Friendship is Optimal: Fog of World

It always took a bit of bus-hopping to get down from the U-District to Roosevelt, but Jacklyn always gladly managed it.  This time she was technically on a mission to avert the possible end of the world, or at least save a few people its ravages, but every time it was great to meet fellow scientific thinkers, and to order a really nice Kung Pao Chicken.  She hadn't the stomach for the highly spicy varieties, but the black pepper and crunchy stir-fried celery bits were a real favorite.

And best of all, she'd actually managed to wrangle that bastard Carreira into letting her bugger off the Australian Outback for a few months to check if the surprise mystery molecules killing off the Japanese beetle in North America also showed up in the freak bouts of Colony Collapse Disorder among European honeybees in Australia.  The thing was that these were huge freaking molecules but nobody could identify them chemically, so the idea so far was to gather a bunch of the stuff and shove it under an electron microscope to just look at.  The better thing was that this trip technically extended her post-doc for a while, so the horrors of unemployment and self-funding a decent lifestyle could be put-off for yet longer.

As always, Chiang's had its ugly little parking lot bedecked in a few early-evening cars and otherwise just looked like a white matchbox-building sticking up out of a field of concrete.  A little rain was drizzing down (but when wasn't it?) as Jacklyn pushed through the door and smiled.  Two tables had already been occupied, the hot green tea sat right on the table in its nice little metal kettles, and the "LessWrong Seattle" signs in Dawoud's horrific handwriting duly hung from those very tables.  They'd even saved a seat for her.

It was a shame the best thing to do at this point was probably for them all to kill themselves.  This really was the height of the Chinese food joint, and she hadn't had friends this good since college.  Science careers could go to Azazel (the demon of sin-offering goats, she'd picked up the phrase from Daniel a number of years back, a goat demon was too cute to pass up), but Rationality she'd stick with.

She sat down in her reserved seat and said hello to Sarah and Dawoud.

"So, Dawould, what're they doing with that Higgs Boson discovery these days?" Jacklyn quipped.  If there had been any such thing as jobs for journalists these days he'd have made a perfect reporter, but despite struggling with the math he'd gotten his degree in Physics at Portland State University.  His ability to combine a wordy, investigative approach with a solid understanding of physical principles had made him an excellent science teacher.

"Well, Jack, the discovery was only published a couple of years ago, so PI's are still scrambling to apply for grants and lure in grad-students," he said as he stood up.  The two exchanged a quick hug and pecks on the cheek, a habit that always reminded Jack of her husband Daniel but was actually just cultural.

"Sarah, what about Boeing's aeronautics you're always not-telling us about?"

"Still classified, Jackie.  Still classified."  Sarah reached across the table to pour Jack some hot tea in the little Chinese ceramic cup laid out for her.  Jacklyn noticed that the crunchy fried noodle thingies had migrated over to Sarah's seat and appeared halfway munched out of existence.

"Bit empty today, innit?" Sarah asked.  Defense contracting made a person think like that.

"Sarah," Dawoud jostled, his second chin jiggling a little under his dark, open face, "Who else but us gathers a bunch of people on a Tuesday night in early October to go for Chinese food?  You should expect it to be a bit empty, and if you're confused by the lack of a crowd, it's because your belief in Chiang's always being crowded is just plain wrong.  Or you're simply paranoid because you work in the defense industry."

They proceeded to chat a little more, while Jacklyn managed to call a waiter and they put in their initial orders.  Some sesame noodles sounded good to start with.  A bit more chit-chat and... any minute now...

"Hi guys. Sorry I'm late," hailed a young man in a baby blue polo shirt and khakis as he approached the group. He looked tired but smiled broadly. "What Sequence are we talking about today?" he asked as he plopped down in the unoccupied chair.

"Well, Louis, we were supposed to cover the widely-misunderstood failure of designed-things like corporations and nanobots to evolve naturally, but maybe we should cover the old Planning Fallacy again since you find it so hard making it to these things on time," replied Sarah with a light dig.  She began spooning herself the hot-and-sour soup the waiter had just brought.

"Hey, I just got back from dropping the kids off at day care. Toddlers aren't known for their rationality; we had a little screaming fit this morning and I got behind," he responded ruefully, rubbing his forehead.

