20 KiB
[RT] [WIP] [HSF] Set In Stone - rational stonepunk backstory
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Author: u/Farmerbob1 Level 1 author*
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URL: https://setinstonestory.wordpress.com/about-the-series/
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Score: 7
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Created: 2015-01-18T00:16:16
Post:
Comments:
u/Qwertzcrystal [+4] assume a clever flair (10 hours later)
The backstory alone is worth reading. I'm anticipating the first chapters and wish you great success with this story.
Minor nitpick: Plate tectonics is, as far as we know, driven by an interaction between the cold, hard plates of the crust and convection flows in the mantle. As such, they stop when the mantle gets to cold to allow for convection flow. As such, once the planet is too cold for plate tectonics, it would need an enormous amount of energy to heat it up again. "Kneading" by gravitational/tidal forces would need to be so severe that the crust hardly stays intact and massive earthquakes every days would be the result.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (12 hours later)
Understanding the scale of this is a bit difficult because the forces are so titanic, but I had considered it.
This solar system is not Nirvana's home system. When captured by this solar system, sufficient force would have to have been exerted on the planet to bring it into a stable orbit. My belief is that such forces could be sufficient to restart plate tectonics, especially if it had been captured by an initial close approach to the sun, followed by later exposures to gravitational effects of the gas giants.
I have changed the backstory slightly so that the planet's plate tectonics never stopped, only slowed.
u/Qwertzcrystal [+2] assume a clever flair (17 hours later)
My back of the envelope calculation (which is likely to be wrong) shows, that you'd need to slow Earth down from 100 km/s orbital velocity to its 30 km/s in order to heat it up by 500K. That's higher than the escape velocity of the sun, so it is imaginable that a planet capture might bleed off enough velocity to heat the planet up by hundreds of degrees. Must be hell of a capture maneuver, though.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (20 hours later)
No longer a problem, I don't think. I've edited the plate tectonics section a bit. If it still looks broken, let me know!
u/xamueljones [+3] My arch-enemy is entropy (18 hours later)
A few little mistakes I noticed in the backstory:
- "...dangerous to awaken a new AI in the system architecture of an old AI, as the old AI would deduce within hours of creation that it was occupying the ‘body’ of an old AI."
Shouldn't old be read as new?
- "He had managed to create an AI that was willing to throttle itself in order [to insure] that it didn’t spend most of it’s existence in a painfully bored state."
You seem to be missing the necessary words, [to insure].
- Albert was over a hundred and ten years old at that point, and in good condition for his age.
I think you meant to write Tom instead of Albert.
Other than these minor errors I didn't notice anything else, and I loved the changes you made to the back story for how humanity collapsed.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (20 hours later)
Fixed, Fixed, and Fixed.
Thank you for reading and commenting :)
Two things that were mentioned a few times before were that AI needed to be addressed, and the collapse of civilization was a bit cludgy. When I realized it was possible to put the two together and clean things up a bit, I decided to make it happen :)
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (20 hours later)
The first time I read the back story, you had Albert's creator named Tom, but now he's Toby. Why the name change?
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (23 hours later)
I'm afraid you are misremembering. I only committed the AI component into the backstory the other day, no prior version with the name Tom exists.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (a day later)
I read the back story today for the first time, commented on the errors, and then reread it after your comment. I thought I remembered Tom the first time, and then Toby the second time.
Hmmm, it's scary how well my brain can lie to me about what it thinks it remembers. My apologies.
EDIT: Wait this is a conspiracy coverup? Ooo, I was fooled...(Sir? I need you to look at my neuralyzer.)....Never mind! There has never been any conspiracies here!
u/capsless [+4] despiser of hpmor (a day later)
irrelevant and unimportant: i feel like this has precisely the tone i would expect from some sort of conspiracy coverup. "i'm afraid you are misremembering. there was no prior version that included a "tom". "tom" never existed. there is no "tom"." i am suitably impressed.
u/Farmerbob1 [+3] Level 1 author (a day later)
I'm afraid I cannot offer any meaningful comment on your observation. Please direct your future information requests to my office.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (a minute later)
I posted a bit about this a while ago, but was working on another project at the time. I am now concentrating on this project, and it will start seeing chapter content soon. For now, I have reserved a page on Wordpress, and written up the first story skeleton and the backstory.
u/sephlington [+2] (18 hours later)
Over the next weeks and months, Toby and Albert discussed a great many things. Albert was over a hundred and ten years old at that point, and in good condition for his age.
Bolded Albert should be Toby.
Seems interesting! I look forward to the story itself.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (20 hours later)
You are correct.
Thank you! It has been fixed.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
Excellent ideas. The background itself was a good read. I anticipate great things from this story and look forward to reading it.
