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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 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.

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