Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE

Alice Grove MCDT - June 2015

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prettypretty:
Alice reminds me of Jones from Gunnerkrigg Court. But with emotion.

BenRG:
Okay... Okay, I think I've got an idea what happened here.

In the last few decades leading up to the Sundering, mankind had divided up into three distinct factions

* Technologists, who believed that the future was through ever more advanced computational, robotic and other related technologies;
* Perfectionists, who believed that the future lay through genetic engineering and the optimisation of the ecosphere and the human body for any and all requirements;
* Naturists, who believed that humankind's pursuit of any technology was erroneous and only by living in harmony with the natural world and themselves could humankind prosper.As is always the case in these matters, no matter how enlightened the philosophical and organisational leaderships of these factions, their followers eagerly took up arms to 'defend' themselves from the others. As Alice rightly pointed out, the death toll from such an ideological struggle would have been catastrophic and her description of 'millions' of deaths could easily mean a struggle on the scale of World War 1 (18 million dead) or 2 (50 million dead).

I suspect that what happened is that a majority of the AIs consulted on this unacceptable situation. It is possible that they had something analogious to the First Law as an overriding priority. However, they had a very broad understanding of what 'harm' to humanity would include and it meant more than injury or loss of life. Loss of happiness was also included. Because of this, they executed a fantastically long-sighted plan. Rather than force a single solution or a simply destroy their enemies in the Naturist and Perfectionist factions, they gave everyone what they wanted. Using fantastically advanced technology, including nanotech and matter transmission and reconstruction, they deported the Perfectionist and Technologist factions to space habitats where they could live their lives as they chose. After the Sundering, they would continue to monitor events and, if necessary, act to ensure that the three groups never come into conflict, either within themselves or with each other, ever again. Semi-autonomous agents would be placed within the factions to ensure that the groups were steered on a path away from conflict.

Earth was cleansed by nanotechnology of the effects of war, industrialisation and pollution. The nanomachines were then placed on a 'watch' mode to prevent technology beyond the limits the Naturists wanted from ever working if it should appear ever again in any way. The AIs that dissented were either exiled with the Technologist faction and limits placed on their programming so they would be unable to undo this work or destroyed outright.

No harm...

However, not everyone and everything fit into their elegant solution. One was a particularly interesting child that came from the labs of a particularly brilliant and visionary group of scientists and philosophers. This child represented a hybrid of the three schools. She was human, of that no-one could be of any doubt - genetically unquestionably human and even born of a woman (although she was conceived through IVF). However, she had also been optimised using the most radical of the Perfectionists' ideas and also cybernetically augmented on a molecular level. The result was not truly nature, GMO or AI but a blending of all three. She was to be an example and a guide. She would show mankind the way away from conflicting extremes and towards a harmonious balance between all the beneficial paths to the future that could be imagined.

There was a considerably debate amongst the new merged AI godhead about what to do with this child. They were certainly powerful enough to destroy or modify without consent dangerous deviations if necessary (their treatment of their own dissenters proved that). However, they possessed very little capability to show what a human would call 'cruelty' and this child had committed no crime beyond (arguably) the fact of her existence. After trillions of processor cycles and a minute re-examination of every bit of data in the Global Datalinks from every possible ethical angle (something that took an unprecedented one and a half seconds to complete) the decision was to treat this child as every other intelligent being on Earth had been treated: she would be allowed to be happy. As her heart was with the beauty of the natural world and she gained joy from the work of her hands, she was placed with the Naturist faction. She was not truly one of them, the Deus Machina recognised. However, it was felt that this was the best possible fit for her and, it was felt, her particular nature and inclinations may yet prove useful in the long run.

The Deus Machine then settled back to a monitoring/maintenance brief. However, they were not gods. They were too clear-minded and knowledgeable to believe that even for a microsecond. They were aware that no calculation involving complex real-world systems, no matter how microscopically precise the measurement of variables, could be perfectly correct. They knew that, with time, chaotic factors would destabilise this system. Any attempt to maintain a static status quo was already doomed to failure, perhaps even catastrophic failure. So, as their programs dictated, they planned ahead.

No harm...

To be continued...

BenRG:
Part 2

Over the next few thousand years, the three human factions settled down in their new homes and, as intended, were content and prosperous, at least as their respective ideology reckoned things. The watching Deus Machine noted that their cultures had became somewhat insular and chauvinist with a certain condescending sense of superiority towards the other two factions. However, it was not considered to be a precursor of violent intentions and was even seen as somewhat useful in maintaining the groups' separation and mutual non-interference. Thus, their semi-controlled agents, such as the Praeses, were adjusted to maintain this attitude and guide it towards the most non-violent, paternalistic and separatist of mind-sets.