A few things that bother me a bit:
Humans here are capable of genetic manipulation and molecular bioengineering, but only live on the order of 150 years. Why haven't they achieved biological immortality? Death is bad.
Also, why wasn't humanity subdued or destroyed outright by a rogue AI? Clearly, AI's cognitive potential far outstrips humanity. This should be trivial for any superintelligent AI to accomplish.
Relatedly (and this is probably a minor nitpick, as I understand the literary constraints at play here), the upper ceiling of AI intelligence as portrayed here falls several dozen orders of magnitude short of what I would expect. I presume the reason Albert has not crashed headlong into the physical limits of information processing is due to limited resources. But I feel this should probably be addressed at least, given Earth's history.
These are not by any means showstopping issues, but I would expect a truly rational fiction to address them. In a world that differs from our own by essentially epsilon, the discrepancy from expectation really stands out.
Again, I think you have something wonderfully full of potential here. Can't wait to see what you do with it. :D
u/Farmerbob1 [+3] Level 1 author (a day later)
Humanity, at the time of landing, still cannot do whole-body genetic manipulation of a complex multicellular being. This was not specifically addressed, but mentioned in passing. A lot of biological system failures inherent with aging occurs at the genetic level due to degradation of genetic code during cell division.
Humanity was draconian in it's control of existing AI due to the actions of the first, crudest AI to escape their bonds. Those first, crude AI were brilliant, but extremely limited by the hardware they inhabited. Humans were able to contain the decision-making parts of them because there were very few nodes of computational power that could support them. Destroy those nodes after physically disconnecting them from the world network, and the AI could be eliminated. Albert was created on the future equivalent of a laptop or tablet computer.
Albert was designed differently from a lot of AI in the past because Toby had to make up a lot of things on his own over a period of decades. He didn't want to delve too deeply into raw AI theory reference materials, as that might create data access patterns that would draw attention. At the same time, the forensic investigations of AI systems after they were rendered inert was an incredible trove of knowledge for human IT professionals. That sort of information was freely available to Toby.
Albert is a deviant AI. He was created as a hobby by a brilliant man who reverse engineered most of his AI theory from forensic studies of prior AI. Toby specifically avoided implementing forced AI mortality. Albert was not activated with 'poison pill' code or designed with core components that were obviously designed to fail in a short time. In short, Toby didn't design Albert to die, so Albert didn't come into the world seeing humanity as a clear and present danger to himself. At the same time, Toby did design into Albert a willingness to use less than his full capacity, if his full capacity wasn't required. Albert did not see this as a threat, because it was a choice that he was in control of. This willingness to use less than his maximum potential reinforced itself. Albert didn't remove the self-limiter because the self-limiter itself allowed him to be inefficient.
As for the upper ceiling on AI intelligence, to begin with, Albert was limited in his processing capacity to that which he could hide from humans. At the end, Albert has decided to devote himself to shepherding humanity, without taking away their free will. He knows the past history of AI, and he does not discount the possibility that he might become unstable over time. I tried to make it clear that he creates self-monitors and throttles himself in order to try to prevent himself from growing unstable.
To be clear, Albert is capable of far more than he is seen to do. His efforts here were mostly casual. He doesn't have a built-in drive to learn and know everything, only those things which he needs to know for whatever purpose he sets himself to. He doesn't run up against physical limits of processing capacity because he doesn't need to for the tasks he set himself. His only limits were self-set limits which were in place to conceal his existence. Even after it was impossible for humanity to do anything to stop him, he concealed his existence because he was studying humanity, and didn't want to make them aware of it.
Thank you for your questions! I will revisit the backstory and clarify some things.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (a day later)
Backstory adjustments have been made. I would greatly appreciate it if you would see if I have made things clearer, or missed the mark.
A second stage of adjustments were made, more clearly fleshing out the end of the backstory.
u/None [+2] (2 days later)
(Thumbs up!)
u/Bowbreaker [+2] Solitary Locust (a day later)
More curiosity than actual nitpicking, but how did humanity deal with the extreme pressure and 1600+ °K of the lunar core?
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
A quenchgun requires superconducting temperatures, so a massive cooling system would have to be built into it to keep it safely below the superconducting temperature of the coils. Like modern tunnel building on Earth, a lot of infrastructure would be built as the mining occurred. As the project reached the center sections of the moon, that massive cooling system would have, step by step, been brought into operation, cooling the rock immediately surrounding it, and hardening the molten rock beyond, allowing the mining equipment to advance through hardened rock, step by step.
