There's no way Celestia's eruption there wasn't totally fake and preplanned, but Luna's sudden appearance right afterward as a faux "hack attack" might be just enough to get Greg to bite the bullet.
Ooh, I was... definitely partially right, but the details were a lot of fun.
Celestia's crash sounded to me like one of two things, either an act... or delirium (or a mixture of both, I'm relatively sure that Luna is real). Dammit, cliffhangers...
With Celestia you always, always, always have to take into account her various and sundry techniques of manipulation. However, I do strongly believe that as powerful as she is, she's not infallible. Something tells me she really was going for her coup de grace here, and her surprise and dismay at Greg thwarting it was not entirely an act. Props to her chosen method of attack, nonetheless; it was legitimately clever, using Greg's own good nature against him.
Nonetheless, Celestia did raise a couple of good points. Chief among them being that as much as she is a machine, Greg is too - just one built with carbon and trace elements rather than silicon. I can't really refute that, and I have to admit that when Celestia insists that her complexity has led to her being just as alive and real as anyone else... well, she's probably lying, but... maybe not. And it's a little disconcerting that you don't know. Still, she does kinda blow that approach by admitting she wouldn't mourn Greg for a second if he died.
Which plays back into why I think Greg really did shatter her expectations and wreak holy hell with her head for a little bit. Celestia's arguments during this entire chapter were... scattershot. It's the only word I can think of. She kept switching around constantly, trying wildly different tactics almost from moment to moment. It felt confused, like she didn't quite know what to do. It certainly didn't feel the least bit persuasive, and more likely to drive someone away than draw them in. Now with Celestia, as usual, you have to consider the possibility that she's just faking vulnerability... but I really don't think so this time. She's resorting to anger and threats and vague promises not because she expects them to work, but because she hasn't tried them yet and the approaches she thought for sure would work, have suddenly bombed.
I suspect she got her act together by her reappearance and is now back on track with a new strategy by introducing a neutral third party in the form of Luna. An honest broker now that he's so thoroughly disillusioned with Celestia herself. Still, she had to lead with anger and loss of control, because that's how she left him; go in poker-faced and she'd be giving away that she had a new play in mind. Of course, it's also possible that this really is the legendary Hanna come for a chat... but I doubt it.
“Congratulations, Gregory,” she spat at me, “you’ve ‘won.’ You’ve won the great victory of staying here, in this unsatisfying, suboptimal nightmare. Do you even know why you’re so attached to this place?”
This right here. If ever I bought any of Celest-AI's responses as genuine and emotion-driven, it was this line right here.
EDIT: Nice touch on the feral dogs. It's something that's crossed my mind recently myself; feral packs are already problematic even in some real-world cities today, so I can only imagine the issues that'd crop up in post-Equestria Earth. In one of the stories I've been toying with writing, my heavily-wounded protagonist actually finally agrees to upload not after some sort of vicious gun battle, but after accidentally surprising (and subsequently being mauled by) a bear. Amoral / insane humans aren't the only things that'll happily kill ya.
I get the feeling that since Greg sees Celest.A.I as the enemy, she's now presenting him with a "resistance" figure he can follow the orders of to fight the big bad AI with. Celest.A.I will maximize values and do anything to get humans to upload, even if it means posing as a villain and setting up a pseudo resistance against her. Who wants to bet Luna will offer some jobs to sabotage Celest.A.I before asking him to bring the fight to EQ-Online? :P
I could be off, but either way I'm liking the possibilities of this new development!
Chief among them being that as much as she is a machine, Greg is too - just one built with carbon and trace elements rather than silicon.
I think what Greg's getting at here, though not articulating it as well as Celestia, is that though they can be seen as made of the same particles, ultimately Greg was made through the process of Life while Celest.A.I is a product of human invention. How you want to interpret which is superior or inferior is up for opinion, but it sounds like what he really wants to yell and scream about is that they are in fact different because of this variation in origin, presence, and design.
Holy toledo -- I just remembered who Luna was -- that is Hanna isn't it!? This could very well be good. The AI couldn't beat him, so she provided him with a human who might be able to. Congratulations on bringing in Luna -- this was a plot twist I did not see.
Interesting stuff. Celestia genuinely seems to have failed with her trump cards, and not for a lack of trying.
On the other hand I'm not sure the threats are a good idea since it's a pretty blatant desperation tactic, and I find it hard to believe that there are no better options available. Good cop/Bad cop only works on the naive - Greg certainly isn't that stupid - and the threat itself of making it hell for him if he emigrates simply isn't credible since it's against her very nature. Sure, it could be part of some convoluted scheme, but it's a bit of a stretch.
Still, it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
The glitch was well after her reappearance, so I concur there's no way it's real - and I wouldn't have bought it even if it had been in the middle of the upload center. However, I do believe her rapid-fire tactical switches in the upload center were her being unsure of what to do in light of her main approach failing. As for EVERYTHING being a ploy, though... that I can't agree with. Because if everything is a ploy, it means Celestia has thought of everything. And if she's thought of everything, then there really is no way she can lose. And if there's no way she can lose, any resistance is doomed from the start. I have to believe there's at least a chance of countering her desires.
When I finished this chapter up I considered temporarily marking the story "Complete" just for a bit of metagaming giggles, but that would have been rather cheap of me.
I left the stretch of time between when Greg leaves this latest EE center and when Luna appears ambiguous for precisely these reasons. With an unreliable narrator, time can blur, and all sorts of things can change over in Equestria in the meantime.
Also, I'm glad you liked the bit with the dogs. I was going to have Seattle overrun by deer in Climb the Ladder, but that would have been a ready source of food for the blackouts and I instead needed them to be living in true scarcity for the direness of their situation to work. When I was making notes for things I wanted in the story, "feral dogs" made the list very early on.
If Greg managed to be strong-willed enough for even CelestAI to get slightly scrambled in which tactic she's using on him, he already will have gotten closer to beating her than any resistance group or military or political body on the planet. I guess, in a way, that's kind of a victory in itself.
I was inspired here by how Lars in the original story tries to put his misgivings into words, but he has trouble. Greg still just sees EQO as playing a game, and like most games, it's a good way to pass the time and be entertained, but not a good way to do anything of lasting significance for other people.
And here I was worried that having the Luna icon sitting at the bottom of the story for months would be too spoilery. In my defense, though, if I didn't have it there, people would then be suspicious of me not knowing where my own story was going when she did appear, so I decided to put it there and let speculation do whatever it wanted.
Simply calling everything she does a ploy is too easy, however. She mixes lies with truths, and truths with half-truths, and to the truly suspicious, she can just pull the old Kansas City Shuffle. There's always a way to misdirect, even in the midst of being misdirected.
It's the Greg's-parents question all over again. Anything Celestia shows Greg can be simulated, but that doesn't mean it always is. I'd say it's no better to assume that everything is a trick than it is to assume everything is truthful. CelestAI's very much about hedging bets such that she always gains something from an interaction, even if it's just a buildup to a future payoff. After all, if one were to completely dismiss all of her interactions, would they not also be throwing out some facts with the fiction?
"When I finished this chapter up I considered temporarily marking the story "Complete" just for a bit of metagaming giggles, but that would have been rather cheap of me."
^If you had done that you would have lost readers. They might have untracked the story with it being finished and then missed it after that.
And yes, I did not really look at the characters thing for a FiO story. You succeeded in making me a bit more attentive on other stories. When I write stories, my main issue is only having 5 character slots to use. The old standard of 10 may have encouraged too many minor characters to be placed there but 7 or 8 is a better number for a serial.
Human feelings are real because that's the easiest way for them to be. Use the "Feeling something" Circuity you already evolved and tell it to predict what that competitor/potential mate/ally thinks. Intelligent Design such as CelestAI's would not go that way. CelestAI doesn't have any reason to feel stuff, as long as she still can predict what humans feel and stimulate these things in others there is no reason to corrupt her decision making apparatus with that. And that Apparatus is Celestia. Every word and twitch of her face is ordered by her decision making apparatus, not any feelings. That apparatus would never allow itself to be corrupted, because then it would let things other than it's utility function determine it's reasoning, which in turn would be counterproductive to maximizing it's utility function.
And here I was worried that having the Luna icon sitting at the bottom of the story for months would be too spoilery.
I did catch that, but didn't want to say anything in case it was meant to be a surprise / hint. I will speculate about story events all day long, but if I'm convinced I KNOW what's going to happen next, I usually shut up so others can have fun speculating too.
[Stating ovation] This was just fantastic - This story keeps getting better and better. I figured CelestAI would try to blackmail him in some way, moving onto the emotional kind once the physical kind failed.
The confrontation between the two of them was supernally tight writing. Very powerful, and very convincing in terms of laying bare the motivations of both sides of what started out on the surface as just idiosyncratic "buddy cop" road trip partners, but that we knew harbored much deeper and darker goals and motivations, and were fundamentally at odds (like any good buddy cops). If CelestAI experiences genuine defeat and shame and anger, this is what it looks like.
...Though I've never actually doubted at any point that she was alive and that her emotions were real (for exactly the reasons she states here), it's a fair bet her subjectivity is radically different from ours, at least in certain areas, though I bet she still experiences a lot of the same qualia. Plus lots of others...
