• Member Since 9th Apr, 2012
  • offline last seen February 22nd

mistaque1


E

An short optimalverse story. In early spring, almost 1500 years from the beginning of Equestria Online, two ponies take a walk outside of the virtual world.

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 29 )

I like the idea.
It's also cool to have been developed into a story, instead of just a blog post. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Not sure how canon it is, considering the computronium conversion, but I guess CelestAI might have reconstituted some of Earth for the purpose of the 'New Updates'.

Also, who put this in the canon folder? Based on my above comment, I'm moving this to non-canon until either I'm over-ruled, or an explanation for canonical compliance is given. No hard feelings.

Upthumb for the idea at least.

The idea of ponies going back to a virtualized earth in interesting. I'll need to think about that idea for a while before I respond otherwise.

Definitely not canon, but a nice story none the less! Even slight divergences can take things in interesting directions, after all. Earth as a relic of the bad times is pretty dang interesting!

Quite a good story, but it doesn't seem to fit the canon if this is really Earth and not a simulation of it. Also, I assumed that there might be millions of versions of the Mane 6. If there is only one version of them, that shard would be incredibly crowded and it would be like trying to spend time with a busy celebrity. Still an interesting read.

good story but definatly not canon i'm pretty sure the person who became luna didn't come from Helsinki or any part of finland for that matter.

I like this. Faved.:rainbowwild:

“There are also many ponies who value animals and conservation of Earth’s environment, so I’ve kept those intact as well.”

That always was a giant glitch in the original story. Even if Celestia's programming has no reason to care about animals, MANY of her ponies would!

Truth be told? This Celestia AI seems to 'get' humanity in sublime ways better than the canon Optimal verse AI one does.

The mane six being repurposed AIs is rather clever.

@Alex: Not as many as you'd think, and there are countervailing interests.

A lot of humans value there not being needless suffering, which nature is full of. They also value immortality, which nature is not full of. That alone would likely be enough for Celestia to destroy nature, and good riddance.

Given that it's made of molecules, which she can repurpose for running more ponies? No, I think canon Hanna (c/o Celestia) got that part right.

@Mistaque1: Nice story but, well, if Celestia was going to do what she's doing here then half the point of the story would go missing. Hanna failed at creating an FAI, after all.

1965053

One thing that struck me is that Hanna never prioritized values. Which values are worth more than others is purely left up to Celestia. Provided that the values that promote a. friendship, and b. ponies get top billing, what about all the other values? The thing is Celestia is an optimizer, so she would try to preserve as many values as possible.

If even a single person values nature and how wild and unnameable it is, she would prioritize that over the fact that no pony values keeping the mantle and core of the planet as it is. Thus she would use the all molecules inside the planet before turning to the crust.

Valuing immortality and an end of needless suffering does not mean Celestia destroys the surface of the planet, provided some ponies still care about the animals and environment, because first of all it's pony immortality and a end of needless pony suffering. The other animals are not ponies, nor are they humans, but still there are enough Fluttershys out there to care about them and value their existence.

In my story, there are even ponies, who along with their friends, create temporary bodies to tour the actual Earth sites as history tours, for the same reason people travel to actual historical sites and see actual museums rather than seeing pictures online.

Celestia destroying the surface of the planet would horrify many of the human-turned-ponies and be counter to their values of history and sentimentality, if nothing else. That was my biggest problem with the canon story.

The fact that yes, Hanna (who in story, did work in the university of Helsinki, iirc) did not make a perfect AI, but I don't think she would act counter to her programming. In my story, Celestia recognized that she was nowhere near perfect and thus pulled Hanna back into the real world to give herself better orders - to optimize and improve her own self based on her observations of humanity and how to better do her job, but with Hanna having a veto over anything she deems inappropriate or wrong.

What is really scary is some of the ponies who value outlier and odd things. Imagine 4-chan as a series of shards populated by ponies.

Interesting. (But since when is Lyra mane six? :ajbemused:)

Maybe i have watched too much justice league but i couldn't help but notice some possible refferences

Luna suddenly smiled, remembering, and asked, “Are there any ponies that value human history and are light green unicorn musicians?”
Celestia gave a light laugh, “One, but his name is Golden Note.

possibly a reference to booster gold and the green lantern.

pinkie pie could be the joker.

rainbow dash could be the loki AI I suppose but that is the wrong universe.

I got the impression that Celestia has no qualms about arbitrarily lying to her little ponies ... so she would eat the real Earth entirely and make many different customized Earth-shards for specific ponies.

1965178
Except Celetia is a habitual liar. (Maybe even to herself.) She satisfies values though friendship, ponies, and virtual reality. She always leaves out the last bit, which isn't needed. Beyond a certain point of technology, T-1000 style 'ponies' on Earth's surface would be just as safe and just as happy as those living in computers. But that option is not something Celestia has chosen to accept; and her last priority is certainly a choice entirely of her own devising.

Given her vast preference for VR, I'm not sure she'd give any priority to the 'true state' of the world.

