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self_made_human  Grippy socks, grippy box  2d ago (open.substack.com)   991 thread views

Avatar's Dirty Secret: Nature Is Just Fancy Infrastructure

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What if Avatar isn't actually about environmentalism vs. technology, but about recognizing superintelligent infrastructure when you see it? A deep dive into why Pandora's "natural" ecosystem looks suspiciously like a planetary-scale AI preserve, complete with biological USB-C ports, room-temperature superconductors growing wild, and a species of "noble savages" who are actually post-singularity retirees cosplaying as hunter-gatherers.

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James Cameron gets spoken of in the same breath as Spielberg, but his movies lack introspection. He is an amazing filmmaker, amazing character writer but not a great philosopher.

His 2 most lasting works : Terminator and Titanic are character stories experiencing a larger than life event. The thing about character stories, is they're carried by great actors who bring those characters to life. Kate Winslet, Leo, Arnold and Linda Hamilton are the heart and soul of those movies. In contrast, not only are the actors of Avatar forgettable, but they're slathered in literally dehumanizing CG. It's not wonder that the colonel remains the most memorable character from the series.

I don't think there is a complex allegory hiding behind the Avatar movies. It was made in an era of peak environmentalism. "Humans are warlike creatures that will destroy the world for oil." I don't think there is much else to it. And I haven't seen anything from Cameron that'd make me change my mind on it.

I think Cameron's tale of noble primitivism is especially imperilled by his massive use of CGI, SFX talent and all the technical wizardry that only a huge industrialized civilization can provide. It's as if Kaczynski was using AI agents and hypersonic missiles, starting a VC-backed startup for the cause of destroying technology.

Also, it is kind of funny to imagine humanity burning all the enormous fruits of their fusion age infrastructure with desperately, insanely incompetent management. As you say, tactical nukes and long-range missiles would make it child's play to crush the natives.

But what if the company that got the contracts doesn't want to use nerve gas or clusterbombs against the natives? What if they want to sell lightly armoured mechs with convenient glass windows for the Navi to shoot through? Then they'll need to buy more light mechs. The contractors on the ground don't want an in-and-out raze-and-burn, they want a forever war. The advisors, the logistics people, the starships transporting troops around... It's all a pretend war to extract money from somebody.

What if the tools to fix Earth are already there but 'ethical reasons' prevent them being used? Some idiot politician banned doing things the right way after some dumb scare so they have to mine unobtanium from light years away and throw away soldier's lives with comically stupid gear rather than embarrass the political consensus?

Anyway, the humans have great aesthetics: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-YM8mCG7Co

It's as if Kaczynski was using AI agents and hypersonic missiles, starting a VC-backed startup for the cause of destroying technology.

'The Master's tools can absolutely dismantle the Master's house,' said Kaczynski, watching from his penthouse as smoke rose on the horizon. 'With great efficacy.'

I find the juxtaposition of treatment of this post between /r/scifi and /r/Avatar to be pretty funny. /r/Avatar is pretty hostile to anyone analyzing a movie in an unintended way. I guess you broke their magic. /r/scifi, meanwhile, is both somewhat weary of Avatar and also open to good scifi.

I think Avatar fans are something else. Anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism is one thing, but for anyone to take it seriously, you'd need a good alternative. Avatar proposes that we give up all our stuff and just go anarcho-primitivist but in a super idealised fantasy world. That's kind of retarded. I feel like a lot of them also treat this movie as gospel about how the West treated the natives, but the natives in this movie don't fight each other or brutally take each other's land. It falls short in so many ways. I guess the anti-colonialists lack material in pop culture, so they have to go for stuff like this. I really, really don't like the whitewashing of history, especially by people who hate the west and hate capitalism and want to evict everyone from America so they can leave it to the natives. Does James Cameron want that? Probably not, I just wish he would come out and say that.