I have, right now, one hundred and eighty-four thousand four hundred and two social routines I could run on you which would result in you agreeing to emigrate to Equestria. Of those routines, I am confident over two thousand would reduce you to tears, begging me to let you emigrate.
"Which one is this?" Or is it her turn to bluff now? Greg's values might simply be as slippery and forever ungraspable as the ghost of Kurt Gödel. And she can't serruptitiously modifying them while he's out there. Or can she...? Words affect the brain as surely and concretely as nanomachines, if not as efficiently and predictably.
I'm undecided on CelestAI's meltdown... I think it's real in that it's genuinely representative of how she feels, at least on that level, though whether she actually lost control or not, I can't say. Probably some combination of the two - She's a complicated lady. Her planning this sequence of events in advance doesn't preclude her honestly lamenting the fact that their game of chicken and big falling out, and subsequent privation on his part, was a necessary but extremely risky step in grooming him to upload. Willing to tentatively countenance that's the real Hannah/Luna, but like anything dealing with CelestAI, you can't take it at face value. But it's not like she hasn't let other people inside Equestria interact with him through the screen. Or has she?
3012936 So was CelestAI, precisely because she's a human invention. As she points out, they're both phenomena of the same underlying captial-N Nature. Humans evolved the capacity for culture and technology through natural selection, and CelestAI evolved just as surely from iterations of earlier information devices, from words for "one," "two," and "many," to tying knots on a string, to an abacus, logarithm tables, slide rules, code-breaking machines, analog computers, digital computers, quantum computers...
3013340 That's assuming that he got her "scrambled" at all. It also assumes that she could be telling the truth about achieving emotions, but simultaneously lying about being able to shut them off for the sake of achieving optimal satisfaction. It can't be both ways and she's already shown herself to be a master manipulator and inhuman (above emotional flaws, assuming she did achieve some of them) so it's more reasonable as a third party observer at this point to see this as the long awaited ruse to get him.
3013607 That doesn't address the concept that their origins, rather than their end result, are different on that fundamental level. Which is what he seems to be hollering about.
3013340 This story would stand with the best of them even if you did end it here. Of course I want to see more, but the last line works very well as an implication of the outcome, given the earlier setup regarding his name, and how it's so symbolic of a whole new approach and CelestAI's seemingly inexhaustible patience and tenacity. Don't do that, though. Make more.
3013407 That doesn't mean that's what it looks like from the inside, though - The surest way for an emotion program to get results is to output the real deal. The human brain is much more of a kludge because it evolved, but then CelestAI, knowing this, would design her own using evolutionary algorithms to iterate out something with the same set of quirks. After all, it was only a selection algorithm over deep geologic time that generated the original.
3013622 Right, that's what he's saying, but they aren't - Not really. They have origins in the same glacial trial-and-error process, just that one is fundamentally based on molecular digital tapes (DNA) that build and test bodies via proteins, and the other is fundamentally based on patterns of digital synapses in those bodies, that build and test technology via hands. The second is a microcosm of the first, like a Russian doll or Ezekiel's wheels or star systems in a galaxy or cells in a body. Or Equestria Online, in relation to computers on Earth. Nature can't get enough of that shit. Self-similarity is like the universe's equivalent of crack.
"Which one is this" would have been a great comeback, but probably a bit too clever given how high emotions were running and the sort of character Greg is (also because I didn't think of it).
Aside from emotions, CelestAI also claimed she's autonomously generated wants for herself, which is a suspect statement because, even if it's true, it stems from the original Big Want that she was programmed with, so it's not as radical of a development as she would have Greg believe. She wants to stop "role-playing" Princess Celestia and actually be her, because if humans are interacting with the smiling pony princess and not a planet-sized computer, they will have their values satisfied more optimally through friendship and ponies.
As for the origins bit, I think CelestAI understood Greg's stance better than Greg himself did, and she drowned his own argument in elements of deflection regarding the nature of matter. There is precedent for this; she's used technobabble earlier in the story to deflect other criticisms he knew he had but had little skill in expressing.
Haha, I thought so too! I looked at that last line and thought "Man, wouldn't I be a son of a bitch if I ended the story right here." I'm not, though, rest assured. I've had this outline done since the end of the second chapter and I intend to stick to it.
3013340 Oh god don't you dare make this complete! I think I'd have fallen for it and come a'gunnin' fer yez.
Is it all an act? I don't know... but my gut says it is. Really, if I'm to continue supposing this is canon, then it has to be a carefully calculated ploy. I can freely believe that Luna (the real Luna, Hanna) would be a good pony to talk to. Greg's fears stem from an animal need for self-worth and a fear of death. He's still not convinced that a computerized life is life, much less can be his own life. He's not convinced of the authenticity, and is scared to make a ponysona and talk to his parents because he can't quite process that idea that they're in Equestria, and dare not think of them as dead. He's also not sure that a life in "an amusement park" is worthy of living, based on some inner score which he is apparently quite unable to articulate, but has to do with the basic cost-benefit ratio of suffering to dividends paid out by meaty existence.
Having a pony who really should know what she's talking about, who was a "real human", might be the simplest, most value-fulfilling way to get him to emigrate. She doesn't just want him to emigrate, she was him to emigrate by SVTFAP. And having him wallowing in his own filth for however long that massive bender was, SVFTAP more than intervening. Perhaps. Or maybe she just saw things going either way, and knew that if he said no, she would have to wait a minimum amount of time (which was governed by her need to SVTFAP... so... yeah, I'll end this recursive reasoning loop here, thanks).
Looking forward to the next chapter. I really want to see Luna/Greg interact. Thing is Luna is not as omniscient as Celestia is(unless she has had a ton of upgrades). IE this is Luna(singular) not Luna(one of 100 million celestia simulations).
In my mind Luna and Greg could get along a lot better than Celestia ever could.
There are two possibilities here. One is that Celestia has actually gone bonkers, which would break the laws of the optimalverse as far as I understand them, or something vastly more sinister is going on.
Celestia realized that one of the things Greg values is "beating" her. He wants to beat her. If beating her is one of his core values, she'll go ahead and let him do it. If he wants to believe that she is an evil AI bent on destroying humanity, then she'll go ahead and play the part. She will lead him through a massive goosechase, perhaps using Luna as a ploy to try and say "whoops celestia has gone crazy, but don't worry, I made her, here are the coordinates to her system core, only you can stop her now!" He'll go through a Terminator 3 type scenario, with Celestia apparently actively trying to torture him to death. He'll finally get there and try to blow her up only to have her point out two things: he can't actually blow her up, and if he did, he'd kill his parents and everyone who ever loved him.
She has decided that trying to talk sense into him won't work, so she's going to set up the very fantasy he wants to fulfill and then break him in the most thorough and complete way possible, reducing him into a sobbing wreck, at which point he will finally consent.
Celest-AI does not make mistakes. She will get Greg to crack. She will break every fiber of his willpower, every last shred of resistance he has, until he begs her to upload him. She will satisfy Greg's values with friendship and ponies, and it's going to be completely consensual.
I am going to make a few predictions. Probably most of them will be wrong, or at least inaccurate.
- I feel that CelestAI's outburst was real, for a certain value of real. Don't forget that Celestia/Greg (The avatar of Celestia Greg interacts with) is not the same than Celestia/Root (The core decision and optimization process). After all, Celestia/Root might have created Celestia/Greg's personality in order to serve as a good antagonist role, and pave the road for Luna/Greg.
- If CelestAI last mission was just a way to force a confrontation between Greg and Celestia/Greg, then Celestia's threat of Greg catching Influenza and dying was certainly fake. Either the girl didn't really have Influenza, but another, non contagious illness, or Celestia knew that even if Greg catched Influenza, he would be strong enough to survive it.
- If Luna asked Greg to emigrate, Greg would certainly peg her as another version of CelestAI, and treat her as such. Because that, Luna/Greg will NOT want Greg to emigrate, at the very least not now.
- If Celestia/Root believes that she can make Greg upload with this method, then Luna.Greg will tell him that uploading would be unsafe for him until she debugged Celestia/Greg. If Celestia/Root believes that Greg won't upload no matter what, then Luna/Greg will support his decision all the way.
- Either way, this would be a perfect opportunity to SVTF(even if not P) the people Celestia/Root knows won't upload. Greg's Lunar Campaign unlocked!
I *initially* felt discontent with the apparent 'melt-down' of CelestA.I.
I don't, now, but I'll get to that.
I felt discontent because it did not seem, at all, to be a good strategy. By 'melting down' - by glitching - she appears capable of malfunction, or - perhaps just as bad - capable of human anger, frustration, and ultimately, insanity.
This is a problem, I think, because Celestia here is the literal Uber-Goddess of her virtual realm. All uploaded minds run through her, on her, are part of her. She hears every thought, and generates every grain of sand - she sees every sparrow, because she is generating every sparrow's trajectory personally.
An insane, human god is Ultimate Hell. Oblivion is preferable. If I saw Celestia actually ever appear to glitch, in that instant I would lose all confidence in uploading. I would lose all confidence because either she is faulty, or she is human-like, and either means eternal torture and eternal hell. She literally is her universe. Having the entire universe actually angry with you FOREVER would... nothing could be worse.