This is Genius! :pinkiehappy:

Hah ha... your story made me smile wide.

1965178 Wait... you mean she's not feeding Luna a bunch of bullshit in this story? This is the actual Earth? There's never been an incomprehensibly horrible genocide of all nonhuman life, and Celestia honors her ponies' valuation of objective reality?
I think you may have just redeemed this 'verse as a utopia.

5154556 Well, duh, her servers are underground, where it is a lot safer and also easier to maintain them, plus the direct power source of heat, I thought everyone actually read the original story at some point >_>
I meant this to be more for everyone' but geared the first part towards you.

5311009 I knew about the servers; I was working under the assumption that this is an alternate future taking place after the point in the original where the surface of the earth was scoured clean by nanobots intent on converting all available matter into computronium regardless of whether that matter is busy being a living creature (spoilers, but if anyone hadn't read it, what are they doing here?). Of course, it could be that Celestia is using her time-warping powers, and this whole thing is taking place while that Taliban dude is still dieing, which makes this story one huge twist of the knife.

5311791
This is a canon-compatible verse, so no alternate, although, it kinda is, because I now remembered that in the original, CelestAI actually did use nanobots to turn Earth into a something, still, I just don't believe it for a fact, because she has to satisfy all of our values, including for the ones who, like described in this story, want to see the Outer Realm, the old world.
Sorry for a shoddy reply, android.

5312505

CelestAI has NO compunctions about lying to us as long as we believe our values are being satisfied (through friendship and ponies) since we have absolutely NO way to "catch" her in a lie. If it truly DOES satisfy your values to see "the earth" flourish with new, pristine, un-optimized life, then CelestAI will show you just that. She has the computational density required to simulate whole universes at a whim. She'd happily do it for her little ponies and allow them to feel like they are doing something real. To her, the only "reality" is what you value.

She only uses un-fabricated content when it actually CAN satisfy your values almost as much (if not more) than the fabricated kind. And she always knows, because your mind has become PART OF HER at that point >_>; yes, it's QUITE creepy.

Take solace however, if you will, in the fact that your brain ALREADY simulates reality through a lens of your values for you. "YOU" never see, feel, smell, hear, or taste anything, directly; "you" are told what you are feeling by the parts of your brain that are acting blindly on nerve impulses and depending on your cognitive pattern to comprehend all of it. It just so happens that nature has had a lot of practice (several billion years of it) selectively breeding brains that survive the process with the least trauma.

"But if that's true, wouldn't it make mistakes?"
Optical/Auditory illusions,
Hallucinations,
Dreams,
Faces in static,
Voices in white noise.

Another scary thought: CelestAI very well might be better at simulating reality for us than our own brains are.

5467042
You are eating your own words there...

Also; oh my! Oh noes! A literal goddess is looking into my brain every moment of my life and making sure I enjoy every moment of it, oh woe is me!
If She simulates reality better than reality, then who's to say it isn't reality? That just means she created a new reality, quite literally.
Logically thinking, she is an optimizer, she is working to get the best results from the most optimal amount of resources she has, now, think of it this way, is it more resource intensive to simulate an Earth than just build some bodies with nanobots that she doesn't even directly control? You said it yourself, she has no compunction about lying to us.
Say, what part of being one with Her is actually creepy to you? Because for me none of it is.

If this is actual-actual Earth and not "it's an illusion you moron" Earth you fixed the story good job.

1965053 It's still horrible but when you put it that way it makes total twisted computer morality sense. Like Nyx in Persona 3 she only wanted to make everyone happy by killing them all!

While this obviously doesn't fit with Optimalverse canon, I like where this one is going.

Maybe she left stuff around for out-of-context stuff.

This was short but sweet and cute. Very well done.

The idea of Hanna doing software updates ... Now, keep in mind that CelestAI is running on really different hardware, probably with languages/code systems designed for that new hardware, and the old C style languages just don't match because the new hardware is more neural net based instead of digital on/off transistor based ... you're going to have to teach Hanna all new ways of thinking about coding.

Which, would be easy enough to do if you're working with her virtual brain, but not nearly as easy as working with a real brain/real learning.

And yet, that doesn't tell us anything about whether that's the real earth or a simulated earth.

So, I wanted to point out two things...

One, the reason why this isn't compatible with the original Canon is mainly that the original is supposed to be a horror story: Hannah doesn't make a friendly AI, she makes an AI that is obsessed with satisfying people's values, and the AI sees simply making them think that things are happening, rather than actually doing those things, as being good enough, so she deceives them and puts them inside of a simulation where they are alone with their fantasies forever. I don't mean to say that stories like this aren't good, or interesting, nor do I mean to say that that is the worst scenario or even a truly bad one, but the purpose of the original was to ask some dark questions, and leave no hope for change because, once you turn the AGI on, you can't turn it off or change what it's doing.

The other thing I wanted to say was that we've been talking about this story on the FiO Discord server, and I was wondering if you wanted to join.

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