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self_made_human  amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi  5mo ago (open.substack.com)   1778 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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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.

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