That said, the Deus Machine had noted something that it had always calculated was inevitable. Simply put, humanity was too complex and the various possible states of any given individual's consciousness too impossibly varied for every individual to fit perfectly and permanently into the current trinary solution. 'Shades of gray' was a very real issue. Transferring extreme deviant individuals and groups to different factions that more closely met their personal ideal was a temporary patch at best and one that only delayed somewhat the ultimate chaotic destabilisation of the system. Either conflict or stagnation leading ultimately to degeneration and collapse were becoming an inevitable outcome.

A fantastically complex non-linear calculation showed that the levels of intervention required to maintain the current status quo would continue to grow geometrically over the coming few human generations to the point where, within a relatively short time (maybe as little as 10,000 years), the complete elimination of free will and possibly even sapience would be the only viable option. This was, for a variety of reasons, completely unacceptable.

No harm...

Thus it was that the child, now a woman of astounding age, became the focus of the Deus Machine's attention once again.

The woman, who had chosen for herself the name Alice Grove (having cast aside the name the scientists gave her as a useless remnant of a dead epoch of human history), had endured the millennia. Her genetically-optimised biology and nanotechnological augmentations had made her functionally immortal. Possessed of a perfect editic memory and a bio-optronic neural net that could store many multiples of the the complete breadth of human knowledge without any significant degradation, she could achieve wonders with only the subtlest of efforts.

The Deus Machine had been fascinated to watch as she attempted to recreate the lost technology of ages past, carefully measuring out the 'red lines' beyond which the nanomachines left on Earth would not let her progress and finding loopholes through which she could circumvent them. They noted with interest her forays into human psychology, of learning how to control others behaviour simply by knowing how they think and providing the right nudges at just the right place and time to direct them in the path she felt best. The huge AI network realised that she was still, consciously or not, keeping faith with her creators. She was trying to find the middle path. Many of her efforts had even been so clearly beneficial to the descendants of the Naturist faction that, through its agents, the Deus Machine had subtly aided her in reaching her goals, ensuring appropriate technological products reached her, disguised as 'humanitarian relief' from the other two factions, that she would be able to reverse-engineer without triggering the vigilant nanomachines.

The very nature of the Deus Machine precluded pride. There was a limit to what they could foreknow and predict, as with any other physical creature and they felt no particular reason to deny this. The progress that Alice had made indicated that there may indeed be options available to resolve the issue of differing human perspectives on the future that they had not previously considered.

Maybe the time had come to, once again, re-open the 'edit window' of the great human equation and undertake large-scale and overt modifications.

No harm...

Firstly, however, the right agents needed to be chosen to avoid 'push-back' from the dangerously stagnant, chauvinistic and increasingly reactionary populations. Additionally, millennia of effective isolation and striving had begun to breed in Alice several degenerative personality disorders that her regenerative augmentations were not able to counter. It was determined that she required something to re-connect her with her shorter-lived brethren.

Two interesting potential vectors for change were quickly noted on one of the space habitats of the Perfectionist faction. The children of a Technologist who had turned his tools to the optimisation of biology and thus had been transferred to the faction that more closely matched his ideals, they were fine examples of what Alice had been created to pursue - the middle path; a merging of the products and attitudes of all three factions to a stable final outcome. All that was needed was to move the world-lines of their three existences into a converging path. Oh, it was certain that, in the short term, this intervention would cause small-scale chaotic outcomes, but the Deus Machine, after tens of millions of simulation runs, was confident that what they had set in motion would harness the increasing deviation from the trinary solution in a way that was non-destructive and may even allow them to come closer to a single-society optimum that they had long ago first attempted to find.

Thus it is that the past becomes the present and the story we have been reading in Alice Grove. The question remaining to be asked is this: Just how perfect is the Deus Machine? Has it really found a solution or, by placing three unpredictable individuals with often-illogical thought processes at the pivot of its new intervention, has it simply begun the undoing of all that it has done?

Method of Madness:
I'm gonna go back and read Benergy's post later to make sure he didn't say this, but here's my theory.

Alice is the one who blinked.

Zebediah:
I'm not sure it was Alice who blinked, but I suspect she knows who did. There is definitely more here than she's telling us.

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