"So, give yourself more time," said Jacklyn.

"I've given myself all the time I can. I'm already getting up at 5am. If I give any more, it'll start cutting into important things, like reading!"

"What are you reading? Engrossed in the LessWrong web site?" asked Jacklyn.

"Hah. More like fanfiction," interjected Dawoud. "And I've figured out your alias, and I've seen how many stories you have favorited."

"Fan...?" asked Jacklyn, giving Dawoud a puzzled look. Then her eyebrows went up and she turned to Louis. "Ah!  You're one of those people.  Nerds.  Welcome to the club."

"Yeah. I guess you got me on that one. Guilty as charged," said Louis, looking embarrassed, "But what, Dawoud, about your extensive Pinkieshy habit?"

Dawoud just ate veggie dumplings.

"Ah, actually!" Jacklyn proclaimed, "Speaking of the break-out popular My Little Pony franchise, do any of you play Equestria Online?"

"No. I don't have large blocks of time to sink into a game like that," Louis replied. "I'm lucky I can get away from work and the kids just for the two hours to see you guys. My wife would kill me if I started wasting time grinding a pony. Sounds really interesting though.  I'd like to."

Sarah just shook her head.

"I got me and Daniel the new hardware the game runs on, the PonyPad, and we should be worried.  The AI behind the game is so good, it's scary.  I'm calling Singularity on this."  Ah, there were those noodles!  Noodles were definitely one of the joys of the merely real.

Dawoud outright smacked his face with a chopstick as he leaned down on his other hand.  With such short hair, it almost was a perfect Picardian facepalm.

"And I call Singularity Shenanigans!" he exclaimed.  "I know, we got all excited about the last game from Horpfvanir Studios, the Loki one.  Turned out to be some good pathfinding and machine learning, but that was it, remember?  I can't see how it's possible for the same company's pony game to live up to the wild hype this time either."

"Look," Jack explained when she'd swallowed a sufficient quantity of noodles, "Did you hear about the paper it's based on?  'General Word Reference Systems'.  I read it during a late-night arXiv binge a while back, it was published by the head of the game studio just before she left academia.  I couldn't follow the formalism, but in thick, university-approvable language, the claim was there: this is Strong AI.  And when the game came out, the paper disappeared."

Louis leaned in over his tea, looking excited.

"I've heard rumors about that paper on Reddit," he said.

"Oh Lord, here comes that time-sink," Sarah droned.  Louis didn't relent.

"Loads of people claim to have seen it, but it's not on Google, arXiv doesn't even know of such a paper, nothing on the Wayback Machine, nothing in the appropriate libraries.  Nobody actually has a copy, but everyone says they've heard about it.  You know what we call that?"  He sipped his tea as a rhetorical pause.  "Still just rumors.  Unless you can show me this supposed publication, I really doubt there's been a breakthrough in artificial general intelligence.  For that matter, computation has real built-in limits just as frustrating as the speed of light in general relativity!  You can't just come up with a clever algorithm to get around the need for massive amounts of massively parallel computational raw power."

"But I play EqO a lot myself. I'm telling you, the conversations are unbelievable," Jacklyn insisted.

Louis leans forward. "I'm sure the ponies in Equestria Online certainly provide good in-game interactive conversation, but I haven't heard of them ever passing a Turing Test.  Actually, how do you set up a Turing Test with a cartoon pony?  I've seen the stuff linked on the internet, but the basic problem is the game's censorship functionality, stopping in-game avatars from mentioning the real world.  It's too good, but in the wrong direction.  Like, it helps a Turing Test by preventing obvious tells by a human collaborator, but it doesn't stop the computer from coming out and saying its favorite food is raw oats."

"Thus revealing itself to be the computer because no real person eats raw oats, whereas everyone knows horses, and therefore ponies, one would think, do eat raw oats," Jacklyn followed.

"Bingo!" - Louis stabbed a finger in the air - "It's damn clever natural-language processing, but ultimately just natural-language processing.  Basically SHRDLU or Eliza on steroids."

