So, Muse walks onto the trading floor and has an analogy…

I had this idea: A traditional Dyson sphere, what most of us singularity-as-a-setting writers now call matrioshka spheres (poor Dyson, to be remembered for the bad SFnal version), where lots and lots of little solar-powered polises live in huge cloud-like orbits around the sun. Gazillions of human analogues live in these things and 99.99% of them don’t do much more than play World of Warcraft and their equivalents. Every once in a while one of these polises suddenly needs a lot more CPU power, maybe because its population is going after a boss-level, or there’s a huge gathering thar requires a lot of environmental rendering. Whatever the case, the polises would like to have a mechanism for borrowing computrons from neighboring polises to do the rendering. Distance and orbital times make calculations difficult, but eventually promises of future returns on borrowed processing time become commodities traded just like the more predictable “hard” commodities of out-system manfacturing resources.

All of this is very boring, so specialized quasi-conscious AIs are tasked with figuring it all out. The post-human overseers who leave their entertainment realms to manage theses systems are rock stars, wealthy in some way, empowered perhaps to make decisions and dole out favors. The AIs, meanwhile, are looking through the optimization space to make sure the polis they’re programmed to oversee has the best possible deals, maximizing speedups and minimizing slowdowns.

The day comes when someone is called upon to make good on a contract, and fails to deliver. Big. An adventure goes south, pixellated and trashed. And while the adventurers in the game are disappointed, the overseeing AI overreacts and pulls its contracts in, refusing to deal until its neighbors, some of whom are coming into a functional transactional range and others are moving out as orbits proceed, until they demonstrate significantly greater transparency.

Everything goes sour in the time it takes light to traverse the solar system twice as people realize that the promises the AIs have been making have no basis in real deliverables, and the promised adventures aren’t going to happen and, worse, the promised entertainments to be delivered out-system to the manfacturing base that provides maintenance and parts for this bread-and-circuses civilization aren’t going to happen, and the manfacturers either shut down or go slow-and-local. The intra-Mars orbit civilization starts to slow down as more and more resources are dedicated to preservation, and a great depression settles onto Sol.

And then the aliens invade, I suppose. Or something.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

I have been remiss… New Stories!

I have been remiss in keeping those of you who don’t use the new stories feed up-to-date on the latest and greatest offerings from the Pendorwright website.

Appliance Dreams is a short story about a few Pendorians living in and busily restoring a derelict starship. They’ve awakened the AI, but they have no idea where her core is stored, until someone figures it out, leading to one of my favorite lines yet: “You mean, I’m sleeping with the ship’s screensaver?” (Line redacted to avoid spoilers; you can highlight the redacted text to see what’s written there.)

On Ida’s Shores is one of those silly foundational stories I wrote when I was trying to get an idea off the ground. Unfortunately, the idea turned out to be thin indeed, although it does have some establishment shots in it that led to the Sterlings series, so it’s not all bad.

We’ll Always Have… is a bit of a sad romance. I wanted to make more of Oenone’s character; I haven’t done enough with her and she has some compelling background material, but she wasn’t coming together as a character, so I wanted to give her a few episodes and see if I could do her justice. This episode does her some justice.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's writing journal, Pendorwright.com. Feel free to comment on either LiveJournal or Pendorwright.

Professor Steve Jones is an idiot.

I already told mundens about this, but it annoys me enough I'm lifting it out of comments.

Professor Steve Jones is an idiot. Either that, or he's being tragically misquoted. According to the Independent, Professor Jones asserts "Human evolution is grinding to a halt. This is as good as it gets." Jones goes on to assert that small, isolated populations might still show evolutionary pressures, but not H. sapiens as a whole.

Rubbish.

First off, evolution cannot "stop" because it is not a machine or a process. It is a consequence of ecosystems. Trying to proclaim that it exists for H. sapiens in one region, but not in another, especially when gene pool remixing is happening at rate never before seen in our species, is to be misinformed. The author of the original shows both a teleological misunderstanding of evolutionary biology and a real failure to grasp our own biological history. I mean, what's this nonsense in the article about "few men over the age of 35 are reproducing, and age is a valuable source of mutations?" Does this guy have any idea at all that for most of our evolutionary period, most of us didn't even live to see 40? That polygamous tribal systems concentrated an awful lot of genetic in single male individuals?

But the key, important part is described in the phrase "as good as it gets." Get this through the thick skull of everyone who says anything remotely like that: evolution does not care if your progeny are smarter, stronger, faster, or live longer. All evolution does is weed out those in the next generation who do the poorest at exploiting the current environment. Brains, muscle and speed cost metabolism. Longevity severely impacts selectivity. If being stupider and living shorter makes us better exploiters of an environment (and believe me, a lot of dumb sheep are evidence that it is), then the smart and long-lived will be the ones weeded out. Evolution selects executors of adaptation; it is the gene pool that maximizes adaptation through selection. In neither case is adaptation "fitness." If adaptation values what we do not, we're out of luck.

Jones tries to talk himself out of this problem by proclaiming that since we're all interbreeding now the gene pool will tend to regress to the mean. But Jones ignores two important factors: first, gene emergence through accidental duplication and cooption is still going to happen, at the normal rate it always has. And second, despite evolution working primrality on genes, evolution does not care about genes either: its only consequence is the selection of successful adaptations.

Besides, evolution is not teleological. It doesn't have a "plan," an "intent," or a "care" for who we are or what we might become. It's a mechanical consequence of biology, as relentless, as unfeeling as a meat grinder. There is no "god" of evolution, and biologists do not flock to mildewed walls to touch a stain vaguely shaped like Charles Darwin in the hopes of suddenly evolving Pokemon-style.

It's also not miraculous. It's not a "real time" event. It takes far longer than the human mind is adapted to consider well. He, and I, and you, and everyone around us will be long gone by the time whatever conscious beings are around notice that their gene pool has drifted so far in one direction or another that they could never successfully interbreed with anyone from this generation. They may have drifted so far they might no more want to than you or I would want to mate with a chimpanzee.

The writer is an idiot. And fortunately, he's being treated as such by the biology blogosphere.