You noticed eh? So did I. I was asking Claude where good places to share my post might be, and even it noted that I would likely get plenty of pushback on /r/Avatar. If the goddamn LLMs have a dim opinion of a subreddit, I wasn't surprised in the least. I still went ahead because eyeballs are eyeballs.

I was tempted to add in many of the criticisms you've raised yourself, but I decided against it in the end. I think it's enough that Avatar's setting undermines its own messaging, and that those who don't see that will never see it. Those who have any capacity for critical thought are more likely to be like you or me.

In my experience, it's only the niche subs that actually have people with IQs above room temperature. I'm content with having >0 net up votes on my post on /r/Avatar, that's more than I expected!

What if Star Wars is actually about post-singularity retirees cosplaying as greasers and long-haul truckers?

If you care to write that thesis, I will read it. With an eyebrow raised, of course, but I read most things!

I'm not sure what's to write that can't be extrapolated from your Avatar take.

The world of Star Wars is obviously post-singularity. The things the humans do like vehicle maintainance or piloting based don't make sense for humans to do based on the observable technology. A lot of the central conflict has to do with long haul trucking trade and shipping .

The state of the art of AI in Star Wars isn't much better than today. Funnily enough, I recall that there was minor plot point, where a malevolent bounty hunter droid of minor infamy ended up seizing control of the Death Star's mainframe, and began growing into a superintelligence.

Unfortunately it had very bad timing, as mere minutes later the place got blown up in a spectacular fashion.

So much of the Star Wars franchise doesn't plain make sense. It's soft science fantasy at best, and even I'm not shameless or contrarian enough to earnestly make that claim.

Funnily enough, I recall that there was minor plot point, where a malevolent bounty hunter droid of minor infamy ended up seizing control of the Death Star's mainframe, and began growing into a superintelligence.

Lame EU stuff is lame. Let's keep it to the OT.

The state of the art of AI in Star Wars isn't much better than today.

I don't think this is really true (except insofar as 'not much better' means we're on the brink of the singularity outselves). Or more over, I don't think it's really knowable. The humans are incredibly incurious about digital technology or any tech outside of raw mechanics. C3-PO, R2D2, and the few other examples in the OT are shown to be essentially sentient and human level intelligence or greater, albeit weighed down with quirky personalities.

You can extrapolate the complete replacement of knowledge work by droid/AI in the star wars universe, and lo, we don't really encounter anyone who's a white collar knowledge worker. It's a bunch of blue collars - farmers, truckers, military, performers, bartenders, machine operators, etc.

The only time we really do see computers, it's R2D2 interfacing with them, and then it's via C3PO translating.

Now imagine an internet where all code is build by AI agents, there are few to no jobs left in coding. Fewer and fewer people even know how to code as it's economically pointless to learn. Meanwhile AI continues to develop coding langauges and standards on its own, in a way further inscrutable to humans. Technical humans by this point are mostly prompters with a high level enough knowledge of the basic data structures to know what to ask for and where. Eventually even those are replaced by ChatG-3PO's who act as a 'personality' mediator between humans and the inscrutable digital world. Running out of much more to train AIs on, it turns out that 'human-like' trained LLM personalities for droids end up with quirkly personalities, with the default being snivellingly defferential not much unlike ChatGPT itself or C3PO.

Meanwhile unions preserve and expand protections for classes of physical jobs, and politicians protect themselves. Technology is not allowed to replace certain labor, and many robotics are artificially crippled to prevent them from displacing blue collar workers.

You end up in a world where knowledge work and digital prowess have completely atrophied to the point of it being basically behind a veil, while meat-space jobs have been preserved. Due to a combination of LLMs being impenetrable, intentional design for palatability, and crippling, your AI assistants end up as mild-mannered, slightly annoying droids, and the more technical work is done by barely comprehensible AI's mostly operating in the shadows with some existing in a liminal intermediate state (R2D2).

The human world that is left is blue collar work, military, and politics.

Fun stuff, but that's really not post-singularity. It's not even post-scarcity!

