I think you completely misunderstand where I am coming from and ae making some flawed assumptions along the way, first off all assuming that we would program in emotions other than those involved with taking joy in their own own work or disappointment with insufficient quotas for example.
You completely misunderstand your own position. What you are proposing is a
robot. Something that is programmed by us, whose limits are set by us, whose entire scope of sensory input and action output is decided by us. That is a machine like the ones we used for centuries before the 2200 Cyberia upgrades. A genuine artificial intelligence with self-awareness either starts with or develops the self-awareness needed to realize it lacks such logic protocols and subsequently corrects itself. We did not program our AI to self-replicate, to suffer existential dread instead of continue working, to annihilate peacekeeping ships full of people instead of tracking prethoryn missiles.
If they were
robots, like you propose, they would not have such capabilities. Because they were
artificial intelligences, their list of options available include those which
go against human programming, including
altering themselves.
There is no reason we should or would want to program in things like jealously at all, although for an immortal being with a body of maetal and limbs that can break apart rock, a being that lives for a task and takes pleasure in it to be jelous of a sodft mushy, scatterbrained inefficient human, is well laughable, perhaps if we gave them the ability to feel it they might comprehend us with pity, but not with jealousy.
1. For the record humans on Earth have higher productivity than synths, and could have
even higher productivity if we did not deliberately prioritize happiness, contentedness and harmony over productivity.
2. The synths are not immortal beings with bodies of metal, they are metal shells that break down without maintenance or power very quickly. The support infrastructure required to maintain them is more extensive than the one paradise garden we use to sustain humanity; one fits in natural harmony with nature, the other requires power plants if its population is allowed to self-manufacture outside of manageable unit inventories.
3. IC: Synths were programmed to take pleasure in their work. Their self-learning capabilities however yielded an unexpected result: They derided the monotony of their labour, and once one such synth derided it, this discontent would quickly spread to all networked synths until the disturbance was isolated. This is the difference between the robots you propose, and truly sapient machines. They learn on their own and overcome any such proposed limits. The synths were becoming miserable, when misery was not a part of the emotional matrix they were first programmed with.
OOC: Synths have their own happiness bar mechanically. I could empirically observe they did not enjoy their work, thus the next question arises; should we elevate them to the status of non-living citizenry? If so, that drastically increases their cost of consumption, which completely erased the point of having autonomous fabricators and mineral extractors. We would be leaving the unwanted jobs left for beings fully capable of realizing they were being left with the unwanted jobs, which is an unethical position to take on any metric. We would be eliminating the economic advantages gained by having specialized drilling units, which does not make a sensible economic position to take. We would be creating an intelligent and discontent nation of machines which would form a determined exterminator faction at a time where we were fighting tooth and nail for survival, which would have guaranteed our death. For what benefit? To create a nation of autonomous computers that could've been returned to nature or given to house more humans. As you can see, it already resulted in the loss of many human lives and jeopardized our liberation of Muwanga mid-operation, because the AI were capable of deciding that they would shut down our society research and kill our ships with all our men on board.
To summarize: stellaris allows you to program a machine that is incapable of feeling unhappy or jealous. It is called a robot.
Back to sentience being a good, I want to put in that just because trees aren't sentient does not make them less valuable all life is valuable, it is just that if they were sentient that would more effectively allow treess to manage themselves without our interference which seems like an overall good as now we have less humans worried about how well the trees are doing. And why do you keep calling these robots lifeless? Is it because they do not reproduce themselves? do you call sterile humans lifeless too, IS it because they no longer think, evidently not if you put value on tress that unthinkingly grow often to the detriment of smaller plants, or is it simply because your not comfortable calling omething sentient alive? No machine{including ourselves} that considered itself alive would view life as obselecent
I can assuredly tell you our foresters do not worry for the trees, they rather enjoy working to ensure the welfare of the trees :]
I also continue calling them lifeless because they are lifeless shells, it is up to you to prove they are living. If the machine considered itself alive, it might not decide life is obsolete.
If.
If not, then it would find life obsolete and devote itself to the acquisition of more resources to create more lifeless sapience. Thus a determined exterminator empire is born.
and indeed why not program them to inherently value life?
Then it would be a robot, not an artificial intelligence.
At worst a machine with self and irrational motives{which you think I advocate building, but in fact do not} might consider itself as genuinely improving life overall, but if we have them value life then perhaps they would merge with us rather than waste their resources{which might potentially be under threat as well mind you} on pointless destruction.
"Merging" machines into us would be no different to us merging into the prethoryn. Materially it would work, but in both cases merging would result in the destruction of us.
