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self_made_human  Grippy socks, grippy box  4d ago (open.substack.com)   1174 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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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.

If they aren't, and it is ever possible that someone other than the Author-Empowered God Stand-In ever claims (or even challenges) that power, then there is not just no story, but no possibility of a story, because the superintelligence would just turn off the laws of physics that permit its enemies to have ever existed. A superintelligence would need to derive a benefit from the existence of a non-sterile galaxy commensurate with the risk of another superintelligence popping up in it and saying "Fuck you and the light-cone you rode in on."; even if it doesn't go full paperclip-maximizer, shouldn't a superintelligence be like "Hey, the fact that failure is a dramatic possibility means that we should pre-empt this?"

It's just unsatisfying to me, and more so to pretend that being able to change the INT_MAX global variable is anything other than either evidence of pure simulationism or about as sci-fi as the Force. It's a conceit I was able to go along with when I read one of the books, but what was trying to come across as mysterious just felt half-baked to me. Like, what if I invent blargle-snarfing, which is applying reason and inference to data available to me but not actually thought? How is 'thought' defined and gatekept?

If they aren't, and it is ever possible that someone other than the Author-Empowered God Stand-In ever claims (or even challenges) that power, then there is not just no story, but no possibility of a story, because the superintelligence would just turn off the laws of physics that permit its enemies to have ever existed.

Now you're just making the opposite mistake, which is assuming that the laws of physics are entirely mutable.

A superintelligence would need to derive a benefit from the existence of a non-sterile galaxy commensurate with the risk of another superintelligence popping up in it and saying "Fuck you and the light-cone you rode in on."; even if it doesn't go full paperclip-maximizer, shouldn't a superintelligence be like "Hey, the fact that failure is a dramatic possibility means that we should pre-empt this?"

This doesn't make any sense from any angle. There's no way to evaluate the values of a superintelligence. Also, there's no reason to assume they wouldn't have plenty of time/ability to stop such a thing from happening, nor foreknowledge that it would be impossible for a competitor to spring up fully formed.

The implication in the book is that galaxies are nurseries where the (distant) equivalent of new child deities arise, and they care to allow that to continue.

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