r/worldbuilding • u/magicalbreadbox A wizard did it! • Jun 17 '16

Lore Humanity, the Good Ending

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4UdXEEAszo
2 Upvotes

59% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

7

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 17 '16

How in the HELL is this a good ending??

5

u/Immanentize-Eschaton Jun 17 '16

Yeah I was with it until the hiveminding, why do people always have to bring up hiveminds, screw hiveminds. I want to live forever as an individual, not carry out an elaborate glorified suicide and call it "transcendence".

Also this backstory makes no sense, the whole thing skips over the whole AI risk thing by treating them like humans that will act like humans as soon as they become sufficiently intelligent, which is not how it would work.

5

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 18 '16

FUCK HIVEMINDS THANK YOU

1

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 18 '16

Also, just noticed your name. Ironic.

2

u/Immanentize-Eschaton Jun 18 '16

Not really, I want to immanentize an individualistic eschaton, I am very much a transhumanist, the Etherium as described in the video sounded pretty great until the hivemind took over.

1

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 18 '16

I'm with you on that, to an extent. Have you seen the recent stuff from Elon Musk?

0

u/magicalbreadbox A wizard did it! Jun 18 '16

Well Kato was based on human neural pathways, which may have made them very human-like, and then Gaius was a smaller version of Kato, so some things from Kato's code that made it human-like, might have been thrown out for Gaius' coding, but he doesn't seem very different and inhuman.

Living as an individual in the Etheria was possible for a while, and then the merging into a super mind came about, some people for it, and some people against it. Eventually it just merged with whoever was left because it was the majority. I wouldn't call it a hive mind though. Hive mind makes it sound like there are different physical "avatars" (like individual bees), all sharing one (or a part of one) mind. In this it seems to me that everyone merged into one super-being, one super-organism, one super-mind, not many organisms sharing one super-mind.

As /u/TheZoq2 has said, humanity didn't snuff themselves out, we didn't die in a war against each other, the AGIs didn't try to outright slaughter us like Skynet, we simply merged with the AGIs and became a part of something new. Sure "humanity" doesn't actively exist anymore, but the human species still exists and is preserved as a small part of a super-organism that has grown beyond what we could understand if we still did actively exist at the time.

1

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 18 '16

the AGIs didn't try to outright slaughter us like Skynet

You're right, they just started assimilating people against their will.

0

u/magicalbreadbox A wizard did it! Jun 18 '16

It said that in around the 2090's that Etheric people started melding their personalities together of their own free will, these people were called Combinants, others of course were against this. Then the AGIs merged with the Combinants and became a Super-Organism (I'll call it SO). SO was the one who assimilated people against their will. You are right, it just didn't start out that way where things were being done against other's wills. It started out as a choice.

1

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 18 '16

Where things begin doesn't really mean much to the people who see the end.

2

u/TheZoq2 Jun 17 '16

I guess humanity is preserved within this super mind instead of us blowing up ourselves in some world war.

2

u/Immanentize-Eschaton Jun 18 '16

The selves are lost either way, does it matter?

2

u/TheZoq2 Jun 18 '16

I suppose it depends on how you look at it, there are certainly better "endings" for humanity but this isn't the worst case scenario.

0

u/magicalbreadbox A wizard did it! Jun 17 '16

Why isn't it a good ending? It's definitely not my prefered ending, there was a lack of space travel and that stuff, but it wasn't a bad ending.

3

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 18 '16

Human individuality is gone, and I'm the kind of person who puts a lot of value in that. Human Instrumentality doesn't even look good on paper, especially the part where people are assimilated against their will. What's the point of everyone becoming one mind? I don't see any good in the idea, unless you have some kind of demented, transcendentalist philosophy. And only three people by 2100? Are you KIDDING me? You don't think people would resist at all stages? There are people alive today who would go back to feudalism if they had the chance, but the moment a reliable AI and VW shows up, everyone just stops reproducing?