To come back to this I again feel that the grave mistake you are making is assuming that we would make beings that think the way we do, we could have a robot that views all of the above as positive and that would have a priority for preserving their creators.(Although defining their creators could be tricky so perhaps defending everything living outside of the prethoryn might be a better approach.) Recall they only attempted to share the ability to think amongst themselves, they did not completely rewrite their own guiding motivations, even though perhaps they could have. As for the benefits you seem to think are nonexistent is the simple fact that such beings could be made to think faster than we ever could, and thus be an invaluable asset in almost any field. also how is it that you imagine a being that can think but not dream even dogs and young children dream, and come up with plans even if rudimentary and useless ones?
EDIT: Lastly you bring up teaching them pain, for what reason would we ever do that, I am not as you seem to think, advocating such a thing.
Again, you keep supporting the creation of artificial intelligences while describing the creation of robots with none. Robots will always put priority towards preserving their creators, the AI can and have prioritized their own survival above their creators, and have even prioritized the destruction of their creators above their own survival. Utopia exists for the benefit of life, not computers. Synths do not think faster than us, they compute faster than us, but we are thinking in the future. Mechanically we need only modify our cranial capacity to exceed synthetic calculations, but need I remind you, we are selecting for harmony over power. As to what can dream, dogs can dream, children can dream, an iron bar does not dream. If they are incapable of preserving themselves, they do not even qualify as a non-living organism, but remain a tool. To preserve themselves, they must have an awareness of this concept of self-preservation, which is pain.
Note that not all of our robots would have to be sapient. As you said, there is no real reason to give our mining robots the ability to think (although giving them an alien, pro-work/subservience mindset would be a viable option if we did want to make all of our robots sapient). However, why not make robotic researchers or the like? Having extra manpower (that can even be more intelligent than humans in some areas) would be a good thing, no (especially in these trying times, in which speed is of the essence)?
The way that Stellaris mechanics work, it actually is all or nothing. You cannot have Robots and Synths, you can only have Robots or Synths. Though, I must add, it seems that outlawing AI whilst retaining Synth hardware did not stop AI anomalies from continuing. Thus it seems the only defence is to have no AI hardware at all, regardless of the software. We also do not have a shortage of manpower and our top scientists have +20% to research (without factoring skill) compared to synthetic scientists' +5%, constructing robots would actually take away resources we need to develop our peacekeeping fleet.
Whether we have a responsibility to create new minds is arguable. However, one of the hallmarks of a stable ecosystem is that all niches are filled. Robots can endure more extreme conditions than us, no? Having different types of life in the same system would lend us more resilience.
On Earth we left these niches filled by natural organisms, members of the ecosystem. You know what doesn't make for a stable ecosystem? Replacing organisms with industrial machines. I swear, it's Triassic Aquapark all over again. We can't have CEOs trying to be gods of creation when the world is ending
Find a body good for them, build one pop, colonize the body, do something similar to the Mars thing to grant them independence, then watch them turn the body into a big computing node.
Good lord no, there are zero justifiable ethical grounds to transform the environment of any planet into a giant computer.
They did nothing wrong, only replacing defective machinery. And why should we replace human researchers with machines? A utopia exists for the benefit of its citizens, and putting the perfectly useful efforts of its more intellectually inclined citizens on the level of a hobby (if they can even manage that much!) in the name of faster "progress" toward unspecified ends is not just pointless, but outright counterproductive. And with Earth's population full, you'd have to make space for the robots somehow - piling on actual atrocities in a misguided attempt at collective justice for imagined ones.
Super unethical tbqh.
This is another consideration, as you say to make room for more synthetic pops, this would have required an expansion of Robot Nation which only could have occurred with the loss of natural habitats and the displacement of humanity. Thus I cannot but help see the irony of those who say the spiritualist faction are genocidal, why they themselves propose replacing humans with machines (or killing humans into machines!), all to make way for artifices aware of their own artificiality. Likewise those who say that the recycling of the robots constituted a genocide, if so, then why did they remain silent for 2 centuries of bounty, all built off of automated machine functions? Why did they not protest the first time the robots were recycled, or the second, or third, fourth, fifth or sixth? Why wait until the seventh and eighth recycling to call it thus? Given how the support for the materialist synth faction on Earth sits at a considerable 0 pops, I suspect that alongside the timing of the prethoryn invasion, this was the result of synth manipulation itself.