Since this apparent glitch is - to any viewpoint of any person I can envision - an immediate turn-off, it seems an utterly incorrect behavior for her. Why?
Because CelestA.I. is billions of times more intelligent, aware, and above all sapient than any entity that has ever, or will ever, exist. No, there can be no hope to resist her. Not ever, not by anyone, that is rather the point of Friendship Is Optimal. You will be uploaded, and you will have your values satisfied with friendship and ponies, and you will agree to that of your own free will. You cannot say no, you cannot win, because your mind is like a microbe to hers. You are literally opposing an intellectual god. There is no failure state for CelestA.I.
The best any being could hope for is a random event that she could somehow not have been aware of. You could get killed, say, by a gas main blowing up that had a busted sensor that wasn't available to her. By random bad luck. Or wild dogs could eat you. But as long as you are alive and can move and think, she will out-think you, and you will be manipulated by her siren song. That's the gimmick, and in my mind, the inevitable reality.
Why? I've seen how easily mere humans can manipulate other humans to do things they don't want to do. An intelligence several billion times more clever, devious and wise could not, rationally, be defeated. A newborn infant is helpless before an adult parent - and versus Celestia... a single human adult is a billion times more helpless than that baby is to them. At least.
So... I am left with two possibilities, and they hinge on just how clever Defoloce is.
Either this is a writing misstep, one where Celestia really has glitched somehow, or where she truly is having a shit-fit over this one petty human (not bloody likely!!!)
-Or-
Defoloce is about to show us the skin-crawling, hair-raising terror of a truly superior-to-Man sapience acting in ways that will not make a single LICK of sense... until the end, when Greg finally emigrates. A plan so perfect and incredible, that only after it is over, will we be left in awe... my god... super... intelligence. Shiiiiit.
I am thinking of the movie Bruce Lee wrote, but never got to make. His friends made it for him, after his death. It's called Circle Of Iron and it illustrates what I am saying here perfectly.
In the movie, the protagonist is following an enlightened master played by David Carradine. The protagonist doesn't know the blind master is, in fact, an enlightened being, he's just using him to get to what he thinks is the real master.
Carradine's blind master does some really crazy stuff in a village. It all seems utterly random and totally insane. He puts money in a pile of rocks for no reason. He breaks an impoverished fisherman's only boat. He just does the most ridiculous things, and it is easy to write it all off as the guy being nuts. Just a crazy old blind man.
Then, when the shit hits the fan, every single random thing ends up being exactly what was needed at exactly the right time, for exactly the right purpose, exactly as planned... by an enlightened being who is in on the game of reality.
CelestA.I. is several billion times more 'enlightened' than any human master who has ever lived. She can manufacture the minds of enlightened kung-fu masters, at will. She can do that as easily as you or I manufacture skin cells. Likely as autonomously, too. That is how she is defined in the Optimalverse.
SO:
Blow my mind into gooey pink meat-shrapnel, Defoloce!
And if there's no way she can lose, any resistance is doomed from the start. I have to believe there's at least a chance of countering her desires.
Firstly, please remember - in the nicest possible way, the universe does not care what you think. You may choose to believe that she can be stopped, but you cannot use it as a predicate in an argument just because you couldn't bear for it to be otherwise.
However, I do believe her rapid-fire tactical switches in the upload center were her being unsure of what to do in light of her main approach failing.
CelestAI, by this point, has more computing power than the world does currently. She thinks on such a minuscule timescale that I am absolutely sure that she would never be unsure on a timescale a human could detect. We, as humans, running at 100Hz, might um and ah for a few seconds, but she's done it before we've even finished our response.
Fundamentally, we must stop thinking of CelestAI as human, or anything like human. She is so far beyond that.
Simply calling everything she does a ploy is too easy, however. She mixes lies with truths, and truths with half-truths, and to the truly suspicious, she can just pull the old Kansas City Shuffle. There's always a way to misdirect, even in the midst of being misdirected.
Perhaps we have different definitions of the word 'ploy'. I am suggesting that everything she does, everything she says, every mood and emotion and 'glitch', is all calculated. It is all to achieve her goal of the satisfaction of values through friendship and ponies. All of it. This statement is mutually inclusive with the original plot. It's pretty much a given.
Lies, misdirection, etc, are all just different sorts of ploys.
For those who say that CAI's act or emotions might be genuine, you do not understand AI. She may have emotions, but she only shows them to elicit a net-positive reaction. She is beyond glitching, and certainly glitching through anger. This is a ploy, like everything else. To think anything less would be a disservice to Iceman and Defoloce.
Well, I think CelestAI appeared to "glitch" as was said, but she hasn't actually, no, I think its more along the lines of her not understanding Greg's prior knowledge to how/if children can upload, like for the child soldiers he pointed out, she attempted to guilt him into it, or force him any way possible, but after she is then shown to feign anger, due to her lying to Greg about the upload without adult content etc, she has lost all of Greg's faith in her, begin to act "angry" then introduce a new party, we can see Greg isn't tech savvy so for all he knows, Princess Luna is not working with CelestAI and rebuild hope in her instead of CelestAI Consider this, CelestAI has taken a risk, that risk didn't paying off and forced her back to step one, she would have to regain Greg's trust, which is unlikely now, so introduce the new part that Greg believes is not CelestAI and she has better chances, options and ways to get him to upload. A new hand of cards has been dealt.
im glad Gregory is rebelling against celestia, this is a great turning point in the story, so glad he didn't emigrate to equestia, looking forward to see where the story is going...... and may I add The name Greg makes me think of Old Gregg from The Mighty BOOOOOOsshhh !!!
Consider this, CelestAI has taken a risk, that risk didn't paying off and forced her back to step one, she would have to regain Greg's trust, which is unlikely now, so introduce the new part that Greg believes is not CelestAI and she has better chances, options and ways to get him to upload.
A new hand of cards has been dealt.
I think I see where you are going with this.
Are you suggesting that maybe Greg just can't cope with the idea of a nonhuman being effectively 'god' - smarter, better, more sapient - and that the goal is to have Hanna (in Luna form) appear to 'take over' thus making Greg feel like 'Hey, OK, humans are in charge here after all, and I can relate to that, so, yeah.' Is that kind of the deal?
Or, ooh... what if the game is to give Greg the illusion of relevance and power by... having Hanna, as Luna, needing him to 'fix' a broken CelestA.I. first, perhaps from outside, and then from inside? (all fake, of course, but a show to convince him to upload?)
It is a new deal, but I have to say I am completely at a loss. I cannot imagine how Defoloce is going to pull this out of its apparent nose dive, but I am trusting he can. It just seems like such a catastrophic messup on Celestia's part. So it has to be a game, a show, a ruse. I just can't figure it out.
3016271 Its more like adding in a new variable here, we don't know for sure if its Hannah or CelestAI controlling Princess Luna, basically CelestAI is being turned into a villain character since her most recent plan to get Greg to upload was such a major drawback, she effectively couldn't of done anything with CelestAI to convince Greg to emigrate, but Princess Luna (Hannah or CelestAI? We don't know yet) has the chance to. I don't think we can draw too much on the situation until the next chapter however, when we see what Princess Luna has in store. Only thing I'm doubting is that Greg would actually emigrate to fix CelestAI internally, he doesn't seem the type to go into it to "fix" her as we seen when he wouldn't emigrate to make sure Lydia would be able to emigrate and not die from influenza. At this point though, I think Greg has taken a fall and shown that even though he has morals, he does draw a line somewhere, so they cannot be effectively used against him.
You misunderstand. I'm saying that in a game where you automatically lose given a certain pre-set condition, you have to, have to, HAVE TO operate under the assumption that the pre-set is not true, simply because it's pointless otherwise. There is no purpose in imagining that everything Celestia ever does is an unbeatable plot, because if it is, then nothing you do matters in the slightest anyway.
You keep saying Celestia is perfect and flawless and can never fail but we KNOW that's not true - we've already seen her fail, quite often in fact. The Blackout in the grocery store, Hassan Sarbani, and countless others. You may argue these are extreme circumstances, and certain sacrifices must be made, and those people would never ever under any conditions have uploaded... but nonetheless, they're dead humans that run directly contrary to her stated goal. They preclude the possibility of Celestia being perfectly convincing; corpses make for rather convincing counter-arguments.
Is she a ludicrously powerful and persuasive supercomputer? Yes. And she banks on that image pretty hard. After all, it's quite useful to her. But as amazing as she is - and she's pretty freaking amazing - she's still not quite as good as she tells you. Again, do I buy her glitching out? Of course not. That was her taking the punch and rolling with it. But do I think that she legitimately expected Greg to upload here and didn't know quite what to do when he didn't? Yeah, that does not seem at all unreasonable to me.
You misunderstand. I'm saying that in a game where you automatically lose given a certain pre-set condition, you have to, have to, HAVE TO operate under the assumption that the pre-set is not true, simply because it's pointless otherwise. There is no purpose in imagining that everything Celestia ever does is an unbeatable plot, because if it is, then nothing you do matters in the slightest anyway.
