"The kind of classic fifties-era first-contact story that Jonathan Swift
might have written, if Jonathan Swift had had a background in game
theory."
-- (Hugo nominee) Peter Watts, "In Praise of Baby-Eating"
Three Worlds Collide is a story I wrote to illustrate some points on naturalistic metaethics and diverse other issues of rational conduct. It grew, as such things do, into a small novella. On publication, it proved widely popular and widely criticized. Be warned that the story, as it wrote itself, ended up containing some profanity and PG-13 content.
- The Baby-Eating Aliens
- War and/or Peace
- The Super Happy People
- Interlude with the Confessor
- Three Worlds Decide
- Normal Ending
- True Ending
- Atonement
PDF version here.
@Eliezer well that's to me looks very dystopian future... the principle of protection of human autonomy was tossed away already when they legalize 'non consensual' anything where it is legal for human being A to impose his notions of fun on human being B against human being B's will. So the mankind got raped very gently by superhappy - so what? They legalized this already, there's a legal precedent for a far worse case that in your universe everyone agreed on.
Plus you give zero thought to concept of human beings as autonomous, each an agent upon himself. What I have immediately thought of is that I would have told the superhappy that due to communication bottleneck and biodiversity humans do not share identical values, have massively different neural wirings and as such they would have to integrate the values of each human personally etc. Not three worlds colliding but hundreds billions. I'd tell that the human neural system is so wired in many of the people that absence of pain would lead to diminished pleasure or failure to achieve sentience. I'd have told them the truth that facing such choice or having alteration forced on you results in extreme psychological pain that can disable and/or destroy some of the individuals. That we see gross modification of existing individuals as death. Etc.
Plus, of course, the fair 'superhappy' aliens are extremely vulnerable to mechanisms that homo sapiens has evolved to take advantage of naivity. You take some clinical psychopath, the smooth talking one (a corporate executive will do fine), get him to talk with the superhappy, and they're toast. The 30x thought speed advantage won't save them. The tech won't save them. They'll get owned by first nigerian prince. We have evolved for cognitive predator-prey interactions; 99% of the bias [as in , vast majority of, not as in exact number] that you're overcoming here is the heuristics for those interactions, for surviving a smarter enemy who would convince you into doing something bad with arguments that are only subtly flawed, akin to proof that 1=2. Where do you think the bias and reluctance to accept reason comes from? Well guess what 99% of reason out there is predator's blinky lights trying to subvert neural system of the prey, as in some squid versus some shrimp. The shrimp learnt to close the eyes. Reader, once you take into your mind what I just said there, even to parse what I said, you have to effectively execute truing-complete code in your head. In wetware with no process boundaries. The rationalism is inherently vulnerable.
They're entirely toothless however, with no concept of biting and no carapace. Ditto for the babyeaters, really, sending off all their data, sending human data to the superhappy, and otherwise acting like total naive idiots instead of waging the cognitive warfare that humanity has perfected in the course of probably more than a million years. I say, in such an interaction, both of those alien races would get massively, massively exploited by humanity.
Non-consensual conversation is legal and socially approved. A society where non-consensual anything is illegal would look very interesting - explicit mentions of kind of interaction you're open to, long escalation of extremely subtle signals, people mostly ignoring each other all the time, ubiquitous go-betweens - but hardly the only non-dystopian one.
Meh. There are some dif... (read more)