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self_made_human  amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi  3mo ago (open.substack.com)   1647 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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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.

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