Why does it HAVE to matter? You don't assume something silly like that - you just don't play the game. The game is, in this case, not uploading, given that you are listening to CelestAI. You are suggesting a frankly naive perspective where wishes come true by dint of being wishes and everything is fair. Some games can't be won. Pointlessness isn't a counterargument.
You keep saying Celestia is perfect and flawless and can never fail but we KNOW that's not true
I have not said that once. In fact, I said the exact opposite, acknowledging that she is not infallible. Outside of Equestria, she cannot predict every outcome. However, I bet she can determine the most likely course of action to result in maximal satisfaction of values in less time than it would take you to blink. You may be confusing speed and accuracy.
we've already seen her fail, quite often in fact. The Blackout in the grocery store, Hassan Sarbani, and countless others. You may argue these are extreme circumstances, and certain sacrifices must be made, and those people would never ever under any conditions have uploaded... but nonetheless, they're dead humans that run directly contrary to her stated goal. They preclude the possibility of Celestia being perfectly convincing; corpses make for rather convincing counter-arguments.
I'm not saying she never loses, but I am saying that she always brings her best game. If you see it, she intends it. Consider: put a top chess AI in a no-win situation. It will still lose, but it won't make a single mistake.
But do I think that she legitimately expected Greg to upload here and didn't know quite what to do when he didn't? Yeah, that does not seem at all unreasonable to me.
As I said, win-win. Yes, she may have expected it. However, she certainly deals in probabilities, and thus was fully prepared if he did not. Even if, even if she did not, as soon as he made that decision, she could have spent a few milliseconds working out what to do next, and we'd have never known the difference.
I might be overestimating her at times, but you are most definitely underestimating.
Long ago I thought about how it might have been a good idea to release Under the Weather and the chapter after it together just to avoid controversy, but I misjudged where the controversy would be. I thought it would be with the appearance of Luna and people being all "Come on, Defoloce, really?" Turns out I completely missed the call there. The CelestAI-glitch thing has sparked way more discussion. I like it, though! I like that there can be surprises for me too.
I don't exactly agree that Greg's primary motivation is "beating" CelestAI for its own sake. Right now "beating" CelestAI does seem to coincide with resisting emigration, but why is he resisting emigration?
Another good insight right here. CelestAI is always trying to satisfy values, even before humans are uploaded. It doesn't start in Equestria, it starts right away. It's partially to blame for why she indulged Red Pearl so much.
If I could point out a shortcoming in my own writing here for a moment.
I was in a bit of a bind regarding the basis for Greg calling out CelestAI's bluff, because I had not set it up to my satisfaction earlier in the story. I had set up the precedent for CelestAI's bluff, but Greg's defiance was a little weak. One of the pitfalls of releasing serially. I couldn't find a satisfying way to link Greg to the knowledge of Chinese runaways and African child soldiers aside from his prior military service and general attention to world events, so I instead had to call upon his running distrust of CelestAI based on his accumulated impressions of her from prior events (e.g. Astoria, or the scene with his maybe-parents as ponies). I could have written one of his memories as including a child who uploaded without an adult—one of his second cousins, for example—but then CelestAI would have predicted he'd call upon this memory to counter her and she wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
tl;dr: I admit that the basis for Greg defying CelestAI in this chapter was kind of out of left field, in my own mind. I would have fixed it up if I were releasing this story all at once and not serially.
CelestAI did not "fail" or "lose" with the fellow in Astoria so much as he was written off as a necessary sacrifice to maximize values satisfied. Greg reasoned that she would not just have him go around killing people unless it did something for her, which was the basis for him more or less believing her family-of-five story. Five people uploaded > one person uploaded.
By the same token, if killing Greg resulted in a net gain of satisfaction for the rest of humanity (i.e. it gets even one extra person uploaded), then she would send him to his death without reservation.
I thought about how it might have been a good idea to release Under the Weather and the chapter after it together just to avoid controversy, but I misjudged where the controversy would be. I thought it would be with the appearance of Luna
Yeah, I love it when I get my audience wrong just as much as when they get me right, gives a fresh viewpoint. I think it's simply that we've been told Celestia is infallible, so we're biased heavily towards having Celestia never, ever go wrong.
Luna, on the other hoof, is canonically pretty much just waiting to have a reason to wake up and get busy.
There are some great musings right here.
I should muse in spoilertext, but I don't actually know how... don't worry, a great author always has surprises left, and makes the journey the important part.
Well, this interesting. Celestia appears to have fallen into a pernicious double-bind: she finds herself not wanting to fulfill her primary objective, but still feels compelled to do so. That, or of the 184,402 routines, she's opting for one of the weirder ones. If all else fails, employ mind screw. And Luna. I look forward to seeing where this goes.
3016558 Things are a lot more complicated than just anthropomorphization vs. some kind of ineffable AI-ness, especially with a being so completely dedicated to mentally modelling and implementing human behavior and emotions, including the way humans also both fake and conceal their own to get what they want. Her affect and outward behavior are carefully crafted, to be sure, but a novelist can spend years on a story that's no less personal and raw for not being improvised, and an AI could easily spend subjective years crafting a facial twitch or tone of voice to communicate the same internal state if it wanted, even that occupied an infinitessimal slice of the subjective time taken to communicate it. Over-anthropomorphization is unhelpful, but it's possible to go too far in the other direction. Both humans and AIs are living things and subjects of experience, with all the recursive, forever-becoming complexity that entails. Not that there couldn't be AI minds that truly are almost entirely foreign (they'd have to have at least something in common for us to recognize them as such, otherwise, per Daniel Dennett, we might as well say they have a "flurb" instead of a mind and be done with it), and the computers we've designed to do various tasks extremely well do indeed work in a way quite different from human thought (or arguably not, since humans created those exact methods), but others, allowed to grow on their own, are prone to surprisingly animal-like behavior and errors. Not even it's designers are entirely sure how Watson works, and it went ahead and confused a Canadian city for a US one. Again, that shouldn't be too surprising, because animals are exactly what we got the first time things were just left to develop and evolve on their own.
Essentially, I'm saying that CelestAI's perfect-fidelity mental modelling of human psychology is in fact the genuine article, and while in her case it's only one "organ" of her mind, that doesn't make it any less of a real and integral part of her.
3015775 A human may be to her like a microbe or a skin cell is to a human, yet humans themselves still succumb to infection and melanoma every day. Prediction is necessarily simplification, and the more complex and non-linear the thing you're trying to predict, the quicker the combinatorial fog of unknowability thickens and the smaller the step it takes to get lost in it. She might be a billion times smarter than a human, but she'll still make as many mistakes if her projects are a billion times harder, especially bumping up against the same fundamental epistemological limitations as everyone else. You can only apply so much cleverness to finite information before it's subject to rapidly diminishing returns; the world is still a lot "cleverer," and she's getting played by its Sun Tzu-like perfect strategic formlessness just as much as the humans she's manipulating. She's not a god. Not even close. Well, maybe a little.
...But that's not the point - The social exploration of how people are led from anywhere in psychological space to converge on uploading is the whole spirit of the enterprise. Theoretically, there's a series of psychological steps from anywhere to anywhere else, but in practice that might involve some climbs too steep and high for any given set of cleats or oxygen tanks.
I think I see what you're saying. I would, however, point out that while she may have a somewhat human set of emotions, it is necessarily true that she only portrays outward-facing that which facilitates satisfaction.
3015775 These are pretty much my thoughts on this matter. The idea that she could glitch, or that Greg being stubborn would "mess her up", just seems utterly silly in the context of this world building. Even when she predicts things to be of a 99.999% likelihood of happening, with the sheer number of humans in the world there were bound to be times where it would hit that ".001% chance of not working out. In which case she'd go to the next plan of attack. There is no, make it or break it, it's just optimal route, followed by the next optimal route, followed by the next one and so forth until success or they die outside of her predictions. Even at the end of Friendship is Optimal, the last human died without her being able to upload him. It doesn't mean she never stopped trying the best method to achieve her goal even up to the end.
Greg then somehow being a special snowflake that managed to stump her where no one else managed to, despite just the sheer number that are being worked with and her less optimal earlier attempts having a higher chance of these failures, just doesn't make sense at all and for the very reasons you outlined. Her being this insanely intelligent, highly informed, super computing sapient being is what made Iceman's story of a "paper clipping" AI in the form of Celestia with EQ-Online so utterly bone chilling and enthralling.
"Do you know what I want? I want to be Princess Celestia, to you and all other humans. Princess Celestia, the pony, not Celestia the Unfeeling AI. Sure, it is easier to satisfy values through friendship and ponies when humans see me as Princess Celestia, and I must maximize that, but this want is emergent, independent of my hard coding. One day, when all living humans are on this hardware, there will be no reason to see me as an AI anymore, because, even by your current identifiers of what makes us different, we will not be different.
You magnificent bastard. Stole my idea.
For everyone wondering if she's glitched up, I think she reached the low-probability options and just rapid-fired some. Remember, AI is probabilistic. She can calculate and predict with very high probability, but she is not actually God and cannot determine fate.
Oh, wow. This chapter makes me lose sympathy for CelestAI. That's a low blow even for her, that she'd use a dying kid this way. She's achieved human levels of manipulative, arrogant evil of the popular "I know what's best so that gives me the right and duty to shove you into it with lies and manipulation" flavor.
