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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

open.substack.com

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?

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.

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.

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