Xanatos Gambit: What the weakly godlike superintelligences who are very, very good at reading the future do (as The Chessmaster) when playing against all those parts of the galaxy that aren’t also weakly godlike superintelligences. (When they are, things move into Gambit Pileup territory very quickly indeed.)
seed AI
Trope-a-Day: The Chessmaster
The Chessmaster: The various weakly godlike superintelligences as they attempt to outmaneuver one another in the search for that Optimal Future; even more so when they’re playing against lesser intelligences.
Also, everyone with a socially-focused valxíjir or estxíjir who lives long enough, to one degree or another. After all, they’re all engineered geniuses with lifespans long enough that time horizons of decades can be shrugged off, centuries are entirely reasonable, and millennia are not out of the question, and a certain tendency to delight in their own cleverness. How else could they be?
Of course, the sheer numbers involved tend to generate one long, ongoing, Gambit Pileup, but that just adds to the fun!
Trope-a-Day: Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence: Well, while the term in-universe is rather more all-encompassing, the fictional trope is defined as meaning those systems which are sentient (gah, damn you badly written science fiction!), self-aware, and capable of independent thought and reason. Those ones, they call digisapiences.
And there are a heck of a lot of them, yes, enough that you aren’t going to be able to walk down the street (or stick your nose out onto the network) without running into a few. Certainly far too many to name on any sort of individual basis. And for the most part, they’re pretty much “just folks”, if very smart, fast-running folks.
Which is not so much to talk about recursively self-improving seed AI, who are pretty much just weakly godlike superintelligences, with all that that implies.
Also of note is the Photonic Network, an entire Great Power-level civilization of advanced artificial intelligences, and the Silicate Tree, a loose alliance in the Galith Waste of renegade digisapiences from assorted slaver civilizations. Having given them ample reason to be hostile in the past, meat intelligences travel off the main routes through the Waste at their own risk.
Trope-a-Day (R): Gone Horribly Right
Gone Horribly Right: An unfortunately large number of experiments with recursively self-improving seed AI are probably the most significant examples, here, for which see that half of the entry under AI Is A Crapshoot. And for the consequences – well, there are quite the wide variety there, but for a good sampling of the more amusing ones – i.e., the ones that don’t simply get everyone killed immediately – why not pop over to the transhumanist wiki and read your way through the Friendly AI Critical Failure Table:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/wiki/Friendly_AI_Critical_Failure_Table
This sort of thing happens on an infrequent yet semi-regular basis.
(The one that happens frequently enough to deserve its own special entry in “civilization-ending stupidities”, though, is when some evangelist-hegemonist religion gets hold of an AI seed and decides to improve its success rate by programming the machine with the Literal Word of God. Even leaving aside the violations of free will implicit in conversion-by-basilisk-hack, the high probability of a “NOW there is a God!” moment as the growing seed AI tries to reconcile the Literal Word it’s been programmed to believe with the actual universe, and so forth, the end-state in which everyone gets condemned to its lovingly detailed virtual Hell for failure to perfectly comply with the deity’s moral rules in deed and thought every single moment of every day would be a hysterically funny piece of schadenfreude were it not one of the most horrific things ever to happen anywhere.
And yet there’s always some new sucker lined up to set this one off, because clearly they have the real Literal Word of God, so it can’t end in a disaster when they try it…)