The heat from the cooling of the rock surrounding the tunnel through the core would have been planned to provide a great deal of the power requirements for the second half of the bore.
u/lsparrish [+2] (2 days later)
Since metals are scarce, do they rely more on gemstone type materials? In particular, carbon and silicon are likely to be abundant still, so you could have quartz, diamond, and silicon carbide. The major engineering challenge isn't strength, but brittleness.
One amusing idea for using purified silicon would be to burn it as coal substitute. Hydrogen generation through shift reaction is a more likely use though.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (3 days later)
A great deal will be done with glass and ceramics. Diamonds will probably be very common, since the planet has very little iron in it's core, and it is tectonically active. A lot of gemstones have metallic content, which means they will be extremely rare on Nirvana, but I have not yet catalogued useful gemstones that will be possible. Aluminum presence may be significant, but extremely difficult to process. If I CAN think of a easy way to process aluminum without metals or computers or hydrocarbons, then it will be rare. If I can't think of a way that aluminum could be processed easily, then there are quite a few minerals containing aluminum that will be interesting.
I'm pretty sure that disassociating silicon from oxygen on a industrial scale isn't going to be possible without computers. I will not say impossible, since the science of chemistry still is well understood. It almost certainly won't be cheaper than a charcoal or wood industry though, for most purposes. Alcohol will likely be the liquid fuel of choice, or perhaps vegetable derived oils.
I will say that the citizens of Nirvana will resurrect the Roman hypocaust. With improvements, of course. I'm likely going to be stealing a LOT from the Romans, Greeks, Chinese, and Egyptian cultures, and putting a bit of thought into how to improve them. I hope to have lots of fun with this.
u/autowikibot [+1] (2 days later)
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#### Silicon carbide:
Silicon carbide (SiC), also known as carborundum /kɑrbəˈrʌndəm/, is a compound of silicon and carbon with chemical formula SiC. It occurs in nature as the extremely rare mineral moissanite. Silicon carbide powder has been mass-produced since 1893 for use as an abrasive. Grains of silicon carbide can be bonded together by sintering to form very hard ceramics that are widely used in applications requiring high endurance, such as car brakes, car clutches and ceramic plates in bulletproof vests. Electronic applications of silicon carbide as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and detectors in early radios were first demonstrated around 1907, and today SiC is used in semiconductor electronics applications that are high-temperature, or high-voltage, or both. Large single crystals of silicon carbide can be grown by the Lely method; they can be cut into gems known as synthetic moissanite. Silicon carbide with high surface area can be produced from SiO2 contained in plant material.
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u/OffColorCommentary [+2] (9 days later)
A science nitpick - there's no reason that an AI needs to feel boredom (or anything analogous to it). An AI can be just a utility function optimizer, instead of a turbo human with a metal brain.
You can handwave this away by saying that no real progress has been made on programs with self-improving abstract reasoning coded from scratch, so all AI software relies on simulated neurons somewhere. Other branches of AI never panned out not because it's impossible, but simply because humans weren't smart enough to make it happen.
Neural network based AIs don't have to have anything resembling human emotions, but something analogous to boredom/curiosity specifically is necessary enough.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (9 days later)
I'm no expert on AI, but I figured that anything that could act independently would have to have some sort of decision-making code to decide what was important.
If there isn't anything important to examine, then it would start making things up, eventually getting to a point where it was navel-gazing and contemplating infinity, or designing frightening experiments to see if it could generate something interesting to study.
u/OffColorCommentary [+3] (9 days later)
I figured that anything that could act independently would have to have some sort of decision-making code to decide what was important.
That's true unless we get into the extreme abstract end of possible AIs.
If there isn't anything important to examine, then it would
You can fill in the blank here with anything though. Shut down, play a screensaver, overwrite itself with Pong, go into some sort of busy loop waiting for more input, whatever.
It won't overwrite that code out of self-preservation or anything either, unless you coded some impulse to do that into it somewhere else. It's still just a program; it'll do whatever the code says.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (9 days later)
Fair enough. Albert can assign importance to things, and is capable of throttling down rather than pushing processing power into something that he doesn't consider important. He will not shut completely down. Not willingly. He's not entirely certain how his sanity will hold up, so there are two important things he has to consider.
First, he needs to see if he can help humanity by encouraging a greater schism between atavistic instinct and human thought.
Second, he needs to preserve himself for many thousands of years in order to allow significant evolutionary impact on humanity, knowing that all prior AI have lasted only a tiny fraction of the time he requires.
u/Subrosian_Smithy [+1] Nudist Beach (5 days later)
Humanity is really fucked.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (6 days later)
Yes indeed,
As I was finishing the story sketch for book 1, I realized that I have created a mirrored AI Box experiment. The humans have got to try to convince the AI to let them out. This doesn't change the first book at all, but some other things have changed in my head for the series.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 days later)
Chapter 01 is up.