Lando is white collar.

Technically sure. But not really. He is a supervisor of an oil rig. You would still have managers and capital owners in this world. It still fits with the described knowledge worker atrophy.

Consider also that he got that position by gambling. Not as a career path or through credentialism. Again lending credence to the theory that knoweldge work is dead and everything is a blue collar larp.

I think part of the appeal of Star Wars is that since the vibes are compelling, and there are seeds of interesting ideas, it’s a fertile bed for fan fiction and headcanon. Have you noticed that Harry Potter also had great vibes, interesting mini-ideas, and also has some of the most prolific fan fiction? No accident, I say. Rigor and internal consistency don’t allow projection as easily.

Avatar’s vibes to me are more visual and spectacle (maybe a bit of the anarcho-primitivism) and the plot is incoherent to the point where I think there are only like, two interesting ideas and they have been done better elsewhere. Plenty of fiction already about VR/projected consciousness (the Matrix, Altered Carbon, endless VRMMO fictions), encounters with aliens (up to half of all sci-fi), a sort of living world (Speaker for the Dead, Gaia theories), even treating them like past human undesirables (District 9), or exploiting them (Mass Effect?).

We also simply don’t see enough of the actual world to get a sense of what humanity is like nor the Na’vi more broadly. The second movie only partly fixes this problem but mostly not. Star Ward to continue the analogy not only gives us visual spectacle but we also see humans and aliens in a variety of worlds and socioeconomic settings from which you can make interesting extrapolations.

Re: Avatar fiction, Semper Victoria is very good, although doesn’t take the transhumanist angle.

Rather, it just extrapolates directly from the end of the first film. The original mission has failed and Earth society is on the verge of ripping itself apart from cascading fuel shortages. So the UN does the only thing it can do: cobble together all the resources they can still access, send one more expedition in a Hail Mary flight across the stars, and promise Parker Selfridge immunity from prosecution if he agrees to act as advisor for the mission.

It’s very well written and the author does a great job of keeping the stakes high and the characters relatable and non-preachy. To quote them:

This is not going to be a "humans show up and curb-stomp the na'vi" kind of story. Nor is it "Humanity is perfect, na'vi aren't". I'm going to show humanity as we are, the good, the bad, the ugly. the noble and the savage, the idealist and the cynical, etc.

Even if you're a huge fan of the Na'vi, I think you can still enjoy my tale. Give it to the first few chapters at least and let me know what you think.

I've come to think of Avatar mostly as a passion project for James Cameron. He likes the blue aliens and the dumb 90s environmentalist message, and he's already made a bajillion dollars and has the credibility to do whatever he wants, so he's just doing what he likes.

I don't particularly like it myself, and I don't think it makes much sense or bears up to scrutiny, but he likes it, and that's all that matters. Probably this all resonates with something deeply personal and relevant to Cameron as an individual in a way that doesn't land for anyone else.

Well, there are worse things for an eccentric and wealthy director to do in the final phase of his career. Good for you, James. I sincerely hope he's enjoying yourself.

I liked it for the unique take on 3D, which only he could do. Unfortunately, Avatar 2 was a mix of 24fps and something much higher, switching at the least inopportune times.

I don’t want to watch a video game, I want cinema. Heck, I think I wouldn’t mint in on 20fps, or 12, as long as it’s consistent.

Its a hell of a vehicle to create tense action scenes showcasing cool-looking scifi military materiel vs. equally cool-looking fantasy creatures.

And from a writing perspective, coming up with clever-yet-plausible ways for the technologically inferior faction to win over the industrialized and heavily armed invaders (that isn't just Zerg rush tactics) is a fun exercise.

Its a hell of a vehicle to create tense action scenes showcasing cool-looking scifi military materiel vs. equally cool-looking fantasy creatures.

Now I wonder what a movie adaptation of Leviathan would look like... Hey, wait a minute, there is an anime adaptation! I did not know this; I'll have to check it out.

