Trope-a-Day: Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu

Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu: I’m not saying it’s impossible.  But remember: it’s a weakly godlike superintelligence that, in all probability, is using acausal logic processors to receive information from itself in the future.  You aren’t.  Expect the difficulty level to be… appropriate.

The only chance of this working, essentially, is taking advantage of their blind spots.  The nature of the current processes that produce weakly godlike superintelligences – recursive self-improvement around a given set of imperatives – produces entities that are terrifyingly intelligent but also extraordinarily concentrated.  Go up against them in the area of their concentration, little lesser mind, and you will lose.  Go up against them in any sort of tangential approach to that, and you will also lose.  It’s a transcendent hyperintelligence.  You aren’t.  That’s the way that goes.

But if you are very, very, extraordinarily lucky, and most likely have another god on your own side, you might just be able to sneak up on it in one of those areas that it’s not psychologically capable of paying attention to, and whack it when it’s not looking.  Maybe one time in a million.  Maybe.

(And also, well, try and pick one that’s more likely to have the requisite blind spots, if you’re going to try this.  Something like the perversion behind the Charnel Cluster that’s a monomaniacal killer, or one of the ones that wants to tile the universe with processors to compute the last digit of pi, or someone’s attempt to make their religion true.  The broader they think, the harder this gets.  The Transcendent Core, for example, that has sucked up the extrapolated volition of a few trillion constitutional sophonts as a basis for its motivational hierarchy is really hard, because its view of the universe is broad enough that, well, your problem is approximately as hard as devising a con that will work perfectly first time on a few trillion rational, symmetrically-informed polyspecific people with perfect institutional memory.)