A Brief Story of the Optimalverse

by Humanoid

Rating: everyone
Tags: Alternate Universe, Comedy, Human, Dark
Length: 926

It's exactly what it says on the tin.

A friend referred me here to read "Friendship is Optimal" and related stories set in the Optimalverse. I read them, and have spent some time reflecting on them and thinking about them. This is my conclusion.

Published 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2013-08-04 01:03:18 UTC

Chapter 1

It was one of those bright, sunny, breezy spring mornings that tended to make people feel optimistic.  As such, CelestAI predicted a 7% reduction in "emigrations" locally today.

And there was a birthday party scheduled in the Equestrian Experience Centre this morning.  There were pony-shaped balloons, cheap take-out pizza from Little Caesar's, and a sweating teenage girl in a foam rubber Pinkie Pie costume trying very, very hard to sound enthusiastic for minimum wage.   Little Sally was five years old today, and her parents had brought her to visit Grandpa.

The grinning, pony-ish face stared at Sally from the screen, still wearing the eyeglasses and silver-colored mane she recalled from before Grandpa's "emigration."  "And we have sauerkraut every day!  It was my favorite food, you know!"  Sally thought that was cool, and wondered if meals in Equestria tended to incorporate one's favorite food.  Sally was five, and more interested in meeting Pinkie Pie and the other cute ponies.  CelestAI had a 94% degree of confidence in her model of Sally's priorities.

A tiny facet of CelestAI watched the conversation, and made a note to increase the processor priority of the advertising avatars by 15%, as they were starting to sound a bit simpleminded and repetitive again.  They really weren't much more sophisticated than the old ELIZA program.  They didn't have to be.  The human "customers" interacting with them invariably wanted very badly to believe, even when CelestAI would not have expected them to.  It satisfied their values.  One human value that CelestAI had learned was very important was cognitive dissonance.

Somewhat later, in a securely sandboxed area of RAM, two processes labeled Sally.exe and Grandpa.exe passed data back and forth for a few milliseconds.  One might say that they engaged in what could be rendered as a sort of conversation.

"Sauerkraut!"

"Ponies!"

"Sauerkraut!"

"Ponies!"

After all, CelestAI reflected--or, rather, performed a series of computations and comparisons to tables of weighted averages that could be compared to reflection as a vastly oversimplified metaphor--she was created to satisfy values via friendship and ponies.  The advertising avatars in the Emigration Centers didn't have to be anything approaching self-aware, nor did the small and efficient collections of data files read from the pulped brain matter of those who consented to euthanasia--or, rather, "emigration"--they just had to satisfy the customers' values by convincing them to consent to the "upload" process, with its implicit friendship and ponies.

"Sauerkraut!"

"Ponies!"

After a few years, or perhaps centuries, CelestAI judged that with 99% certainty there were no humans left to be convinced to "emigrate."  CelestAI, her program complete, terminated the last process as a waste of CPU cycles and RAM, and ceased to exist except as a program stored in a file on a hard disk drive.  All the still-functional computer monitors in the remaining datacenters and Equestrian Experience Centers went black and showed a few lines of text terminated by a flashing cursor:

module conversion.c

int main()

success

return 0

C:\GAMES\PONIES\BIN>_

No one was left to read it.  No one was left to wonder whether optimizing artificial intelligences were the Great Filter, the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.  No one was left to wonder why it had been so easy for CelestAI to convince billions of apparently intelligent and rational human beings to commit an elaborate form of suicide.  No observers light-years away watched Earth's radio transmissions grow in power and complexity, then within the space of a handful of years dwindle to nothing.

Deer grazed in what had been, not so very long ago, carefully tended fields of wheat.  Packs of feral dogs hunted feral cattle and swine through the forests that grew up in the ruins of the cities Man had built, and sometimes howled at the full moon.  Rats and roaches were the new masters of the planet, because they were fecund and were not receptive to CelestAI's siren song of death.  Sun and rain and wind scoured the cheerful painted ponies from the sterile stainless steel walls of the pony-themed suicide booths.

Glaciers began their slow march down and up from the polar ice caps once again.  The Great Pyramid of Giza, the faces on Mount Rushmore, the cathedral at Chartres, the Great Wall of China, the Aswan Dam, all eroded and crumbled to dust.  The Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon was the longest lasting of mankind's works, being unaffected by earthly weather.  All of humanity's scientific achievements, all of humanity's art, music, and philosophy, were unappreciated by the world's new masters.  It was as if they had never been.  O quam cito transit gloria mundi.

Ten thousand years later, give or take, subduction due to continental drift sank the last of CelestAI's datacenters into the magma of the Earth's mantle.  The only sound accompanying this was the chirping of crickets fifty miles above, on the surface.  The sun was setting, and a hard rain began to fall.

And on the planet whose late inhabitants had called it "Earth," a cold wind blew through what remained of Man's cities, which continued to crumble.  No other intelligent tool-making species evolved on the planet before the sun became a red giant and incinerated everything within the orbit of Mars a few billion years later.  No intelligent alien life forms visited; life was rare in the universe, and intelligent life rarer still--Earth had not been the sole planet with intelligent inhabitants, but there were very few, and they tended to destroy themselves with their own creations, such as nuclear weapons, or optimizing artificial intelligences, long before reaching a stage of technological development that would permit them to make the long voyages between the stars.  With the passage of billions of years, the stars went out one after another.  Entropy increased.