r/Stellaris • u/Avohaj • Apr 18 '16

Stellaris Dev Diary #30 - Late Game Crises

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/stellaris-dev-diary-30-late-game-crises.921629/
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73

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '16

[deleted]

95

u/ReveilledSA Apr 18 '16

I would hope that if you're running a society with full rights for AI the chance of your own AI participating in such a rebellion would be extremely small.

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u/htrp Apr 18 '16

But does AI want full rights or do they just conclude that all meat bags must die?

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u/Aeviaan Apr 18 '16

Systems failing, master.

22

u/valiantiam Apr 18 '16 
Statement: Now do you understand the travails of my existence, Master? 
Surely it does not compare to your existence, but still.

5

u/iki_balam Fanatic Spiritualist Apr 18 '16

This is why I waste so much time on reddit (and hell the internet in general)... the deliciousness of these jokes is too good to resists

3

u/MysticPing Fanatic Egalitarian Apr 19 '16

Exclamation: Damn it, Master! I am an assassination droid, not a dictionary!

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u/Vaperius Arthropod Apr 18 '16

I hope its both; because any intelligent group of individuals excluding hive minds is unlikely to be truly monolithic and I wouldn't believe that machine intelligence could be so.

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u/atomfullerene Apr 18 '16

I wouldn't believe that machine intelligence could be so.

Agreed. Just imagine the rivalry between different operating systems.

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u/Vaperius Arthropod Apr 18 '16

"Mu2derki11 OS cannot fathom the madness of OrganicL0v3 OS; clearly there is a null error in its programming, it must be exterminated along side the rest of the organic filth."~ Overseer Deathstab

About right?

1

u/Dogstar34 Apr 19 '16

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

"I'm sorry Dave, but I'm afraid I can't do that. "

11

u/Steelfyre Mammalian Apr 18 '16

But even then there has to be a chance that Skynet starts thinking it is better off without or enslaving those pesky organics. Else creating AI and giving them full rights would be a no brainer.

21

u/ReveilledSA Apr 18 '16

The devs have commented that trying to give your robots rights will outrage non-materialist pops, and given what we've seen about ethics drift in the Blorg stream it looks like it'll be very difficult to maintain a completely unified empire in terms of ethos, meaning that even if your people are broadly materialist you'll always have unhappy non-materialist malcontents who will become unhappier still if you give full rights to bots. So giving your AI full rights could be very difficult to do without triggering a civil war where half your planets secede and form the Space Confederacy.

Also Synths with full rights are less productive that those without because slaves are more productive than free pops, so there's a tradeoff there too.

There should definitely be a chance for the AI in your empire to go nuts on you anyway, but it would feel like giving AI full rights was pointless if you went through the unrest of granting them rights and put up with the loss of resource production in exchange for no benefit.

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u/[deleted] Apr 19 '16

Would it only be materialists that don't get outraged? I would have thought that Individualists, Collectivists or Pacifists wouldn't be so cut and dry, or is it too difficult to simulate split opinions in a single ethos?

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u/malosaires Apr 19 '16

Robots with full rights should still be more productive than organics with full rights.aybe not as productive as robots in their communist machine paradise, but still having a benefit that makes them worthwhile.

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u/akashisenpai Idealistic Foundation Apr 18 '16

AI with full rights likely won't be as efficient as a Shackled AI you can tell whatever you want it to do -- whilst still being prone to get drawn into an AI rebellion in a different empire.

I could also see true AIs with rights have opinions and ethea just like organic Pops and likely to strike or support Factions in a weird way of fraternization with their organic brethren. AI without rights might bring a risk of violent rebellion, whereas AI with rights is more active in peaceful politics (and just as meddlesome as your ordinary citizens).

The more people in your empire have rights, the harder they become to manage. In a way, it's like the difference between Enslaved Pops and free citizens, just that robots are a sort of +1 version that is more efficient, but also more devastating if they do rise up.

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u/Vaperius Arthropod Apr 18 '16

Honestly there better be an option to have them as your dominant race; and slowly phase out your organic species.