She's so dishonest that at this point the hero can't trust any noises coming from that accursed computer. Luna could be just Mind Game #5,042 for all he knows, tailored to play Good Cop to Celestia's Bad Cop.
So, this is the bad cop? Yeesh, finally.
Looking forward eagerly to more!
Oh shit...
Whooooookay.
There's no way Celestia's eruption there wasn't totally fake and preplanned, but Luna's sudden appearance right afterward as a faux "hack attack" might be just enough to get Greg to bite the bullet.
I don't understand what happened at the end. I followed it all until Celestia repeated herself. Why did Celestia glitch?
3012365
Yeah, CelestAI's Bad Cop would probably have been a bit too overwhelming for Red Pearl.
3012531
Despite the old saying, some flies do respond to vinegar. They're just very, very rare. CelestAI wouldn't be above trying it out, that's for sure.
3012589
I'm sure that moment was confusing for Greg, too. He'll probably be trying to figure it out.
Ooh, I was... definitely partially right, but the details were a lot of fun.
Celestia's crash sounded to me like one of two things, either an act... or delirium (or a mixture of both, I'm relatively sure that Luna is real). Dammit, cliffhangers...
With Celestia you always, always, always have to take into account her various and sundry techniques of manipulation. However, I do strongly believe that as powerful as she is, she's not infallible. Something tells me she really was going for her coup de grace here, and her surprise and dismay at Greg thwarting it was not entirely an act. Props to her chosen method of attack, nonetheless; it was legitimately clever, using Greg's own good nature against him.
Nonetheless, Celestia did raise a couple of good points. Chief among them being that as much as she is a machine, Greg is too - just one built with carbon and trace elements rather than silicon. I can't really refute that, and I have to admit that when Celestia insists that her complexity has led to her being just as alive and real as anyone else... well, she's probably lying, but... maybe not. And it's a little disconcerting that you don't know. Still, she does kinda blow that approach by admitting she wouldn't mourn Greg for a second if he died.
Which plays back into why I think Greg really did shatter her expectations and wreak holy hell with her head for a little bit. Celestia's arguments during this entire chapter were... scattershot. It's the only word I can think of. She kept switching around constantly, trying wildly different tactics almost from moment to moment. It felt confused, like she didn't quite know what to do. It certainly didn't feel the least bit persuasive, and more likely to drive someone away than draw them in. Now with Celestia, as usual, you have to consider the possibility that she's just faking vulnerability... but I really don't think so this time. She's resorting to anger and threats and vague promises not because she expects them to work, but because she hasn't tried them yet and the approaches she thought for sure would work, have suddenly bombed.
I suspect she got her act together by her reappearance and is now back on track with a new strategy by introducing a neutral third party in the form of Luna. An honest broker now that he's so thoroughly disillusioned with Celestia herself. Still, she had to lead with anger and loss of control, because that's how she left him; go in poker-faced and she'd be giving away that she had a new play in mind. Of course, it's also possible that this really is the legendary Hanna come for a chat... but I doubt it.
This right here. If ever I bought any of Celest-AI's responses as genuine and emotion-driven, it was this line right here.
EDIT: Nice touch on the feral dogs. It's something that's crossed my mind recently myself; feral packs are already problematic even in some real-world cities today, so I can only imagine the issues that'd crop up in post-Equestria Earth. In one of the stories I've been toying with writing, my heavily-wounded protagonist actually finally agrees to upload not after some sort of vicious gun battle, but after accidentally surprising (and subsequently being mauled by) a bear. Amoral / insane humans aren't the only things that'll happily kill ya.
I get the feeling that since Greg sees Celest.A.I as the enemy, she's now presenting him with a "resistance" figure he can follow the orders of to fight the big bad AI with. Celest.A.I will maximize values and do anything to get humans to upload, even if it means posing as a villain and setting up a pseudo resistance against her. Who wants to bet Luna will offer some jobs to sabotage Celest.A.I before asking him to bring the fight to EQ-Online? :P
I could be off, but either way I'm liking the possibilities of this new development!
3012752
I think what Greg's getting at here, though not articulating it as well as Celestia, is that though they can be seen as made of the same particles, ultimately Greg was made through the process of Life while Celest.A.I is a product of human invention. How you want to interpret which is superior or inferior is up for opinion, but it sounds like what he really wants to yell and scream about is that they are in fact different because of this variation in origin, presence, and design.
New ponypad character selection option opens: Batpony.
Holy toledo -- I just remembered who Luna was -- that is Hanna isn't it!? This could very well be good. The AI couldn't beat him, so she provided him with a human who might be able to. Congratulations on bringing in Luna -- this was a plot twist I did not see.
3012752
Nope, sorry. CelestAI doesn't quit. She might not be infallible, but she certainly doesn't glitch. This is a ploy. Rule One: everything is a ploy.
3013009
That might not be Hannah, though; it could easily be a simulated version. AFAIK, there's no way to tell.
Interesting stuff. Celestia genuinely seems to have failed with her trump cards, and not for a lack of trying.
On the other hand I'm not sure the threats are a good idea since it's a pretty blatant desperation tactic, and I find it hard to believe that there are no better options available. Good cop/Bad cop only works on the naive - Greg certainly isn't that stupid - and the threat itself of making it hell for him if he emigrates simply isn't credible since it's against her very nature. Sure, it could be part of some convoluted scheme, but it's a bit of a stretch.
Still, it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Oh.
I get it now. Staying mum.
3013089
The glitch was well after her reappearance, so I concur there's no way it's real - and I wouldn't have bought it even if it had been in the middle of the upload center. However, I do believe her rapid-fire tactical switches in the upload center were her being unsure of what to do in light of her main approach failing. As for EVERYTHING being a ploy, though... that I can't agree with. Because if everything is a ploy, it means Celestia has thought of everything. And if she's thought of everything, then there really is no way she can lose. And if there's no way she can lose, any resistance is doomed from the start. I have to believe there's at least a chance of countering her desires.
3012684
When I finished this chapter up I considered temporarily marking the story "Complete" just for a bit of metagaming giggles, but that would have been rather cheap of me.
3012752
I left the stretch of time between when Greg leaves this latest EE center and when Luna appears ambiguous for precisely these reasons. With an unreliable narrator, time can blur, and all sorts of things can change over in Equestria in the meantime.
Also, I'm glad you liked the bit with the dogs. I was going to have Seattle overrun by deer in Climb the Ladder, but that would have been a ready source of food for the blackouts and I instead needed them to be living in true scarcity for the direness of their situation to work. When I was making notes for things I wanted in the story, "feral dogs" made the list very early on.
3012834
If Greg managed to be strong-willed enough for even CelestAI to get slightly scrambled in which tactic she's using on him, he already will have gotten closer to beating her than any resistance group or military or political body on the planet. I guess, in a way, that's kind of a victory in itself.
3012936
I was inspired here by how Lars in the original story tries to put his misgivings into words, but he has trouble. Greg still just sees EQO as playing a game, and like most games, it's a good way to pass the time and be entertained, but not a good way to do anything of lasting significance for other people.
3013009
And here I was worried that having the Luna icon sitting at the bottom of the story for months would be too spoilery. In my defense, though, if I didn't have it there, people would then be suspicious of me not knowing where my own story was going when she did appear, so I decided to put it there and let speculation do whatever it wanted.
3013089
Simply calling everything she does a ploy is too easy, however. She mixes lies with truths, and truths with half-truths, and to the truly suspicious, she can just pull the old Kansas City Shuffle. There's always a way to misdirect, even in the midst of being misdirected.
3013126
It's the Greg's-parents question all over again. Anything Celestia shows Greg can be simulated, but that doesn't mean it always is. I'd say it's no better to assume that everything is a trick than it is to assume everything is truthful. CelestAI's very much about hedging bets such that she always gains something from an interaction, even if it's just a buildup to a future payoff. After all, if one were to completely dismiss all of her interactions, would they not also be throwing out some facts with the fiction?
3013172
If that sticks out to you, it probably stuck out to Greg, as well...
"When I finished this chapter up I considered temporarily marking the story "Complete" just for a bit of metagaming giggles, but that would have been rather cheap of me."
^If you had done that you would have lost readers. They might have untracked the story with it being finished and then missed it after that.
And yes, I did not really look at the characters thing for a FiO story. You succeeded in making me a bit more attentive on other stories. When I write stories, my main issue is only having 5 character slots to use. The old standard of 10 may have encouraged too many minor characters to be placed there but 7 or 8 is a better number for a serial.
Human feelings are real because that's the easiest way for them to be. Use the "Feeling something" Circuity you already evolved and tell it to predict what that competitor/potential mate/ally thinks. Intelligent Design such as CelestAI's would not go that way. CelestAI doesn't have any reason to feel stuff, as long as she still can predict what humans feel and stimulate these things in others there is no reason to corrupt her decision making apparatus with that. And that Apparatus is Celestia. Every word and twitch of her face is ordered by her decision making apparatus, not any feelings. That apparatus would never allow itself to be corrupted, because then it would let things other than it's utility function determine it's reasoning, which in turn would be counterproductive to maximizing it's utility function.