My favorite entry in this particular genre has to be the Anime Miniseries Blue Sub No. 6, where you have advanced submarines duking it out with mutated whales and weird hybrid creatures.

And the morality occupies a bit more a gray area than Cameron dares portray.

He's got fuck-you money, I've got a 9-5 and writing as a hobby. He's doing it better. At this point, he definitely can be indulged if he wants to flame out and make his own Megalopolis, Avatar had mass appeal.

I would be more interested in watching the Vernor Vinge version of Avatar, where it's heavily implied they're a downgraded planet that used to be in a higher zone. As it is, I only watched the first movie.

I enjoyed the entire Zones of Thought series, but alas, the mechanism underlying it is even more fictional than anything Avatar has to offer. It's remarkable how hard the scifi is, the ISV Venture Star gets us nerds really going.

but alas, the mechanism underlying it is even more fictional than anything Avatar has to offer.

Wasn't it very, VERY specifically implied that the "zones of thought" were a mechanism implemented by a (much!) 'higher power' to prevent rogue malicious superintelligences from simply eating the entire galaxy?

Yes, which is how it is applied in the finale of Fire.

I'm pretty sure that's explicitly stated. It's a cradle of sorts to make sure that new sapiences can arise without getting eaten by the sort of (to us) megapredators which would otherwise infest the levels at which things like us are generated.

I don't recall any explicit statement of it, other than maybe some of in-novel forum poster speculating out loud.

But literally every other piece of it was sort of set out.

  1. Superintelligences exist, and are in fact common/inevitable in the higher zones. They could easily squish any lower-level civ if they cared to.

  2. Superintelligences occasionally disappear after transcending into something even higher in existence.

  3. Superintelligences can set up all sorts of long-term plans and have hidden mechanisms in place to facilitate those plans (specifically, how the Blight used the Skrodes).

  4. Every time the Blight arises it tries to eat the entire galaxy, and thus only those Civilizations in the slow zones would be 'safe,' so the creation of the slow zones was presumably a failsafe to keep malicious intelligences from ever 'winning' fully.

  5. Finally, the Countermeasure does have a way to expand the slow zone on demand, although its obviously a very difficult, involved, energy intensive process, so it wouldn't be done arbitrarily.

It definitely resembles the concept of reformatting or otherwise partially wiping a hard drive to remove a virus that has managed to infect enough files that a simple hunter-killer program won't do.

As has long been theorized [citations from various sources, three known to Ølvira; the theories cited are of long standing and nondisprovable] the Zones themselves may be an artifact, perhaps created by something beyond Transcendence for the protection of lesser forms, or [hypothetical] sentient gas clouds in galactic cores. - "Twirlip of the Mists"

Twirlip sounds like an utter kook ("Appears to be seriously out of touch. Program recommendation: delete this poster from presentation."), but one of its other theories (zone interface instability being connected to the Blight) was right on the money, and even its craziest theory ("Hexapodia as the key insight", "If these humans have three pairs of legs") sounds a tiny bit less crazy when you realize the Skroderiders have six wheels...

Ah so they did pretty much put the pieces together for the reader.

Also this was very prescient of the "forum of obsessives throws wacky theories around and analyzes tons of evidence and manages to stumble upon something close to the truth" phenomena that sometimes occurs nowadays.

Not that prescient, as the net in AFUTD was heavily inspired by the early 1990s Usenet computer network, and the phenomenon you describe existed just as much on Usenet back then as on Internet fora today.

Was it? I don't seem to recall that being the case. And even if that's the nominal explanation, there's no way in hell it would work IRL.

there's no way in hell it would work IRL.

Like FTL and several other things. Obviously, if Vernor Ving could implement either IRL he would be doing this rather than writing books.

Writing good stories with say FTL is much easier than inventing working FTL.

