Science fiction books have to tell interesting stories, and interesting stories are about humans or human-like entities. We can enjoy stories about aliens or robots as long as those aliens and robots are still approximately human-sized, human-shaped, human-intelligence, and doing human-type things. A Star Wars in which all of the X-Wings were combat drones wouldn’t have done anything for us. So when I accuse something of being science-fiction-ish, I mean bending over backwards – and ignoring the evidence – in order to give basically human-shaped beings a central role.
This is my critique of Robin. As weird as the Age of Em is, it makes sure never to be weird in ways that warp the fundamental humanity of its participants. Ems might be copied and pasted like so many .JPGs, but they still fall in love, form clans, and go on vacations.
In contrast, I expect that we’ll get some kind of AI that will be totally inhuman and much harder to write sympathetic stories about. If we get ems after all, I expect them to be lobotomized and drugged until they become effectively inhuman, cogs in the Ascended Economy that would no more fall in love than an automobile would eat hay and whinny. Robin’s interest in keeping his protagonists relatable makes his book fascinating, engaging, and probably wrong.
It’s worth noting that Reynolds’s SMAC future does not consider this level of AI development to be an existential threat to humanity as a whole. There’s no way to inflict a robot or “grey goo” plague on your rivals in the way that it is possible to use tailored retroviruses. This is quite interesting given that, in the years since Reynolds released the game, plenty of futurists have gone on record as saying that they see significant danger in the creation of real, general AI.
To be fair, the player sees Sister Miriam express some worry about the issue. But nothing in the technology tree or the game mechanics directly support this. In particular, Reynolds does not postulate anything about the development of AI necessarily leads to the abandonment of any faction’s core values. Each faction is philosophically stable in the presence of AI.
The fundamental reason why this is, I think, is because Reynolds wanted the game to be human-centric. In the context of the technology tree, the late-game factional struggle is largely about what kinds of people we want to build ourselves into. The argument over what types of social organization are right and good is secondary in comparison.
The structure of the technology tree supports this by making amazing cybernetic, biological, and psionic enhancement of people come far before true AI. By the time real AI erupts on the scene, it does so firmly at the command of entities we might fairly consider more than human. They have evolved from present-day humans, step by step, and their factions are still guided by largely recognizable, if exceptional humans. Where AI is necessarily alien, Reynolds postulates transhumans are still human in some crucial sense.
David Udell comments on David Udell’s Shortform