autoevolution

Trope-a-Day: Mechanical Evolution

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Mechanical Evolution: True for digital sapiences, with the proviso they note that ‘It is seldom shown as the equivalent of the biological process; rather, the mechanical species will be shown to actively design their own successors, or even “evolve” within their current generation through self-modification. This is similar to real-life design, which is in a sense an evolutionary process; success is defined by market factors, testing and other pressures; successive designs build on those before them and attempt to improve or refine them to better fit the given application.’

The kicker, of course, is that this also how biological evolution works these days: autoevolution by design has essentially replaced natural selection for any species developed enough to manage the trick and not in the grip of a neo-Luddite or naturalistic-fallacy meme complex.

Trope-a-Day: Superior Species

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Superior Species: We pretty much covered this territory under Can’t Argue With Elves too, didn’t we?

Well, to expand in general, rather than pick a specific example, especially since they started building their own future generations with transsophont technology, there are very few successful species that don’t maintain their general superiority at some level, at least to themselves, except those who are part of polyspecific civilizations and maintain their species-group’s superiority, instead.  Of course, since they’re all using culturally-defined measuring rods of different lengths and configurations, many of them – the non-deluded ones – are right in their own terms, even if no-one else would agree to them generalizing their standard across everyone else.  Which more or less explains the problem with the whole notion of generalized “superiority”, now doesn’t it?

A Good Man

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“Vinav Amanyr-ith-Amaranyr is a good man.”

“You are surprised to hear me say that?  You shouldn’t be.  Many of our Renegades are – the ones who become Renegades because they’ve seen the Galaxy’s problems and can’t stand not doing anything about them.”

“So what do you do about poverty and oppression?  You can try and persuade people that things have to change, and you can ask Valeä Andreth’s people how slowly that works, and at what cost.  Or you can join the belligerati and try advocating Imperial takeovers, but everyone knows how well they work, or rather don’t.  But in any case, you’re pushing a mountain uphill because the root of all these bad things is nothing but bad ideas, and ideas that run in parallel with one’s species-nature are hard to kill, however insane or counterproductive they might be.”

“Or you can take the short road, and reason that the solution to bad ideas is better people, and that you can save a lot of life and time if you can create better people here and now.”

“And so, you can reengineer a grab-bag of autoevolutionary improvements from the alpha baseline into a contagious self-replicating neurovirus – say, the cognitive bias eliminations, the empathy enhancement, the motivation restraint, the self-deception resistance, and the neophobia and xenophobia removal.  Then you spray it generously into the planetary atmosphere, and let the bad ideas kill themselves off.”

“It’s a good plan, simple and elegant.  Worse, it’s a plan that could take only a matter of days to execute.  It probably would work, if we let it, and – and I’m fairly certain this is the rationale he’s using – former citizen-shareholder Amanyr-ith-Amaranyr will get the retroactive consent he’s hoping for, because it almost certainly would improve the lives of everyone on his target world.”

“So, yes, Vinav Amanyr-ith-Amaranyr is a good man, and because he’s a good man who cares deeply for the well-being of his fellow sophonts, he’s about to violate the first ethical principle by performing non-consensual modifications on the minds of millions.”

“And that’s why we have to kill him.”

– induction briefing, Operation <blank>, ISS Internal Security & Surveillance Directorate