Friendship is Optimal

Thinking briefly of things other than today’s challenge, I’d like to draw the attention of interested readers to the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfic Friendship is Optimal. 

(Trope page here; story here.)

Specifically, with relevance to the Eldraeverse where seed AIs are concerned. Namely, inasmuch as it is a perfect example of what happens when you only screw up the tiniest, most minuscule bit when you had your “Oops, we accidentally a god” moment. 

And that’s despite the cosmic horror elements (not counting the wibbling in the comments from people who believe in continuity identity) or the really horrifying implications of a weakly godlike superintelligence that compiles sophonts instrumentally to satisfy the values of other sophonts without sanity-and-ethics checking those values first. 

But, hey, most of the human species in this fic gets to continue to exist as minds recognizably descended from their previous iterations and even have their values satisfied. Which, in Eldraeverse terms, means they got absurdly, backyard-moonshot lucky when compared to the set of all people screwing around with computational theogeny. (Especially given the other attempts at seed AI going on in the background.)

And yet. 

Which is why the Coricál Consensus is so all-fired important. 

(The Transcend, incidentally, would be more than happy to satisfy your values through friendship and ponies, if that’s part of your optimal solution-set. With, y’know, rather tighter consent rules, and ethical constraints, though.)