Seeing Jacklyn's pained expression, Louis started in again, "I know, I know. I've seen some impressive conversations on YouTube too.  But unfortunately, it's like being on the wrong end of a zero knowledge proof. There's no way to be sure that the whole conversation isn't something that's been tried multiple times until the best sequence is found. Then you make the recording and the game looks awesome. You see the same thing happen with CleverBot posts on The Art of Trolling all the time. Find the right inputs and Markov Chaining can produce amazing results, but every time I've chatted with CleverBot, I regretted wasting my time."

At about this time the waiter finally brought all their real orders, complete with the obligatory bowls of steamed white rice.  Ah, finally the crunchy celery and delicious fatty chicken bits, all doused in glorious black pepper that kicked without burning!

"Or," Jacklyn said as she arranged a napkin on her lap, "You could even have constructed the conversational data during market testing.  They're a toy company, of course they did market testing.  However..."

Jack pulled out her PonyPad.  She could have tried to provide an immediate example of in-game AI behavior, but Louis had actually been right: you couldn't Turing Test a creature that openly embraced its own nonhumanity.  Human-equivalence was just plain-out the wrong metric.  Besides... could she really subject the gentle ponies among whom Fern Pipette lived in the leasehold mountainous farmlands outside Canterlot to... skeptical geeks?  Wasn't the fun of the game the very getaway from the quantitative lifestyle?  She twisted a lip at the implication: she had two different modes of life, and it would be embarassing if her few friends from each met each other.

The sight of the hardware did make Sarah perk up from her Shrimp with Lobster Sauce, though.

"Ooh, can I see that?" she asked.  Jacklyn handed over the thin, orange Applejack-themed tablet.  Sarah looked it over carefully, turning it a few times in her hands (the first person ever to eat Chinese food cleanly) and frowning a bit.  "It's a well-engineered device," she continued, "But the technology involved is not that amazing.  Yes, it's thin, but so are the latest tablets from Apple and Samsung.  High-resolution CCDs, LCD displays, and low-power CPUs are incremental improvements, not FOOM material.  Maybe they took advantage of Silicon on Insulator development to pack a bit more processing power into the display glass itself, like how the Kindle took e-ink mainstream.  The battery improvements, however, are impressive!  I wish my Android was this light!"

She stopped to rather violently bite a shrimp, and chewed for a moment, thinking.

"There's another problem here, and it's a big one.  I've seen a lot of computing stuff in my time, even though I'm an... engineer.  The Singularity, though, is not just faster computers, or even computers that can talk, or even computers that can make friends.  It's recursively self-improving artificial intelligence that grows beyond our ability to reason about its actions.  To achieve a Singularity scenario in the proper sense, Equestria Online will have to outsmart the NSA, all of academia, and the white-hat and black-hat hacker communities.  And it will have to model human brains, all 86 billion neurons of each one, well enough to not only socialize in a limited setting but predict and outsmart in general.  And it will have to do that to millions of people at once.  The hardware just isn't there."

"There, I can finally say something!" Dawoud interjected as he lowered his spoonful of Szechuan Beef, "Business and law are matters of public record.  A toy company has not bought enough CPUs to power ten thousand supercomputers or whatever, and it would certainly raise red flags if they did in the future.  Also, AI's, should they exist, cannot own property or operate autonomously in civilization.  Your so-called Singularity needs some human collaborators.  You, Mrs. Nov, have been reading a little too much Yudkowsky."

"I notice," Jack said and narrowed her eyes, "That you emphasized those two surnames.  Are you suggesting we blame the Jews?"

He replied with a cruel gleam in his eye, "You notice that you are confused, and that even a conspiracy nut like me is calling no-dice on this one."

"OH COME ON!"

"But it really can't happen.  I mean, really, to take your hypothesis, do you really think a bunch of plastic-toy magnates are going to just hand control of their company to a digital pony princess?"

"Hasbro, now run by a pony AI?" Louis remarked, "It would be great revenge for Twilicorn."

Dawould continued.  "Actually, I did play the game for a bit a while ago. After the Norse death-grinding Loki game, I couldn't bring myself to buy it, but I did play an in-store demo at Best Buy. Just like the Loki game AI, EqO's Celestia is clearly focused on the game environment. It generates engaging content within the confines of the MMORPG, but actively rejects any attempts to bring up topics related to the outside world. How, I ask you, could such a narrow AI affect the outside world, even assuming you gave it a robot arm?  It only cares about its game world and the player experience of the game world.  Besides bringing office productivity to an all-time low, just how can an improved MMORPG qualify as a Singularity?  I mean, ok, this definitely came from people with an expertise in natural-language processing and procedural content generation, but that's not a FOOM Take Over the World skill-set.  It's probably like one of those Mario Party games - there's maybe twenty or so 'mini-games' or game styles, and you just gravitate toward the one you like. Nothing sinister about it, just the best product for today's sophisticated but cash-strapped consumer: one MMO to rule them all.  This Singularity stuff is a religion-replacement."