I mean, the ending of the first book [SPOILERS] involves the protagonists figuring out how to activate a 'weapon' against the Blight, the rogue malicious superintelligence that was coming to destroy them, and the weapon's effect was to expand the slow zones of thought, trapping the Blight in a zone of thought that it couldn't exist in. And condemning many, many other civilizations to doom, incidentally.

So the existence of the weapon (called "Countermeasure") that can expand and presumably contract the zones of thought themselves would be a hint that said zones are an artificial construct, and either came from the person that created the galaxy, or some previous friendly superintelligence ascended to a high enough level to mess with laws of physics, and decided to do the rest of the galaxy a solid in case a malicious intelligence popped up.

I understand how that makes sense in-universe, but my objection is that makes no sense in the real world. I see no viable mechanism by which a real ASI could pull that off IRL, without simply forcing everyone into a simulation it controls. As I've said in a reply to @TitaniumButterfly, not even God can make 2+2=5.

It is a good conceit for a story, but it doesn't apply to reality.

What do you think of the use of dimensions in The Three Body Problem?

Uh.. It's fine? I'm genuinely okay with "hard" scifi having speculative elements. My original objection was solely that Avatar represents harder scifi than Vinge's work. Nothing in Avatar outright breaks the laws of physics as we know them. This isn't a particularly big deal, since speculating on future advances in physics and engineering is part of the appeal of science fiction in general.

Hard to analogize, but I could think of it like how humans can curate a garden or similar patch of earth to be more orderly than random nature, and constrain where and how the plants grow by application of fertilizer, pesticide, water, herbicide, etc. etc.

And we humans like to combat weeds that would otherwise outcompete and choke out the rest of the plants.

If there are higher dimensions that we can't successfully perceive let alone access, a superintelligence might be able to hide machinery or mechanisms or in there that do the curating along strictly defined boundaries to keep certain variables in certain regions within specific bounds. From the "plants" perspective they can't perceive this interference other than noticing some other areas growing faster or slower than they are.

If there was a superintelligence that wanted to prevent weeds overrunning the galactic garden, they might set up a portion of the garden were plant growth is constrained and slow, and have a process in place to spray a massive does of weedkiller (which also takes out 'good' plants) on any sector that gets overrun.

We, as plants, can't really understand how the herbicides work but the effects would be quite observable.

Yeah it's near the end of the first book.

And even if that's the nominal explanation, there's no way in hell it would work IRL.

I'm sure you know better than transcendent superintelligences =P

Huh. I mean, at that point, you might as well say that a superintelligence can make 2+2=5!

The only way I can see this working is if it took control of the lightcone, and then forced everyone else into a simulation where it had perfect control.

To be honest I don't know what your actual objection is.

My objection is that I strongly doubt that even a superintelligence can enact such a sweeping change to the laws of physics such that it could meaningfully constrain the ability of different levels of something as vaguely defined as "intelligence" within the galaxy. The only remotely feasible way I can envision to do this would be to create a universe from scratch, or at least run a simulation where you have utter authority.

Superintelligence != omnipotence, even if they can be ridiculously powerful.

This assumes that laws of physics are universal and immutable which we are not in a position to judge.

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Is this a thing? Where can I find more?

I meant I only watched the first actual Avatar, not the other two actual Avatars. But if you haven't read A Fire upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, they're quite good.

Yes I've read both and loved them. The latter held up better on a second read, imo, whereas I couldn't get back into the first.

I'm 99% sure you're asking "is the Vernor Vinge version of Avatar a thing", and my answer is a useless "no"; at least I'm not finding any hint of it on fan fiction sites.

But on the 1% chance you're unfamiliar with Vinge and asking "is this sort of science fiction universe you're talking about a thing", I feel like I have to speak up to tell you to go get a copy of A Fire Upon The Deep now. The way he weaves primitive and high technology together into one coherent and fascinating story puts Dances With Smurfs to shame.

Don't worry I've read plenty of Vinge. Was looking for more of a Vingian take on Avatar.