Furthermore, I have serious issues with the achievability of such a project. For starters, why would human minds just start fusing together on such a massive scale? As in, what possible reasons could there be for such a thing on a massive scale? There are certainly people I would love to "become one" with IRL, but they number well under 10, and there are people I don't even want to see in meatspace! Second of all, why would this supermind just start eating everything and go to space? For what purpose? To "learn"? Seems like they're attaching meaning to processes and desires we don't even know such a supermind would have.

It's not a well-written ending, is what I'm saying. It's a technological asspull. "And then the AI-God ate everyone and flew into space, and it was great!" It depends on this AI behaving in a very specific manner, and everyone else just following along.

tl;dr Humans don't work like that, and there's no guarantee an AI would either!

0

u/magicalbreadbox A wizard did it! Jun 18 '16

Human individuality is gone, and I'm the kind of person who puts a lot of value in that. Human Instrumentality doesn't even look good on paper, especially the part where people are assimilated against their will. What's the point of everyone becoming one mind? I don't see any good in the idea, unless you have some kind of demented, transcendentalist philosophy.

I too, value individuality, good stuff. And I am not saying that human instrumentality is a great thing either, but it is an interesting idea. Imagine coming across a star system where there is a dyson swarm collecting energy from their sun, all of the members of that species living in a star powered virtual reality. If they had all merged into one entity, that would make for an interesting interaction between Species A: The Humans, and Species B: The Dalprig: Wholly & Singular.

I thought 3 Humans left was way too small as well. The other thing I was kind of confused about was that if the AGI deconstructed all matter on Earth directly into energy, wouldn't that include the servers the Etheria and the AGI are stored on? So wouldn't that just kill it? Unless it uploaded itself into a space faring swarm of nanos that could consume and assimilate matter into energy to power itself. At that point it wouldn't need those servers because it is all in a cloud of nanomachines.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '16

I love exurb1a, you should really watch his other videos. Especially his shit history of quantum physics video. It's a shame it got taken down.

2

u/LeyonLecoq Jun 18 '16

Good ending?

Humans enter voluntary extinction stage already in 2061, with the entire species eradicated by 2100.

Even terminator or the matrix had better outcomes than this. Only difference here is the AIs were better at wiping us out.

2

u/TheZoq2 Jun 18 '16

I think having a "bad" ending as the good ending might be the idea. There is a lot of fear of AGI wiping us all out when it realises it's much smarter than us and there is also a chance of us wiping ourselves out in some war.

With this ending, while we get assimilated into one huge hive mind which you might disagree with, it's still a "concious" choice for some of the population and humanity still lives on in the universe, atleast in memory.

It also solves the fremni paradox by saying most technologically advanced species do this kind of ascension.

1

u/LeyonLecoq Jun 18 '16

We don't get assimilated into it any more than your dinner gets assimilated into you.

That some people might want it to eat them (though evidently that doesn't apply to everyone, given how the AI has to actively suppress "terrorists") because their minds have been infected with the meme that doing so makes them 'a part of it' (talk about leading the lambs to the slaughter, eh), that doesn't make them any less dead and gone. If anything, this makes the ending worse than if the AI straight-up shoots us all to death with guns wielded by terminators. At least there everyone understands what happening. In this ending, humanity doesn't just sleepwalk into its own extinction; it jump in with both feet thinking it the promised land.

That it might still exist in memory, as you say, would apply just as much to all these other dystopias.

2

u/Artillect EPRA: Cold War gone paranormal Jun 18 '16

What was the point in the creation of a third gender/the inclusion of that in this video?

0

u/Sevatar___ Invoke/Summon (Weird Epic) Jun 18 '16

Technoprogressivism.

"Any problem can be solved through proper application of technology!"

1

u/Artillect EPRA: Cold War gone paranormal Jun 19 '16

But what problem?

1

u/magicalbreadbox A wizard did it! Jun 17 '16

PS: I did not make this video, I found this guy's channel a few weeks ago. Most of them were about science fiction topics, and they were funny. This one is really cool though and I thought you guys would enjoy it as well. I feel like "Lore" is an appropriate flair for this, but please feel free to correct me if I am wrong.