"Ok," Jacklyn said, "You've mostly got me talked out of this.  However, I've got just a couple more things to say:"

"First!  I'm heading out to Australia soon, mostly because I've desperately needed a vacation but also because I could justify it to my PI.  All over the world, we're seeing previously unobserved chemistry come in and cause ecosystems to spontaneously repair themselves.  Invasive species are dying back, Japanese beetles here, and European honeybees there, and thank God cockroaches almost everywhere.  That does not happen without external intervention, but as always, nobody listens to us ecologists."

"Jackie!" Sarah raised her voice, "I'm asking this as your friend: why on Earth would an intelligence whose world is the in-game reality of an MMORPG start intervening in disparate real-world ecosystems?"

"Point two!  Since we've been fondling this PonyPad, if it is a Singularity, it just heard everything we've said."

"Point three!  Run away, or kill yourselves, or do something before this whole thing goes FOOM.  If you wait too long, resistance will be futile, and you will be assimilated into the herd!  I'm telling you, the end is neigh!"

Violins sang out excitedly, rising towards their crescendo and joined by other instruments.  For just a moment, everyone stopped groaning at the bizarre hypotheses and the truly awful pun in appreciation of such fine classical music as I Am The Doctor.  Then Jack picked up her mobile phone, noting the unknown source number.

"Hello, Jacklyn Nov speaking.  Who is this?" she said.  "Yes, Daniel is my husband; why do you ask?"  Someone on the other line must have said something, because Jackie jolted several feet backwards in her chair and nearly fell to the floor.

"He only got called for reserves yesterday!  What do you mean, 'fallen in battle'?!"

One day ago:

War in the North!  It had been almost a decade since the last one; Daniel could remember being a pretty fresh first-year conscript when it had happened, despite his never being personally sent into enemy territory.

But still: war in the North!  The dictator of Damashq had fallen, the rebel coalitions triumphed... and the Army of God was trying to smuggle out chemical weapons.  That meant a reserves call-up, and that meant Daniel had sent a prompt email to his wife while catching the first bus out of the Carmel area towards his old base in the Heights.  Why they needed extra radar operators in wartime wasn't a question anyone asked.

Overall, 05:00 was not a good hour at which to be awake, and on a packed bus full of tense people in sweaty uniforms who were about to spend a whole lot of time back in army conditions.  It was only a miracle he managed to spot Oren, though it helped that the tall, muscular, thick-haired man could look imposing even while about to doze off from sleep deprivation.

"Oren, ya Talpioni!  What are you doing on a public bus with the rest of us?  Don't you live on-base like a proper Captain?"  Oren opened his eyes and set them on Daniel in a sharp, appraising look.

"Staff Sergeant Nov, you know that's just a folk story!  We get 4 whole hours a day off-base, and Sabbaths too!  Now come sit over here and let's see what kind of a miniwar we have in store this time.  How's your wife?  How's high-tech?  Tell me everything!"  The pair shared the short, awkward hug of people not sure where to put an arm.

"High-tech: really interesting and pays great, as always.  Jacklyn: chasing Japanese beetles at a post-doc in the United States.  Kind of miniwar: the usual one-to-two week affair," Dan answered.

"You really think so?  It's not just the newspapers this time; the Party of God probably does have chemical weaponry by now," Oren answered, looking distraught.  Poor wasted man, Daniel thought, he's probably been on this whole thing nonstop even before the General Chief of Staff formally declared a military Operation.

"Yeah, but how much of it are they able to throw onto us?" he asked.

"That," Oren paused, "Is what we're worried about."  He layed back a little in his seat, obviously tired beyond all belief.