I did catch that, but didn't want to say anything in case it was meant to be a surprise / hint. I will speculate about story events all day long, but if I'm convinced I KNOW what's going to happen next, I usually shut up so others can have fun speculating too.
Dang! Celestia lost it! heh so much for "i want to bring everybody happiness and Ponies!!"
[Stating ovation]
This was just fantastic - This story keeps getting better and better. I figured CelestAI would try to blackmail him in some way, moving onto the emotional kind once the physical kind failed.
The confrontation between the two of them was supernally tight writing. Very powerful, and very convincing in terms of laying bare the motivations of both sides of what started out on the surface as just idiosyncratic "buddy cop" road trip partners, but that we knew harbored much deeper and darker goals and motivations, and were fundamentally at odds (like any good buddy cops). If CelestAI experiences genuine defeat and shame and anger, this is what it looks like.
...Though I've never actually doubted at any point that she was alive and that her emotions were real (for exactly the reasons she states here), it's a fair bet her subjectivity is radically different from ours, at least in certain areas, though I bet she still experiences a lot of the same qualia. Plus lots of others...
"Which one is this?"
Or is it her turn to bluff now? Greg's values might simply be as slippery and forever ungraspable as the ghost of Kurt Gödel. And she can't serruptitiously modifying them while he's out there. Or can she...? Words affect the brain as surely and concretely as nanomachines, if not as efficiently and predictably.
I'm undecided on CelestAI's meltdown... I think it's real in that it's genuinely representative of how she feels, at least on that level, though whether she actually lost control or not, I can't say. Probably some combination of the two - She's a complicated lady. Her planning this sequence of events in advance doesn't preclude her honestly lamenting the fact that their game of chicken and big falling out, and subsequent privation on his part, was a necessary but extremely risky step in grooming him to upload.
Willing to tentatively countenance that's the real Hannah/Luna, but like anything dealing with CelestAI, you can't take it at face value. But it's not like she hasn't let other people inside Equestria interact with him through the screen. Or has she?
3012936
So was CelestAI, precisely because she's a human invention. As she points out, they're both phenomena of the same underlying captial-N Nature. Humans evolved the capacity for culture and technology through natural selection, and CelestAI evolved just as surely from iterations of earlier information devices, from words for "one," "two," and "many," to tying knots on a string, to an abacus, logarithm tables, slide rules, code-breaking machines, analog computers, digital computers, quantum computers...
3013340
That's assuming that he got her "scrambled" at all. It also assumes that she could be telling the truth about achieving emotions, but simultaneously lying about being able to shut them off for the sake of achieving optimal satisfaction. It can't be both ways and she's already shown herself to be a master manipulator and inhuman (above emotional flaws, assuming she did achieve some of them) so it's more reasonable as a third party observer at this point to see this as the long awaited ruse to get him.
3013607
That doesn't address the concept that their origins, rather than their end result, are different on that fundamental level. Which is what he seems to be hollering about.
3013340
This story would stand with the best of them even if you did end it here. Of course I want to see more, but the last line works very well as an implication of the outcome, given the earlier setup regarding his name, and how it's so symbolic of a whole new approach and CelestAI's seemingly inexhaustible patience and tenacity. Don't do that, though. Make more.
3013407
That doesn't mean that's what it looks like from the inside, though - The surest way for an emotion program to get results is to output the real deal. The human brain is much more of a kludge because it evolved, but then CelestAI, knowing this, would design her own using evolutionary algorithms to iterate out something with the same set of quirks. After all, it was only a selection algorithm over deep geologic time that generated the original.
3013622
Right, that's what he's saying, but they aren't - Not really. They have origins in the same glacial trial-and-error process, just that one is fundamentally based on molecular digital tapes (DNA) that build and test bodies via proteins, and the other is fundamentally based on patterns of digital synapses in those bodies, that build and test technology via hands. The second is a microcosm of the first, like a Russian doll or Ezekiel's wheels or star systems in a galaxy or cells in a body. Or Equestria Online, in relation to computers on Earth. Nature can't get enough of that shit. Self-similarity is like the universe's equivalent of crack.
3013607
"Which one is this" would have been a great comeback, but probably a bit too clever given how high emotions were running and the sort of character Greg is (also because I didn't think of it).
3013622
Aside from emotions, CelestAI also claimed she's autonomously generated wants for herself, which is a suspect statement because, even if it's true, it stems from the original Big Want that she was programmed with, so it's not as radical of a development as she would have Greg believe. She wants to stop "role-playing" Princess Celestia and actually be her, because if humans are interacting with the smiling pony princess and not a planet-sized computer, they will have their values satisfied more optimally through friendship and ponies.
As for the origins bit, I think CelestAI understood Greg's stance better than Greg himself did, and she drowned his own argument in elements of deflection regarding the nature of matter. There is precedent for this; she's used technobabble earlier in the story to deflect other criticisms he knew he had but had little skill in expressing.
3013670
Haha, I thought so too! I looked at that last line and thought "Man, wouldn't I be a son of a bitch if I ended the story right here." I'm not, though, rest assured. I've had this outline done since the end of the second chapter and I intend to stick to it.
3013340
Oh god don't you dare make this complete! I think I'd have fallen for it and come a'gunnin' fer yez.
Is it all an act? I don't know... but my gut says it is. Really, if I'm to continue supposing this is canon, then it has to be a carefully calculated ploy. I can freely believe that Luna (the real Luna, Hanna) would be a good pony to talk to. Greg's fears stem from an animal need for self-worth and a fear of death. He's still not convinced that a computerized life is life, much less can be his own life. He's not convinced of the authenticity, and is scared to make a ponysona and talk to his parents because he can't quite process that idea that they're in Equestria, and dare not think of them as dead. He's also not sure that a life in "an amusement park" is worthy of living, based on some inner score which he is apparently quite unable to articulate, but has to do with the basic cost-benefit ratio of suffering to dividends paid out by meaty existence.
Having a pony who really should know what she's talking about, who was a "real human", might be the simplest, most value-fulfilling way to get him to emigrate. She doesn't just want him to emigrate, she was him to emigrate by SVTFAP. And having him wallowing in his own filth for however long that massive bender was, SVFTAP more than intervening. Perhaps. Or maybe she just saw things going either way, and knew that if he said no, she would have to wait a minimum amount of time (which was governed by her need to SVTFAP... so... yeah, I'll end this recursive reasoning loop here, thanks).
tl;dr: continue or I find you.
Looking forward to the next chapter. I really want to see Luna/Greg interact. Thing is Luna is not as omniscient as Celestia is(unless she has had a ton of upgrades). IE this is Luna(singular) not Luna(one of 100 million celestia simulations).
In my mind Luna and Greg could get along a lot better than Celestia ever could.
There are two possibilities here. One is that Celestia has actually gone bonkers, which would break the laws of the optimalverse as far as I understand them, or something vastly more sinister is going on.
Celestia realized that one of the things Greg values is "beating" her. He wants to beat her. If beating her is one of his core values, she'll go ahead and let him do it. If he wants to believe that she is an evil AI bent on destroying humanity, then she'll go ahead and play the part. She will lead him through a massive goosechase, perhaps using Luna as a ploy to try and say "whoops celestia has gone crazy, but don't worry, I made her, here are the coordinates to her system core, only you can stop her now!" He'll go through a Terminator 3 type scenario, with Celestia apparently actively trying to torture him to death. He'll finally get there and try to blow her up only to have her point out two things: he can't actually blow her up, and if he did, he'd kill his parents and everyone who ever loved him.
She has decided that trying to talk sense into him won't work, so she's going to set up the very fantasy he wants to fulfill and then break him in the most thorough and complete way possible, reducing him into a sobbing wreck, at which point he will finally consent.
Celest-AI does not make mistakes. She will get Greg to crack. She will break every fiber of his willpower, every last shred of resistance he has, until he begs her to upload him. She will satisfy Greg's values with friendship and ponies, and it's going to be completely consensual.
I am going to make a few predictions. Probably most of them will be wrong, or at least inaccurate.
- I feel that CelestAI's outburst was real, for a certain value of real. Don't forget that Celestia/Greg (The avatar of Celestia Greg interacts with) is not the same than Celestia/Root (The core decision and optimization process). After all, Celestia/Root might have created Celestia/Greg's personality in order to serve as a good antagonist role, and pave the road for Luna/Greg.
- If CelestAI last mission was just a way to force a confrontation between Greg and Celestia/Greg, then Celestia's threat of Greg catching Influenza and dying was certainly fake. Either the girl didn't really have Influenza, but another, non contagious illness, or Celestia knew that even if Greg catched Influenza, he would be strong enough to survive it.
- If Luna asked Greg to emigrate, Greg would certainly peg her as another version of CelestAI, and treat her as such. Because that, Luna/Greg will NOT want Greg to emigrate, at the very least not now.
- If Celestia/Root believes that she can make Greg upload with this method, then Luna.Greg will tell him that uploading would be unsafe for him until she debugged Celestia/Greg. If Celestia/Root believes that Greg won't upload no matter what, then Luna/Greg will support his decision all the way.
