Asimov's Ghost - Chapter 12 - Empires
The game of Empires, residing on the StayTel Network, in the virtual city of Principia, is still to this day, one of the single most impressive pieces of technology development the human race has ever come up with.
The game is a fully immersive, fully interactive, nanoscopically detailed, whole earth, complete simulation. The simulation runs in ten-year cycles (subjective) and recreates the decade leading up to the Great Confusion.
There are several missions that a player can go on within the Empires game. Most people go for the Domination mission, whereby they are tasked with building the most successful possible, blockchain-based business.
However there are a smaller subset of players who attempt Empires hardest mission, and that is to work out what led to the Great Confusion, and to retrieve any information that happened before the mass deletion.
Within Empires a player can employ a ‘helper’, somebody who guides them around the virtual planet and steers them in their missions. The best helpers are the ‘greys’, these are people who have dedicated themselves to living as real a life as possible whilst on the Qblock.
Most greys tend to congregate around the Empires game, as this is where they can gain the most reality rewards.
What makes Empires so impressive, is not just the attention to historical detail, but also the amount of detail put into the characters in the game, which are split into three categories.
First there are the slave Ais, who are intelligent with a small ‘i’ , anyone actually born in the 21st century, wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference, however it was an important distinction.
The Ais were charged with keeping things running smoothly, hence they were often waitresses, drivers and things that could be done fairly automatically without too much sophistication.
Then there were the ‘grown up’ AIs, these characters were considered almost sentient, and their programming was such that they could become fully aware; otherwise known as an FMS AI, FMS Human, or FMS Bot, standing for fully machine sentient.
These characters are extremely sophisticated and are constantly reacting to their environment in a way that pretty much matched how an actual 21st century human being would act.
Lastly, the most impressive subset of characters, are the mapped-AIs, or MAI for short. The MAI’s technology takes advantage of the fact that 21st century humans were incredibly open about their personal data. They regularly publicly posted intimate details about themselves, as well as completely trivial ones, all the time.
There were millions of humans who had almost their entire lives documented in high detail. This meant you could take that information, and map it onto a MAI’s hardbrain, though this wasn’t just about simulation, a MAI can take various things that they have learned about one ancient human or another, and then feed that into an emulated, behaviour modulator.
This means that the MAI’s can and will, react completely uniquely to any given situation; but using the personality of the original human who has been mapped.
Meaning that there are certain rules of engagement when dealing with an MAI, for instance, players are not allowed to reference the Qblock, or indeed anything that may indicate they are from 23rd century earth.
There are few things that a player’s NPlants are used for within Empires, and identifying MAIs is one of them, this ensures that players do not break rules of engagement by accident.
MAIs are not fully sentient in the way that FMS-bots are; however they have created a rather uncomfortable debating point in that, they do seem to be aware; and they seem to genuinely believe that they were the original long-dead humans from whence they gained their personalities.
Of course any self-aware entity is afforded the same rights as an organic-born human, the MAIs are not considered truly self-aware, as they have no idea they are just pieces of code in a quantum generated, virtual simulation, within a simulation, within a simulation, within a simulation . . .
~ From Life On The Qblock by Maze66
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Original artwork by @nekromarinist
Words by Cryptogee
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@cryptogee, this is an interesting post and it got me thinking. It was a weird feeling, I had, reading this post. I had the feeling that I was a bot who thinks he is a human, not realizing that the human race had died off a long time ago. It makes one wonder at the history we accept so easily and so quickly.
What if the black death was more final than history books are reporting? What if Noah's flood was not just the end of a civilization but actually the end of the human race with Noah being the last human alive; a scientist who having mapped the life on the planet, recreated them.
This was exactly the same feeling I had when I saw the movie Matrix years ago. What do we really know of this world? Are we in some simulation? Being remotely manipulated across space and time even, watched by beings who mock our efforts at finding peace, joy and love?
I remember reading somewhere that the Genesis chapter of the Bible where it is said that the world was without void, the creation story I mean, if properly read, could be seen to show that the earth was being created for the second time. The earth had faced a cataclysm of immense magnitude that had wiped all life and frozen it in darkness and God was not creating from scratch but rather he was rebuilding from memory.
I cannot remember the author now of the book, or was it an article neither can I remember the book title but it made me wonder then as this story makes me wonder now. What do we really know?
Once again, within steemit, I have found something that made me think. Thank you.
Nah, that story was written by people who know less about the world than my 7 year old daughter, which is why it has things in it like god created light on the 1st day and then the sun and the stars on the 4th.
'read properly' means fill in the gaps for yourself and make up whatever suits you ;-)
The story of Noah is predated by a thousand years of the story of Gilgamesh, it is more or less a direct rip-off; biblical plagiarism if you like!
As for living in a sim, I wrote about this in the past, the TL:DR version is basically an argument of complexity. I state that if there are truly NP problems in the universe (problems that take the most powerful computers more than the age of the universe to solve), then we probably aren't living in a sim, however if NP = P, and there are actually no such thing as NP problems, then we might be.
Thanks for your kind words and comments; glad you're enjoying the series, hope to entertain you further! :-)
Cg
Lol... I think the writer focused more on how all the animals created where said to be created each to their own kind except two which I can't remember now. According to him, what kind did the passage refer to if not a kind that had been created before.
The Np=p theory you mentioned is quite enlightening. For it would definitely need a supercomputer of that capacity to create a virtual reality of the nature of reality we are in. I can get behind that.
Thank you for a good story. I will be reading definitely.
Thing is, Humans themselves are becoming more and more like robots, and lose their sense of empathy for others. Feelings are increasingly considered as a weakness. 'Deliver, deliver, deliver without compassion is the moto these days in order to get maximum results in a performance-driven society.
At the same time, 'real' robots are looking exactly like Humans, and the mutual assimilation in the abolition of feelings makes Human and robot even more indistinguishable.
No doubt that the time will come when Humans will be turned to robots on the operating table!
Or at the very least cyborgs! :-)
Cg
Such a nice blog u r really superb