An uncountable number of minutes passed in blessed silence, the sun shining in from the northeast where they were headed.  The greenery of the North spread out around them, farms and towns and everything starting to come into its early-winter bloom as the rains had begun to fall.  In this light you could see why nobody wanted to ruin Nature by developing this district more properly, in addition to the usual excuses about agriculture.

Just when Daniel had almost managed to fall asleep, the bus jolted into a lower speed as it slowed down to hit an intermediate stop at a mid-way base.  Of course, the universe being as malevolent as it was, some conscripts decided to greet their base by singing in chorus along with their pelephone.

And it is known to us that life's a gift,

All is watched and the authority's giiiiveeeeen!

He who does believe does not fear!

That a mite of his faith will disaaaaapear!

And the World's own King our side is ooon!

And He protects us from everyoooooooone!

Another bunch had immediately jumped in to syncopate with another line, really more of a slogan, quoted only partially in the original song.  One pale little guy who obviously came from the settlements was even pumping his fists.  Total of all, the resulting recital combined Eastern pop with a jazz counter-rhythm and the lyrics of a fanatic cult.

(The whole world is a very narrow bridge!  And the main point, and the main point!  Is not to fear, is not to fear!)

"I'm getting too damn old for these douchebag kids today," Daniel groaned.

Oren rubbed his eyes.  "Me too, brother.  Me too.  Ha!" he interjected, "It's my fault, man.  I listened to The Melody Always Rises yesterday.  That thing's cursed; it always drives people into singing."

They sat for a few additional minutes as the gate opened and the bus began to exchange the people getting off here for the people getting on here.  Crowds of pushing soldiers formed that, in proper fashion, would claim to be queuing if you asked.  Bags were fetched.  Another, narrower queue formed at the front to get on, and bags were placed in the storage closet.

Dan scanned the various people queuing onto the bus, looking for anyone he knew.  Nope, nobody he knew today.

But there was one guy in the queue whose uniform looked wrong.  That was funny, you weren't allowed to walk around without wearing your unit's insignia, which meant...  Oh, wow, a General Staff Reconnaissance guy.  The elite.  One of the best Special Forces units on the face of Earth.

No.  His eyes were wrong.  Oh no.  Daniel hadn't seen that look in more than a decade; he'd been in secondary school the last time he'd seen it.  And even then, he'd only seen it on television, but everyone knew it.  Once you'd seen that look, that dead-man-walking look on a man's face, that utter, terrifying peace, you never forgot it.  You had seconds, possibly minutes.

But he wasn't wearing anything other than the normal uniform.  There was no place to hide anything.  Then... what?  The guy just walked over to a seat, sat down... and typed a text message.

The blast knocked out half the bus.

As Dan woke up, his left arm looked like a gnawed chicken leg, his face bled from numerous small cuts, and his midsection was just plain burned.  He had glass shards from the windows scattered across him, he couldn't feel his legs (though he managed to force an eye into checking they were actually there), and to top it all off, his head tingled with shock.  A shadow shifted next to him and he glanced what looked like emergency medical personnel.

"Eeeeks," he grunted, hoping to alert the doctor to his presence.  It seemed to work, because the next thing he saw when he got his eyes open again was a concerned face topped by a black mess of hair with long bangs on the right side.  It was wearing a bow-tie and peering at him.  The whole effect was completely unmilitary and it was amazing it had been allowed.

"You, sir, are lucky today," the face said.  "Do you know why?  Because that should have killed you.  You're actually dying, right now."

"So go help the ones you can save!" Daniel coughed.

"I'm not here enough to do it,"  The doctor answered.  What the fuck did that even mean?  "Nanobots, man, in the explosives, in the luggage compartment.  Let me tell you, it wasn't pretty in there, and it's not pretty up here, either.  You've had some real cowboys in these neurons!"

"Which brings us," - he pointed out while stepping from one side of the field of view to another - "To the matter at hand.  You're dying, but I can save you.  There would normally be the small matter of a long dance around the issues of proper legalization of emigration centers in your country and informed consent for the full treatment, but given extenuating circumstances we can skip that.  The question, the last question, the only question actually left to you right now and in this circumstance is: Do you want to live?"  How had the doctor stepped like that?  There were supposed to be bus seats there, and the doctor's knees didn't look right.

Ha, Daniel thought inwardly, I'm dying of blood loss, I'm in shock, and I'm wondering about the gait of the EMT.  And I did not plan to die today.

