Oracles
A short piece on the role of oracles in my space opera serial Chronicles of the Deep Patrol.
Oracles
Time is the most mysterious factor effected by the Wavefront, more so even than the Unknown Powers, who can be proven to exist, even if their nature and intentions (if any) are an enigma. Essentially the problem is the Omphalos Hypothesis, also known as Last Thursdayism.
It is a proven fact that an ASI* with access to printers and fabbers can create artefacts of arbitrary size, complexity and apparent history. Humans can create crude objects with fake age, but the problems of isotopic proportion and radioactive decay are beyond them. A Strong AI can solve this problem and make, for example, a building or spacecraft that to all possible detection methods will appear thousands of years old. Trivially they could make a human with memories conforming to this fictional history.
In other words everything we see in the wake of the Wavefront, including the Deep Patrol, might have been built last Thursday by a particularly hard working ASI with a terrible sense of humour.
(A competing explanation is the Simulation Hypothesis, which suggests that since the effects of the Event and the Wavefront are so enormous, energy expensive, and implausible, they did not in fact occur, and instead we are all within a simulation designed to find out what would happen if they did. This solves a number of the problems, including the time one, in a trivial and unhelpful way.)
Meanwhile faster than light travel creates inconsistent timelines. Occasional reports of ships and crew arriving at their destinations before they left aside, those who can be proved to have left the solar system when the Wavefront hit have a wide variation in their elapsed time frames. Shokotan 10 was found drifting a thousand parsecs from Earth in 2067, and no more than eight hours had passed for the crew. Meanwhile later that year, a settlement was discovered on Ariadne, the survivors of a Canadian wilderness trek and their descendents, who had been on planet for fifty two years according to their data pads, rather than the nineteen the explorers determined they had been missing.
With history a mess, prediction of the future is equally chaotic. Even if there are no upsets as large as the Wavefront, a dubious assumption, the existence of aliens, Strong AI, advanced human cultures, and the Unknown Powers make prognostication futile.
Strong AI’s disagree. Even though history has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, with sufficient knowledge broad future themes can be determined. In other words they predict events that have not yet occurred. Not just immediately, as in a tactical situation (“If I tell you X, then the Deep Patrol will investigate Y, stumble across Z and unleash entire alphabets of consequences upon itself and surrounding cultures”). But also strategic prophecies stretching across years and parsecs, leading to the downfall of threats and rising up of allies.
How accurate are such predictions? Although often phrased in general terms and having an if-this-then-that format, it has rarely been wise to completely ignore a Strong AI oracle. That said, if such intelligences can see far enough into the future, can we understand their plans or the outcomes they desire?
And can an oracle predict the actions of another oracle? If they were opposed to each other, past, present and future could be their battleground, and the whole of the history of known space a skirmish.
* ASI - Artificial Super Intelligence. Of course in the wake of the Wavefront, who is to say what is artificial and what natural?
Oracles
Time is the most mysterious factor effected by the Wavefront, more so even than the Unknown Powers, who can be proven to exist, even if their nature and intentions (if any) are an enigma. Essentially the problem is the Omphalos Hypothesis, also known as Last Thursdayism.
It is a proven fact that an ASI* with access to printers and fabbers can create artefacts of arbitrary size, complexity and apparent history. Humans can create crude objects with fake age, but the problems of isotopic proportion and radioactive decay are beyond them. A Strong AI can solve this problem and make, for example, a building or spacecraft that to all possible detection methods will appear thousands of years old. Trivially they could make a human with memories conforming to this fictional history.
In other words everything we see in the wake of the Wavefront, including the Deep Patrol, might have been built last Thursday by a particularly hard working ASI with a terrible sense of humour.
(A competing explanation is the Simulation Hypothesis, which suggests that since the effects of the Event and the Wavefront are so enormous, energy expensive, and implausible, they did not in fact occur, and instead we are all within a simulation designed to find out what would happen if they did. This solves a number of the problems, including the time one, in a trivial and unhelpful way.)
Meanwhile faster than light travel creates inconsistent timelines. Occasional reports of ships and crew arriving at their destinations before they left aside, those who can be proved to have left the solar system when the Wavefront hit have a wide variation in their elapsed time frames. Shokotan 10 was found drifting a thousand parsecs from Earth in 2067, and no more than eight hours had passed for the crew. Meanwhile later that year, a settlement was discovered on Ariadne, the survivors of a Canadian wilderness trek and their descendents, who had been on planet for fifty two years according to their data pads, rather than the nineteen the explorers determined they had been missing.
With history a mess, prediction of the future is equally chaotic. Even if there are no upsets as large as the Wavefront, a dubious assumption, the existence of aliens, Strong AI, advanced human cultures, and the Unknown Powers make prognostication futile.
Strong AI’s disagree. Even though history has a sensitive dependence on initial conditions, with sufficient knowledge broad future themes can be determined. In other words they predict events that have not yet occurred. Not just immediately, as in a tactical situation (“If I tell you X, then the Deep Patrol will investigate Y, stumble across Z and unleash entire alphabets of consequences upon itself and surrounding cultures”). But also strategic prophecies stretching across years and parsecs, leading to the downfall of threats and rising up of allies.
How accurate are such predictions? Although often phrased in general terms and having an if-this-then-that format, it has rarely been wise to completely ignore a Strong AI oracle. That said, if such intelligences can see far enough into the future, can we understand their plans or the outcomes they desire?
And can an oracle predict the actions of another oracle? If they were opposed to each other, past, present and future could be their battleground, and the whole of the history of known space a skirmish.
* ASI - Artificial Super Intelligence. Of course in the wake of the Wavefront, who is to say what is artificial and what natural?
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