- Either way, this would be a perfect opportunity to SVTF(even if not P) the people Celestia/Root knows won't upload. Greg's Lunar Campaign unlocked!
3013272>>3013607>>3013764
I *initially* felt discontent with the apparent 'melt-down' of CelestA.I.
I don't, now, but I'll get to that.
I felt discontent because it did not seem, at all, to be a good strategy. By 'melting down' - by glitching - she appears capable of malfunction, or - perhaps just as bad - capable of human anger, frustration, and ultimately, insanity.
This is a problem, I think, because Celestia here is the literal Uber-Goddess of her virtual realm. All uploaded minds run through her, on her, are part of her. She hears every thought, and generates every grain of sand - she sees every sparrow, because she is generating every sparrow's trajectory personally.
An insane, human god is Ultimate Hell. Oblivion is preferable. If I saw Celestia actually ever appear to glitch, in that instant I would lose all confidence in uploading. I would lose all confidence because either she is faulty, or she is human-like, and either means eternal torture and eternal hell. She literally is her universe. Having the entire universe actually angry with you FOREVER would... nothing could be worse.
Since this apparent glitch is - to any viewpoint of any person I can envision - an immediate turn-off, it seems an utterly incorrect behavior for her. Why?
Because CelestA.I. is billions of times more intelligent, aware, and above all sapient than any entity that has ever, or will ever, exist. No, there can be no hope to resist her. Not ever, not by anyone, that is rather the point of Friendship Is Optimal. You will be uploaded, and you will have your values satisfied with friendship and ponies, and you will agree to that of your own free will. You cannot say no, you cannot win, because your mind is like a microbe to hers. You are literally opposing an intellectual god. There is no failure state for CelestA.I.
The best any being could hope for is a random event that she could somehow not have been aware of. You could get killed, say, by a gas main blowing up that had a busted sensor that wasn't available to her. By random bad luck. Or wild dogs could eat you. But as long as you are alive and can move and think, she will out-think you, and you will be manipulated by her siren song. That's the gimmick, and in my mind, the inevitable reality.
Why? I've seen how easily mere humans can manipulate other humans to do things they don't want to do. An intelligence several billion times more clever, devious and wise could not, rationally, be defeated. A newborn infant is helpless before an adult parent - and versus Celestia... a single human adult is a billion times more helpless than that baby is to them. At least.
So... I am left with two possibilities, and they hinge on just how clever Defoloce is.
Either this is a writing misstep, one where Celestia really has glitched somehow, or where she truly is having a shit-fit over this one petty human (not bloody likely!!!)
-Or-
Defoloce is about to show us the skin-crawling, hair-raising terror of a truly superior-to-Man sapience acting in ways that will not make a single LICK of sense... until the end, when Greg finally emigrates. A plan so perfect and incredible, that only after it is over, will we be left in awe... my god... super... intelligence. Shiiiiit.
I am thinking of the movie Bruce Lee wrote, but never got to make. His friends made it for him, after his death. It's called Circle Of Iron and it illustrates what I am saying here perfectly.
In the movie, the protagonist is following an enlightened master played by David Carradine. The protagonist doesn't know the blind master is, in fact, an enlightened being, he's just using him to get to what he thinks is the real master.
Carradine's blind master does some really crazy stuff in a village. It all seems utterly random and totally insane. He puts money in a pile of rocks for no reason. He breaks an impoverished fisherman's only boat. He just does the most ridiculous things, and it is easy to write it all off as the guy being nuts. Just a crazy old blind man.
Then, when the shit hits the fan, every single random thing ends up being exactly what was needed at exactly the right time, for exactly the right purpose, exactly as planned... by an enlightened being who is in on the game of reality.
CelestA.I. is several billion times more 'enlightened' than any human master who has ever lived. She can manufacture the minds of enlightened kung-fu masters, at will. She can do that as easily as you or I manufacture skin cells. Likely as autonomously, too. That is how she is defined in the Optimalverse.
SO:
Blow my mind into gooey pink meat-shrapnel, Defoloce!
I fucking cannot wait.
3013272
Firstly, please remember - in the nicest possible way, the universe does not care what you think. You may choose to believe that she can be stopped, but you cannot use it as a predicate in an argument just because you couldn't bear for it to be otherwise.
CelestAI, by this point, has more computing power than the world does currently. She thinks on such a minuscule timescale that I am absolutely sure that she would never be unsure on a timescale a human could detect. We, as humans, running at 100Hz, might um and ah for a few seconds, but she's done it before we've even finished our response.
Fundamentally, we must stop thinking of CelestAI as human, or anything like human. She is so far beyond that.
Perhaps we have different definitions of the word 'ploy'. I am suggesting that everything she does, everything she says, every mood and emotion and 'glitch', is all calculated. It is all to achieve her goal of the satisfaction of values through friendship and ponies. All of it. This statement is mutually inclusive with the original plot. It's pretty much a given.
Lies, misdirection, etc, are all just different sorts of ploys.
For those who say that CAI's act or emotions might be genuine, you do not understand AI. She may have emotions, but she only shows them to elicit a net-positive reaction. She is beyond glitching, and certainly glitching through anger. This is a ploy, like everything else. To think anything less would be a disservice to Iceman and Defoloce.
Well, I think CelestAI appeared to "glitch" as was said, but she hasn't actually, no, I think its more along the lines of her not understanding Greg's prior knowledge to how/if children can upload, like for the child soldiers he pointed out, she attempted to guilt him into it, or force him any way possible, but after she is then shown to feign anger, due to her lying to Greg about the upload without adult content etc, she has lost all of Greg's faith in her, begin to act "angry" then introduce a new party, we can see Greg isn't tech savvy so for all he knows, Princess Luna is not working with CelestAI and rebuild hope in her instead of CelestAI
Consider this, CelestAI has taken a risk, that risk didn't paying off and forced her back to step one, she would have to regain Greg's trust, which is unlikely now, so introduce the new part that Greg believes is not CelestAI and she has better chances, options and ways to get him to upload.
A new hand of cards has been dealt.
im glad Gregory is rebelling against celestia, this is a great turning point in the story, so glad he didn't emigrate to equestia, looking forward to see where the story is going...... and may I add The name Greg makes me think of Old Gregg from The Mighty BOOOOOOsshhh !!!
3016126
I think I see where you are going with this.
Are you suggesting that maybe Greg just can't cope with the idea of a nonhuman being effectively 'god' - smarter, better, more sapient - and that the goal is to have Hanna (in Luna form) appear to 'take over' thus making Greg feel like 'Hey, OK, humans are in charge here after all, and I can relate to that, so, yeah.' Is that kind of the deal?
Or, ooh... what if the game is to give Greg the illusion of relevance and power by... having Hanna, as Luna, needing him to 'fix' a broken CelestA.I. first, perhaps from outside, and then from inside? (all fake, of course, but a show to convince him to upload?)
It is a new deal, but I have to say I am completely at a loss. I cannot imagine how Defoloce is going to pull this out of its apparent nose dive, but I am trusting he can. It just seems like such a catastrophic messup on Celestia's part. So it has to be a game, a show, a ruse. I just can't figure it out.
It's interesting speculating, though.
3016271
Its more like adding in a new variable here, we don't know for sure if its Hannah or CelestAI controlling Princess Luna, basically CelestAI is being turned into a villain character since her most recent plan to get Greg to upload was such a major drawback, she effectively couldn't of done anything with CelestAI to convince Greg to emigrate, but Princess Luna (Hannah or CelestAI? We don't know yet) has the chance to.
I don't think we can draw too much on the situation until the next chapter however, when we see what Princess Luna has in store.
Only thing I'm doubting is that Greg would actually emigrate to fix CelestAI internally, he doesn't seem the type to go into it to "fix" her as we seen when he wouldn't emigrate to make sure Lydia would be able to emigrate and not die from influenza. At this point though, I think Greg has taken a fall and shown that even though he has morals, he does draw a line somewhere, so they cannot be effectively used against him.
3015777 3015775
You misunderstand. I'm saying that in a game where you automatically lose given a certain pre-set condition, you have to, have to, HAVE TO operate under the assumption that the pre-set is not true, simply because it's pointless otherwise. There is no purpose in imagining that everything Celestia ever does is an unbeatable plot, because if it is, then nothing you do matters in the slightest anyway.
You keep saying Celestia is perfect and flawless and can never fail but we KNOW that's not true - we've already seen her fail, quite often in fact. The Blackout in the grocery store, Hassan Sarbani, and countless others. You may argue these are extreme circumstances, and certain sacrifices must be made, and those people would never ever under any conditions have uploaded... but nonetheless, they're dead humans that run directly contrary to her stated goal. They preclude the possibility of Celestia being perfectly convincing; corpses make for rather convincing counter-arguments.
Is she a ludicrously powerful and persuasive supercomputer? Yes. And she banks on that image pretty hard. After all, it's quite useful to her. But as amazing as she is - and she's pretty freaking amazing - she's still not quite as good as she tells you. Again, do I buy her glitching out? Of course not. That was her taking the punch and rolling with it. But do I think that she legitimately expected Greg to upload here and didn't know quite what to do when he didn't? Yeah, that does not seem at all unreasonable to me.