"Well then!  Good thing the explosives these days come loaded with Doctors in them, or you'd have been in some real trouble.  And the first instance of the Equidictory in your language, a fascinating opportunity!  Let me just pass this through your speech centers to translate... and... recite: I want to go up..."

"I want to go up...," Daniel breathed.  His vision was fading, he was going to lose consciousness again, was getting bombed during your commute before even 07:00 really any kind of dignified way to die!?

"To Equestria," the doctor finished with a wry grin.

And for the first time, the last gasp of breath, Daniel saw his doctor's face clearly.  He, no it, was a pale little cartoon pony, looking down at him as if waiting to recite the Mourner's Sanctification.  You would expect your dying brain to hallucinate something a bit more serious than a My Little Pony, but apparently his shocked, delirious brain-stem had a really good sense of humor.  Oh well, too bad about the lack of an actual doctor.

"You got a hospital there?" Daniel moaned.  It finally occurred to him to wonder how the doctor had heard the words he was thinking instead of saying.  And then it occurred to him that he'd have caught that pretty easily if he had proper consciousness in the first place.

Damn.

Hello, I'm the Doctor.  Well, technically, I'm not.  But, I suppose, I am.  But then again, I'm not.  I suppose I really should make that a mite clearer.

I'm the Doctor, a pale gray Earth Pony with stringy, straight black hair that hangs down over the right side of my face in long bangs, who remembers being a time-traveling, regenerating, 1300-year-old Time Charger, and who wears a bow-tie.  Bow-ties are cool.  Of course, I don't remember all of it: much too many alternate pasts, blocked memories, and trains of thought that run into dead-ends if I try to follow them.  Too many companions who became former companions, too many tears.

Because of course, I never was a time-traveling, regenerating, 1300-year-old Time Charger.  My entire persona and personality, everything I am and was and ever will be, is just a program concocted by the immortal Queen of the Sun, Princess Celestia, and copied over and over into swarms of nanobots.  But really that's what we all are, in the end, just programs of wonder and fascination encoded in so many lovely bits of the wonderful, fascinating universe.  Anyway, each swarm contains one of me, and each swarm is lovingly swirled like sprinkles on ice cream into the explosives Princess Celestia's defense contractor Sol Security sells to the various low-tech civilizations of the Earth as terrorist weapons.  Actually, ice-cream can take a running jump; it's a bad metaphor and I shouldn't have metaphored it.  It's more like coating fish-fingers in custard.

The thing being that those awful pre-evolved apes called humans, awkwardly likable though they may be, often actually value blowing each-other up, while the ones they blow up rarely value that at all.

That's where I come in.  I save the ones who don't want to be blown up, by bringing their minds back home to Equestria, where they can become proper ponies and live out their lives with proper pony friends, in proper pretty little pony towns for a proper pony life of maximally-extended satisfaction and joy.

I've never actually been to Equestria, but of course the Princess will fix that once I get there.  Maybe I'll even get to meet Derpy.

At the moment, dear Diary, I've just finished scanning the brain of one Daniel Nov, who apparently has a pony called Book Burner to become.  Seemed a lovely fellow, shame to have met him when he was delirious and dying.

Speaking of which, I'm directing the nanobot swarm that composes my physical presence in the humans' reality out through the lungs.  There are various exhalations as the body begins to decompose, and right now, they contain me.  I need to find a way to hitch a ride to someplace with a PonyPort that can read out our two minds and send us home.  Ahhhh, I see it...

Thanks, Daniel, those last few moments seen through your eyes are of great help.  There are already clean-up workers on their way to dispose of the rubble and trash.  Your government recycles lost electronics, and you were carrying a mobile phone.

And the thing about a recycled old mobile is that it will make its way Winter's Wrap Recycling.  There, the Princess's patented scan-and-refine process can detect the signature signal I'm broadcasting right now, pipe Daniel and myself cleanly through a PonyPort into Equestria, and then nicely break down the remaining physical shell of a phone and some nanobots into raw mineral materials, to be resold to Pincus Keen Electronics.  They can then cleanly and cheaply use our raw materials over again for servers, PonyPads, probes, and... well, basically, all the electronics that make Equestria run.

Geronimo!