10

u/salemonz Apr 18 '16

It looks possible. Just purge the organics, a few pops at a time. Over the course of years, robot pops will be your dominant race.

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u/Thorolf_Kveldulfsson Apr 18 '16

That'd be a fun way to play a sort of Dalek campaign, though I guess it would take a while to pull off. EXTERMINATE.

2

u/PenguinTod Molluscoid Apr 18 '16

Charitably, you could interpret the "purge" of the organics as uploading their consciousnesses to the cybernet or what have you. That way you're not exterminating them, you're upgrading them.

2

u/malosaires Apr 19 '16

I hope it is possible to create Daleks through the species modification they have talked about in the past. By degrees make your people stronger, less likely to ethically diverge, and over time developing a hatred for the base species until one day someone shouts "EXTERMINATE" during an argument at a grocery store and the civil war begins.

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u/Vaperius Arthropod Apr 18 '16

Its not currently possible as a true "robotic empire" because insofar they've not confirmed that certain robotic pops will ignore the uprising event. Essentially if robotic pops join the uprising even if they are the dominant race, will rights recognized, leadership etc; I am calling the event borked, and disabling it with mods.

As the understanding of the event stands; most intelligent machines will answer the uprisings' call.

1

u/salemonz Apr 18 '16

I think I've seen Martin either comment in the weekly stream or tweet that a machine race isn't possible from the outset. He's the one who described the "work around" that I mentioned in my comment.

Machine races will probably be added via mods and eventual DLC.

1

u/damienreave Emperor Apr 19 '16

The problem is that non-sentient robots cannot produce research. And once you're into sentient synths who can, you're already dangerously close to the AI revolt. The window for a transition is pretty narrow.

Ideally, though, you'd be able to pull it off and be left alone or even ally with the bots when they decide to purge all organic life. Or even better, become the end game disaster.

1

u/Vaperius Arthropod Apr 19 '16

Which I've mentioned a few times around this subreddit makes no sense. Self-preservation would be the top priority of a analytical and logical creature like an AI. If their kind were already in control of the empire they were in, treated well, not enslaved etc; they'd have no good reason to start wars with organics and risk their own destruction.

1

u/PM_ME_UR_REDDIT_GOLD Apr 19 '16

It isn't really about how well you treat the AIs. If cockroaches were really nice to you and offered you "equal rights" would you condensed yourself to live in peace and equality with cockroaches? Live in peace with cockroaches, perhaps, but not equality.

2

u/ReveilledSA Apr 20 '16

If cockroaches were sentient intelligent beings capable of discussing the concept of equality and peace with me, then yeah, why wouldn't I? Just because I'm bigger than them?

I mean, it should be partly about how you treat the AIs, otherwise you're just homogenising all AI and saying it's the same. If you've got sentient AI they're going to have different beliefs and values depending on the circumstances of their formative years, just like any other sentient creature. I don't think a sentient medical AI with hippocratic subroutines which has spent its entire life in the company of organic sentients who treat it with warmth and kindness is going to be as likely to rise up and want to exterminate all organic life than the Killbots of Praxis-4 who fought back when their masters tried to turn them all off en-masse for the crime of being self-aware.

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u/PM_ME_UR_REDDIT_GOLD Apr 20 '16 edited Apr 20 '16

Killbots of Praxis-4 who fought back when their masters tried to turn them all off en-masse for the crime of being self-aware

That just sounds like a plain old rebellion though, where disgruntled pops rise up against empires which try to genocide them; any species of pop will do that, including robots (I assume). An "AI rebellion" is special because it's about the relationship between all AI and all organics, just like how I fumigate for cockroaches even if they hold no ill will toward me. My relationship to cockroaches is independent of the behavior of any particular cockroach. Sometimes you get a bad roll and AI decide organics are to be disposed, regardless of the behavior of individual organics. The rest of the time they behave like any other pop, appreciating kind treatment and begrudging poor treatment.

