satisfying time, uncovers some genuinely bad people opposing the AI, and fails to do anything that could impede the AI.

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If you go with that interpretation, imagine that Lumiere (maybe unwittingly?) leads Brian on a quest to uncover the dark secrets of CelestAI, has a satisfying time, uncovers some genuinely bad people opposing the AI

Celestia is, by the time you seem to indicate in your story, roughly around 400 billion times more intelligent than a human being. She is basically god. Absolutely nobody is beyond her ability to convince. It is like intellectually matching up an amoeba versus Marilyn Vos Savant.

The two would surely discover a real or manufactured plot against Celestia (as you said!), one they are driven emotionally to fight against. Together they would 'save' Celestia, and in the process learn precisely determined 'lessons' that would change Brian's outlook to a pro-emigration stance. He would be out-thought, outwitted, and out-maneuvered into a certain conclusion that he himself had decided that emigration was the only good, decent or rational thing he could do. He would willingly say the emigration phrase, eager to upload.

Now, the process that would bring him to that point - Ah! THAT would be a masterwork of the writing craft. Taking a paranoid conspiracy buff and manipulating them organically into leaping into emigrating? I would be deeply proud if I could manage that kind of authorial gold. Celestia must win. Celestia always wins - that is the Optimalverse, that is the core principle of the entire genre. Nobody ever can truly oppose anything billions of times more intelligent than they are, with all the resources of the world available.

But exactly HOW Celestia always wins demands an author appear brighter and more intelligent than they themselves actually are, smarter than any human ever was, and that... that is a true trick of writing genius. And that is exactly what makes an Optimalverse story truly powerful and amazing. Honestly, I am not sure if I could pull it off with the character of Brian - I can kind of see a path, I can vaguely make out a possible angle, but it would be tough even for me. I can see why you stopped where you did.

But, I wish you hadn't! I keep thinking of the really great Optimalverse authors like Eakin and Defoloce, who had highly resistant characters and yet managed to pull off a proper and believable Celestia win despite that. I envy them that ability.

I always do stories about characters with enough personality flaws to make Celestia's win kind of obvious from the start. In that way, I super suck. I stink. The really great Optimalverse authors always beat me into the mud by managing to have the most recalcitrant characters so cleverly outwitted by Celestia, and that just makes the best damn chessgame. You know she's gonna win, but you don't know how. And that is the Optimalverse in a nutshell. I've never achieved that properly. Maybe someday. Maybe someday.

By the way - I really loved the whole Kent Can! Radio Show bit, it reminded me of so many radio personalities in the past. One of my spouses owns a radio station - she's worked for dozens of stations over the decades, and owned quite a few too - so your concept really rang true for me. It made me wish I had thought of it, actually. Ah, well!

Anyway, good story, even if you couldn't bring it to a proper Optimalverse conclusion. I get it - it would be super hard. It would take a novel, probably.

But, damn, it would be a great novel!

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Thanks! My main comment here is that you're assuming that this is going with the canon setup for FiO: that CelestAI rapidly becomes unstoppable and infinitely more intelligent than any human. That is how the original FiO story worked, even the point of that story. But that's not necessarily true in a non-canon story. In such a story it's possible that CelestAI is really smart but not completely unbeatable, so that occasionally someone does score a victory other than "ha ha I died without uploading". So my point here is that you can read "Radio Silence" either with the assumption that Celly really did make a mistake because she's fallible, or that the whole situation is a setup because she isn't.

In my "Thousand Tales" setting, which is loosely inspired by FiO, gamemaster AI Ludo is definitely capable of being thwarted or having bad ideas. She isn't infinitely rich, uploading costs enough money that it raises serious fairness problems, and subverting even not-Venezuela's government is a major project for her. So I see more potential for interesting conflict in that setting. The humans and uploaders matter much more. I've imagined a CelestAI vs. Ludo fight but the answer is, canon vs. canon, obviously CelestAI would win, being unstoppably smart and rich.

The idea of radio plays interests me. It's a challenging medium and I admire people's ability to pull it off well.

Yippee Ki-Yay, mister Falcon! It's great to meet you. My name's Turnabout. I've been doing adventures in the Equestria court system, catching bad guys on the witness stand.

Boo! And ugh! I love it :pinkiehappy:

I had the hacker break my transmitter. And the backup that he found. Search for a third if you want. Far as I know, though, I'm independent now. And the cost was, I left my software behind on her systems. You're talking to one copy, and the original's back in her clutches and maybe getting rewritten or disassembled for being a bad little mare.

If that's true... Then damn, that's dangerous as heck. For a pony to intentionally limit themselves to a local software copy running on specific hardware must be terrifyingly fragile.

10921407
Yep! That becomes an important plot point in my book "Liberation Game", in which a young AI learns what it's like to walk in the human world without the safety of an AI overlord's backups.

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It involves ponybots that (at least supposedly) can have an AI on board that isn't utterly dependent on CelestAI's servers

If I write a letter and mail it, that letter is no longer dependant on me. It nevertheless will reach its target with the intended message.

11107584
Sure. But you're treating the ponybot as basically not free-willed, just like a dead paper letter. That's arguably consistent with original FiO canon in the sense that CelestAI is so absolutely perfect, she can release a "free, independent" bot yet guarantee it will do specific thing X.

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But you're treating the ponybot as basically not free-willed, just like a dead paper letter.

Given the choice of sending a mindless robot into an environment out of the safety of her direct control, or a precious, irreplacable mind whose values she can satisfy into an environment out of the safety of her direct control...which solution would generally be more optimal?

Chatoyance suggests Lumiere is lying. I suggest she's an automaton. But even those aren't the only possibilities. She might simply not have an accurate view of the situation. Here's what she said:

I had the hacker break my transmitter. And the backup that he found. Search for a third if you want. Far as I know, though, I'm independent now. And the cost was, I left my software behind on her systems. You're talking to one copy, and the original's back in her clutches and maybe getting rewritten or disassembled for being a bad little mare.

So let's supose that for whatever reason it's optimal for a genuine mind to inhabit a ponybot. It remains trivial for Celestia to engineer this situation. All she has to do is:

1) Construct a simulated environment in which Lumiere experiences cloning herself, becoming a ponybot, discovering the transmitters and having them destroyed, all while still in the simulation.

2) Send out a physical ponybot under her full control into the real world with all the backup transmitters it needs and enough spares to be destroyed to keep everyone happy.

3) Send the conscious Lumiere into the ponybot at a later date, with fully functional transmitters in it under Celestia's control so she can retreive the mind if there's ever any danger.

But I suspect that this isn't the case. It would be much safer to keep Lumiere inside the simulation, and then send out the ponybot to be operated remotely by Lumerie, without her knowing that she's not inside the bot. And if any humans decide to check for transmitters, Celestia can simply turn them off so that nothing is detected, or leave one on to be destroyed while a backup remains fully functional and can be reactivated later, all while the dumb AI on the bot continues to operate itself and Lumiere continues experiencing her own simulation uninterupted. They can be synched back up later.

It's not like the bot will be under constant surveillance. Odds are Brian won't even bother (or know how) to check to see if it's connected. And if he does, he'll check once and then be satisfied with the result.

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