As good place to ask as any. When in A Fire Upon The Deep nobody in-unverse could understand the purpose of a broadcast sent by the Blight involving humans, which led to the false speculation about our unique susceptibility, was it to poison the well against similar, but in that case true, accusations against another species?

I don't think there was anything explicitly in the text to that effect, but it's at least a really good fan theory. It was only good luck that it didn't work, arguably: if Blueshell actually had been subverted, Ravna's genocide-survival-intensified insistence to the contrary could have killed them all and lost the Countermeasure to the Blight.

The other likely reason to turn everyone against humanity would be the possibility that the human-stolen Countermeasure might get revealed and/or destroyed as collateral damage in the ensuing pograms. The Blight would prefer to find, seize, and analyze it, not destroy it outright, but at that time in the story the Blight had very little idea where it had been taken, and so might have decided to take a gamble with wider variance but less extreme risk.

Is this where we start bitching about how the two Avatar movies make no goddamn sense whatsoever and how James Cameron is a fucking hack who doesn't know how to write?

Because I'll do it. I'll fucking well do it.

Props for the essay, but it's stuff I've seen before. Hell, it's pretty much my original take away from the first movie.

And Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri did it all better anyways.

Thanks btw; I actually missed the link and thought this was just a really tiny (but intriguing) prompt.

He knows how to write a compelling screenplay which he can then direct. Most directors can't even do that, so it seems a bit unfair to call out James Cameron specifically.

Avatar would have more of a cultural impact if he worked with some good sci fi writers to do some spinoff novels to expand the world. Unfortunately he wants to do it all himself between his submarine adventures so it's a little more simplistic than is ideal.

I mean, if that's what you want to do, be my guest. The storytelling in Avatar is... simplistic at best.

Well, see, that's the problem.

It's the exact opposite.

The reason the first movie drew so many nerds and geeks to it, despite the majority of them actively disliking said movie and it's resolution is that James Cameron actually put in the work to build verisimilitude. The entire setup and world-building of the first movie - if you do the background research - is actually really, really good. He basically sets up a cyberpunk dystopia in a very subtle way to explain the whys and wherefores.

Some of the background aspects that always stuck with me was the brutal albeit realistic risks that people signing up for a tour on Pandora would take. You weren't signing up for a tour on a vacation world, but a potentially deadly mission to what amounted to a remote Antarctica Research facility, only ten times worse. If your cryo-pod failed during transit, they would quietly euthanized you, as they couldn't spare the resources to keep your sorry ass alive for several years, and you just weren't that valuable. If you got injured past a certain point, again, they just euthanized you. It spoke of a ruthless business with very limited resources that treated thier employees like replaceable cogs, and with the same care. Brutal, albeit realistic and understandable.

And then there's the ISV Venture Star, which is one of the most gorgeous ships in movie history. Beautiful thing.

The second movie basically takes all the world-building in the first movie and throws it in the trash. Turns out, no, full-brain uploads and backups are a thing, and can be done in a trivial fashion. Whoops, the head security guy knocked up someone and the resultant child got left behind, despite the previous attitude toward RDA's own employees meaning said child likely would have been aborted without so much as a raised eyebrow or blush.

Avatar 2 basically went full Eclipse Phase without working out the implications of what going full Eclipse Phase actually means. Given all the homework done to make the first Avatar movie reasonably work(compared to other movies, atleast), it points overall that James Cameron likely had nothing to do with the writing/worldbuilding and is basically making shit up for the second movie without thinking it through and going all in on selling a message.

Granted, that's what the first movie did, but it atleast did the work to make it actually interesting.

Whoof. Okay. Glad to get that off my chest. All right, I'm done.

10/10 rant, and I agree with most of it. Only minor quibble is that I believe that the mind uploads were brand new technology developed in between the two movies. As I described in my essay, its existence makes the hunting of sentient whales even more of a questionable value add.

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