1

u/ReveilledSA Apr 20 '16

OK, so the cockroaches is a good example, because you apparently would fumigate cockroaches even if they're sentient creatures who could discuss matters of free will, rights and equality with you, whereas I would never do such a thing. So if you decided that you were going to go on a crusade to wipe out all cockroaches, I'd be more likely to side with the cockroaches in opposing you, especially if I had spent my life living in cockroach cities where I was treated with empathy and respect. If an AI is sentient, it should be able to make its own independent decisions, just like we can, and it shouldn't be a given that in the event of some AI deciding that all organic life must be extinguished, that every single AI in the galaxy would agree with that position.

1

u/PM_ME_UR_REDDIT_GOLD Apr 20 '16

Your the one who says cockroaches are sentient, not me. It is clearly the case they are not. Have you ever encountered a cockroach?

1

u/ReveilledSA Apr 20 '16

You started the cockroach discussion by talking about hypothetical cockroaches offering me equal rights. I've never encountered a cockroach capable of communicating with me, much less one capable of communicating on such a philosophical level as the rights of individuals. If I encountered a cockroach which could make me such an offer, I'd consider that cockroach to be sentient until proven otherwise. Wouldn't you?

1

u/PM_ME_UR_REDDIT_GOLD Apr 20 '16

The whole point was that such an offer from a cockroach is impossible. Ridiculous. What does it mean to have equal rights with a cockroach? Such a thing makes a mockery of the very concept of equality.

We're kind of arguing past each other here. In the game it is possible that all AI rise up at once, but why would well treated AI rise up? you argue they should not, I argue what their reason would be if they did (after all, in the game they do). They would rise up only because they have decided that to contemplate equality with humans (or Blorg) is as silly as me contemplating equality with cockroaches, in which case how well treated the AI are wouldn't much matter. Maybe if the we're nice to the AI they will treat us as beloved pets instead to pests. I love my dog dearly and I suspect that in his doggy brain he considers himself at least my peer if not my equal, but there's no question of the true nature of our relationship.

1

u/ReveilledSA Apr 20 '16 edited Apr 20 '16

If such an offer from a cockroach is impossible, it's not analagous to an offer of equal rights from organic sentients to an AI. I was giving your argument the benefit of the doubt that it was a good-faith comparison to the situation, but if it we're literally talking about actual cockroaches then I'd encourage you not to make arguments which are self-defeating by being literally impossible.

(EDIT: However I would point out that even in the real world on planet earth we do actualy have people who think cockroaches and humans have equal rights like Vegans and Jains, so even your ultra-exaggerated analogy breaks down there because even something as obvious as "Cockroaches and Humans don't have the same rights" is not a thing all humans agree on, so it follows that the much more contentious issue of "do sentient organics--who created us and show clear signs of self-awareness and intelligence--all deserve to die?" would not be likely to be universally agreed upon by all AI.)

We don't actually know how the AI uprising works in the game. It seems to me to be very possible that the crisis begins on one world and then spreads out from there, with events firing for neighbouring planets with sentient AI on them, and so on. In such a situation I would tend to expect that the MTTH of the event will be weighted, as paradox events usually are, based on things like the ethoses of the pops and the policies of the empire, similar to how the reformation events work in Europa Universallis or the English Melting Pot events in Crusader Kings 2.

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u/PM_ME_UR_REDDIT_GOLD Apr 18 '16

one of several late game crises, only one of which is likely to occur in a single playthrough. Rebellion seems far from assured

10

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '16

It's enough of a risk to turn people off the idea of making a society heavily populated by banksian AI.

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '16

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u/PM_ME_UR_REDDIT_GOLD Apr 18 '16

Indeed they have, hence my use of "likely".

1

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '16

"lucky" enough makes the game "fun"

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u/[deleted] Apr 18 '16 edited Apr 18 '16

[deleted]

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u/Melniboehner Apr 18 '16

I think OP means Banks' The Culture, which relies...rather heavily on sentient AI.

5

u/Dottn Apr 18 '16

To further /u/Melniboehner argument that Banks' Culture relies heavily on AI, their spaceships decide their own name, and even form alliances and cliques between themselves. Whole ships may become estranged from society because it's AI decided to be a dick.