Transhumanist AI Fiction

Adrian Tchaikovsky's at it again

If you are as avid a fan of SciFi as I am, then you are probably already aware of Adrian Tchaikovsky. His latest series is the Dogs of War Trilogy and I am about midway through the third book Bee Speaker as of this initial writing.

Bear Head is second in the series.

Tchaikovsky has, more than just about any author I’ve ever heard of, explored depths of the ideas of intelligent animals and their anthropology in surprising and dramatic fashion. What happens when humans encounter a planet of sentient mold? What happens when an evolutionary magic formula meant for chimps crashlands on a planet of spiders? How do sentient octopuses make decisions when each of their arms has its own brain? How is a primitive human culture transformed when a shunning ritual unleashes a freewill unknown previously? In this most recent series, what if dogs, as man’s best friend, were made even more intelligent and were genetically engineered to have their loyalty rise to the level of religious belief?

The trilogy takes place over several generations as the ability to genetically engineer and digitally augment mammals, reptiles and insects takes place on Earth, Mars and beyond. In this final book, implications of distributed intelligence as represented by a swarm of synthetics known as Bees is pivotal in the fate of collapsed economies.

Collapse
As much as I love military history and epic fiction, it is a revelation that I have been stuck in the tropes of the post-apocalyptic. As war shows us today, apocalypse needn’t be more earth shattering than Apocalypse Now. All you need are a sufficient number of powerful madmen who go rampant and radical change is pressed upon us. What we don’t often consider is how a societal collapse affects the rest of the biosphere. In I Am Legend, New York City has plenty of weeds (and presumably enough meat & veggies for hordes of zombies to survive). We generally assume for the most part that it takes the greatest toll on cows, pigs and chickens, our primary meats & dogs, cats and horses, our primary pets. That feral world generally survives an economic collapse, but not necessarily an alien invasion or nuclear holocaust. But what if our dogs were as intelligent as we were. Would they necessarily see their fate as bound to ours? Well, that depends upon their religion.

The Commune Series by Joshua Gayou is an excellent longitudinal study of man’s inhumanity to man as everyone on the planet is reduced to 1800s agrigtech after a CME that wipes out all of the electrical gadgets and infrastructure on the planet. All it takes is 2 weeks for everything that needs refrigerations to stink up the joint. Six months later all the gasoline is spoiled and you are dieseling or walking.

The Mad Mick Series by Franklin Horton is a more lightly entertaining gutbucket examination of the character of a true warrior under similar circumstances, a bit more amped up to 11.

In all of these, except the first three by A.T., there is always some hope that an extra handy person or collective can jury rig some technology to get us back to the future. It is almost axiomatic that the bloody brutal success follows, for better or worse for humanity, those who can wrap their opposable thumbs on the most deadly tools. We are always hiding in the shadows of the adept. Perhaps that is all we naked ape meatbags are good for aside from conniving our ways into each others genitals. That’s certainly a consistent premise in Martha Wells series of Murderbot.

You’re So Vain
Is it anti-humanist to suggest that synthetic or artificially enhanced intelligence in other Earthly creatures might hijack all of our greatest inventions and put them to other uses while we, deprived of them, bludgeon each other to death? Science fiction is always about some kind of triumph of the human spirit; we always have some kind of hero protagonist. There must certainly be something other than that, Lovecraft for example, or the new Scalzi that doesn’t have much use for a moral arc. Charles Stross goes there, especially against us poor Yanks and splashes in a mudpuddle of undesirables quite well. But you’re only hearing my bias, because I don’t like Zelazny or any of a dozen retro tragic sci-fi writers of the 60s and 70s. An exception being 1972’s Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and Blood Music by Greg Bear.

Nevertheless, the idea that we are responsible for creating cutting edge technology for our own benefit, or its art for its own sake, leaves a pregnant pause into which we ought to speculate about what can go wrong despite our best wishes. Why, after all, don’t we simply leave well-enough alone?

In our humble and multiple opinion they were experts on poor masters. The worse things got, the worse the leaders they chose. Each war, disaster, shortage, each turn of the screw, there was always some shyster in the wings, waiting for their moment to take the stage in a welter of promises and populist appeals. Our memories preserve several. Now, at this remove, we’re not sure why we even bother. None of those strongman big-man return-to-traditional-values types is worth remembering, honestly. Not even those who declared us an enemy of the people they so blithely claimed to speak for. Not even those who challenged us for the throne of heaven. Gone, all gone, and all their aspirations. The big men who, inside, were just small men who couldn’t bear a big world. Who wanted to put up barriers and close borders, so they could shrink their surroundings until they themselves felt larger. Small minds. Small hearts. Small ambitions.

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Bee Speaker (Dogs of War) (p. 109). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Well if there are two kinds of people in the world then they are minted on the same coin, one’s imperious mettle is equal the other’s. Everyone seeks to inherit, all of our best and worst qualities are our humanity, see?

So imagine this is an AI who knows this and then says…

We might become death, destroyer of worlds. That would be unfortunate. There are at least two worlds within our current understanding and neither of them would appreciate the chaos we might cause, if we cohere into something nasty. Sweetness. Light. Or not. To be nasty and vindictive is very human, and so something we should not be, not being human ourselves. To be benevolent and giving, that is also human. Why should we? These memories are showing us that we tried it here on this world, and it didn’t go well. Just bred hate and resentment. Why do we bother? Why did we bother?

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Bee Speaker (Dogs of War) (pp. 110-111). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I’m not one of those people who thinks that the destiny of human beings is one of self-destruction. Quite frankly one of our inherent qualities is that we desire luxury and beauty. Someone is always trying to create and sustain beautiful luxuries and luxuriant beauty. When you get it, it feels timeless. Anywhere on any spot of the planet or human imagination we know whether we are in the Four Seasons or the Waffle House. (I’m also reading The Count of Monte Cristo, more later).

What we want is an evolution of self, a return to the best days of our lives when we find ourselves lost. Or resigned to toil for the benefit of our offspring as John Adams so eloquently stated, oh so many generations ago.

“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

― John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife

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What Kind of Human
I’m recording a podcast this evening talking about the role of AI in education, more specifically how do we make sure humanity is in it. Well, the Dogs of War are sentient and know whether they are good dogs or bad dogs. They, like us, will refer to their origin stories and seek intercessions from their creator. Isn’t that like an intelligent self-interested entity? It needs purpose. It needs to feel like it is part of something larger than itself. The problem of course is that a collective entity that believes it contains universal multitudes is the ultimate sovereign. It needs nothing other than itself to justify itself.

That’s what we become when we individually believe we speak for humanity, that we indeed contain multitudes in ourself. So our collective minds become greedy gods bent on making promises of eternal anything if only you will see me as god. I am that I am is all gods have to say, with the inversion of Bruno Mars: Don’t watch me, just believe.

We’ll take the glory. We’ll take the blame.
It doesn’t matter which outcome, it all comes out the same.
We inherit our humanity. We play our human game.
Born of virgins, born of whores, whatever’s in a name?
Human, you man. You never shall transcend.
Ashes are your destiny.
Dusty shall you ever be.
So long as it’s humanity
We bother to defend.

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The above video is much more sanguine.