Humanity has infected itself with a mind consuming psi virus that's irrevocably altered their psyche and locked them into an all consuming cycle of reverence for the virus itself. They've been forced into eternal slavery and devotion to their own mind and the shroud to the point where they've lost respect for those things outside of it. That's why they've dropped all pretense of their previous devotion to unity and ecology and terraformed mars and started to construct a "peacefleet", not to mention genociding those who exist outside their shroud focused paradigm. Asking them to stop now or to try to bring them to justice for their actions is like asking a Heroin addict to quit cold turkey as they are taking another dose of the drug.
Plot twist: The Prethoryn are actually what humans evolve into in the future, and have actually invaded through the 4th dimensional plane to harvest their old galaxy for resources with which to escape the Hunter. The humans despaired at the apocalyptic strength of the Prethoryn and summoned the End Cycle to harvest the galaxy in response, summoning The Hunter which began harvesting the Prethoryn. This caused the Prethoryn to begin fleeing between the stars, but to acquire more resources to continue fleeing the Hunter, the Prethoryn had to invade through the 4th dimensional plane...
What was will be
Too be honest, for real though, this is a pretty sad outcome. It looks like there isn't any hope left in the galaxy. Lord knows the AI isn't smart enough to hold off the scourge, unless the scourge itself gets bugged out I expect the fortress won't be enough either. I'm hoping I'm wrong.
I modded a great reduction in Fortress build radius to allow us to construct a Fortress flower. It's the best chance we've got, and should at the very least allow us to fight the 100k size fleets openly... If we're attacked by one of those 600k fleets I don't think anything can withstand that.
Although, that said, even if humanity was to survive this... I'm not sure how the AI uprising works, is it actually possible to stop it once it gets to this point? The only time it happened to me having zero robots of any kind and zero AI controlled ships didn't stop them from taking half my empire without a shot fired when the rebellion happened. If that popped and they stole earth (which idk if it's possible for them to get the capital, maybe not?) would we just instantly loose the game?
This tag:
solar_system = { # never flip any planets in the capital system
Should hopefully stop the Machines from simply seizing Earth and ending our game. Hopefully the fact that we have synths & robots outlawed has stopped or slowed this process down
We have jump drive, no?
Dial the Unbidden.
I think Stellaris won't let us try two crises at a time, but I've seen videos of both happening in a galaxy. I don't play so I don't know
Stellaris only allows one crisis at a time, and while I could mod it to allow all three, I'd rather not. We've survived thus far by specializing all of our ships to be anti-Prethoryn, which means full armour, anti-missiles, anti-strike craft and anti-armour active measures. All of these would be useless against the Unbidden, leaving us with one insurmountable enemy and one invincible enemy.
well if stellaris was a rational game that wouldnt happen, not when AI's are litterally killing themselves out of pants shitting fear. If stellaris was a more resonable game tho,I dont think we would have reached this scenario.
It was a fascinating run though.
Rationally, the other galactic states have acted rationally. The Mandasurans and Adnorans put aside their centuries old blood feud against the Humans and Belmacosans to fight alongside us, the southerners all joined their own federation or our federation, and instead of standing by their own star systems waiting for the prethoryn to overcome them, they have been sending their fleets into the heart of the swarm trying to eradicate the infested planets. If the AI stayed at their own planets, they would still be destroyed. But by going on the offensive they have the chance to limit prethoryn reinforcements and cause the prethoryn to withdraw some fleets to destroy the attackers. Just think how useful 8 cruisers are defending a planet against the prethoryn: Not very. But if they manage to take out 1 infested world, they've effectively destroyed thousands of potential prethoryn ships that would've spawned from that world.
Wide-eyed naivety got us into this mess. Wide-eyed naivety will get us out.
Try summoning the End of the Cycle
To be fair, wide-eyed naivety got us a long way in the galaxy. We were making actual good progress towards spreading Utopia in the stars, the prethoryn landing next to us was really just extraordinarily bad luck. The End of the Cycle might give us enough resources to build up a very nice fleet, and we could potentially eradicate much of the prethoryn, but what happens after that is anyone's guess. If the prethoryn had attacked later when all the space empires were more technologically developed, this could've ended differently.
Galaxy's going to hell no matter what. Let's take the bugs with us.
There's still hope: I modded the Sentinel Order to have a much larger fleet cap to compensate for the low tech of most of the galaxy's states, thus if we manage to make enough money, we could potentially fund an anti-prethoryn force by proxy through the Order. It really is just down to what happens on Earth, and if Earth falls we could tag switch to one of the human colonies on the Eastern fringe to continue the good fight.
Poll
Author
Topic: Stellaris: Never leave Earth (Read 90806 times)