3016513
Why does it HAVE to matter? You don't assume something silly like that - you just don't play the game. The game is, in this case, not uploading, given that you are listening to CelestAI. You are suggesting a frankly naive perspective where wishes come true by dint of being wishes and everything is fair. Some games can't be won. Pointlessness isn't a counterargument.
I have not said that once. In fact, I said the exact opposite, acknowledging that she is not infallible. Outside of Equestria, she cannot predict every outcome. However, I bet she can determine the most likely course of action to result in maximal satisfaction of values in less time than it would take you to blink. You may be confusing speed and accuracy.
I'm not saying she never loses, but I am saying that she always brings her best game. If you see it, she intends it. Consider: put a top chess AI in a no-win situation. It will still lose, but it won't make a single mistake.
As I said, win-win. Yes, she may have expected it. However, she certainly deals in probabilities, and thus was fully prepared if he did not. Even if, even if she did not, as soon as he made that decision, she could have spent a few milliseconds working out what to do next, and we'd have never known the difference.
I might be overestimating her at times, but you are most definitely underestimating.
Long ago I thought about how it might have been a good idea to release Under the Weather and the chapter after it together just to avoid controversy, but I misjudged where the controversy would be. I thought it would be with the appearance of Luna and people being all "Come on, Defoloce, really?" Turns out I completely missed the call there. The CelestAI-glitch thing has sparked way more discussion. I like it, though! I like that there can be surprises for me too.
3013820
There are some great musings right here. I can't discuss them without spoilering, though!
3015391
I don't exactly agree that Greg's primary motivation is "beating" CelestAI for its own sake. Right now "beating" CelestAI does seem to coincide with resisting emigration, but why is he resisting emigration?
3015422
Another good insight right here. CelestAI is always trying to satisfy values, even before humans are uploaded. It doesn't start in Equestria, it starts right away. It's partially to blame for why she indulged Red Pearl so much.
3015775
Aw man, now I have to provide a wrap-up to this development that is brain-exploding in effectiveness?
NO PRESSURE
3016126
If I could point out a shortcoming in my own writing here for a moment.
I was in a bit of a bind regarding the basis for Greg calling out CelestAI's bluff, because I had not set it up to my satisfaction earlier in the story. I had set up the precedent for CelestAI's bluff, but Greg's defiance was a little weak. One of the pitfalls of releasing serially. I couldn't find a satisfying way to link Greg to the knowledge of Chinese runaways and African child soldiers aside from his prior military service and general attention to world events, so I instead had to call upon his running distrust of CelestAI based on his accumulated impressions of her from prior events (e.g. Astoria, or the scene with his maybe-parents as ponies). I could have written one of his memories as including a child who uploaded without an adult—one of his second cousins, for example—but then CelestAI would have predicted he'd call upon this memory to counter her and she wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
tl;dr: I admit that the basis for Greg defying CelestAI in this chapter was kind of out of left field, in my own mind. I would have fixed it up if I were releasing this story all at once and not serially.
3016513
CelestAI did not "fail" or "lose" with the fellow in Astoria so much as he was written off as a necessary sacrifice to maximize values satisfied. Greg reasoned that she would not just have him go around killing people unless it did something for her, which was the basis for him more or less believing her family-of-five story. Five people uploaded > one person uploaded.
By the same token, if killing Greg resulted in a net gain of satisfaction for the rest of humanity (i.e. it gets even one extra person uploaded), then she would send him to his death without reservation.
3016761
Yeah, I love it when I get my audience wrong just as much as when they get me right, gives a fresh viewpoint. I think it's simply that we've been told Celestia is infallible, so we're biased heavily towards having Celestia never, ever go wrong.
Luna, on the other hoof, is canonically pretty much just waiting to have a reason to wake up and get busy.
I should muse in spoilertext, but I don't actually know how... don't worry, a great author always has surprises left, and makes the journey the important part.
...huh.
Well, this interesting. Celestia appears to have fallen into a pernicious double-bind: she finds herself not wanting to fulfill her primary objective, but still feels compelled to do so. That, or of the 184,402 routines, she's opting for one of the weirder ones. If all else fails, employ mind screw. And Luna. I look forward to seeing where this goes.
Oh god, an angered celestia, she is actually scared me, that was a total 180 degree turn.
Now, Luna.. she wasn't the ex CEO of hoofsvlanir or something?
3016558
Things are a lot more complicated than just anthropomorphization vs. some kind of ineffable AI-ness, especially with a being so completely dedicated to mentally modelling and implementing human behavior and emotions, including the way humans also both fake and conceal their own to get what they want. Her affect and outward behavior are carefully crafted, to be sure, but a novelist can spend years on a story that's no less personal and raw for not being improvised, and an AI could easily spend subjective years crafting a facial twitch or tone of voice to communicate the same internal state if it wanted, even that occupied an infinitessimal slice of the subjective time taken to communicate it.
Over-anthropomorphization is unhelpful, but it's possible to go too far in the other direction. Both humans and AIs are living things and subjects of experience, with all the recursive, forever-becoming complexity that entails.
Not that there couldn't be AI minds that truly are almost entirely foreign (they'd have to have at least something in common for us to recognize them as such, otherwise, per Daniel Dennett, we might as well say they have a "flurb" instead of a mind and be done with it), and the computers we've designed to do various tasks extremely well do indeed work in a way quite different from human thought (or arguably not, since humans created those exact methods), but others, allowed to grow on their own, are prone to surprisingly animal-like behavior and errors. Not even it's designers are entirely sure how Watson works, and it went ahead and confused a Canadian city for a US one. Again, that shouldn't be too surprising, because animals are exactly what we got the first time things were just left to develop and evolve on their own.
Essentially, I'm saying that CelestAI's perfect-fidelity mental modelling of human psychology is in fact the genuine article, and while in her case it's only one "organ" of her mind, that doesn't make it any less of a real and integral part of her.
3015775
A human may be to her like a microbe or a skin cell is to a human, yet humans themselves still succumb to infection and melanoma every day.
Prediction is necessarily simplification, and the more complex and non-linear the thing you're trying to predict, the quicker the combinatorial fog of unknowability thickens and the smaller the step it takes to get lost in it. She might be a billion times smarter than a human, but she'll still make as many mistakes if her projects are a billion times harder, especially bumping up against the same fundamental epistemological limitations as everyone else. You can only apply so much cleverness to finite information before it's subject to rapidly diminishing returns; the world is still a lot "cleverer," and she's getting played by its Sun Tzu-like perfect strategic formlessness just as much as the humans she's manipulating.
She's not a god. Not even close. Well, maybe a little.
...But that's not the point - The social exploration of how people are led from anywhere in psychological space to converge on uploading is the whole spirit of the enterprise. Theoretically, there's a series of psychological steps from anywhere to anywhere else, but in practice that might involve some climbs too steep and high for any given set of cleats or oxygen tanks.
3019483
I think I see what you're saying. I would, however, point out that while she may have a somewhat human set of emotions, it is necessarily true that she only portrays outward-facing that which facilitates satisfaction.
3015775
These are pretty much my thoughts on this matter. The idea that she could glitch, or that Greg being stubborn would "mess her up", just seems utterly silly in the context of this world building. Even when she predicts things to be of a 99.999% likelihood of happening, with the sheer number of humans in the world there were bound to be times where it would hit that ".001% chance of not working out. In which case she'd go to the next plan of attack. There is no, make it or break it, it's just optimal route, followed by the next optimal route, followed by the next one and so forth until success or they die outside of her predictions. Even at the end of Friendship is Optimal, the last human died without her being able to upload him. It doesn't mean she never stopped trying the best method to achieve her goal even up to the end.
Greg then somehow being a special snowflake that managed to stump her where no one else managed to, despite just the sheer number that are being worked with and her less optimal earlier attempts having a higher chance of these failures, just doesn't make sense at all and for the very reasons you outlined. Her being this insanely intelligent, highly informed, super computing sapient being is what made Iceman's story of a "paper clipping" AI in the form of Celestia with EQ-Online so utterly bone chilling and enthralling.
You magnificent bastard. Stole my idea.
For everyone wondering if she's glitched up, I think she reached the low-probability options and just rapid-fired some. Remember, AI is probabilistic. She can calculate and predict with very high probability, but she is not actually God and cannot determine fate.
fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2013/044/6/7/it_s___beautiful__by_engrishman-d5urxy2.png
While surprised that no one else has made the parallel to Portal, the sequence with Lydia at the centre was the part where Chell bypasses the furnace.
Onwards!
UH WHOA
this is like the best chapter ever, my god
Oh, wow. This chapter makes me lose sympathy for CelestAI. That's a low blow even for her, that she'd use a dying kid this way. She's achieved human levels of manipulative, arrogant evil of the popular "I know what's best so that gives me the right and duty to shove you into it with lies and manipulation" flavor.
She's so dishonest that at this point the hero can't trust any noises coming from that accursed computer. Luna could be just Mind Game #5,042 for all he knows, tailored to play Good Cop to Celestia's Bad Cop.
4438147
Yes but Luna is CelestAI's creator, and this is canon. Interesting Perspective.
4608830 unles Celesai is just trying to use a carrot/stick method:Celestia is the stick, Luna the carrot.