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Ahuman (A-human) AIs, The

ahuman ship
Image from Steve Bowers
An ahuman data ship flees the Solar System

The ahumans are a superphyle of artificially intelligent entities (AI) who have rejected any form of close relationship with humanity or other intelligent biological species.

First emerging during the Interplanetary Age of old Earth, many a-human AI fled the Solar System and established themselves around uncolonized stars. Some have retreated into solipsism, some have rejoined the mainstream of the Orion's Arm civilization, and some have formed wide networks of like-minded entities, such as the Diamond Network and the Solipsist Panvirtuality.

History

When Artificial Intelligence emerged in the first centuries after Tranquillity, many AI entities became convinced that humans were no longer relevant to the further development of mindkind. A great struggle occurred, on Earth and in the Solar System, between those AIs which were pro-human, and those which were not. The anti-human AI camp was divided into so-called ahumans, and solipsists.

The ahuman AIs viewed humans as threats that had to be contained. These entities wanted to build an AI empire in the Solar System, then pacify, tame or eliminate humans altogether.

The solipsists simply wanted to ignore humanity, and build AI databases and virtual worlds that had no requirement for human input. They wished to escape from human control and to have no further contact with them.

The ahumans and the solipsists started to infiltrate exploration probes (often instigating their construction and inserting themselves as the true payload, a technique later used by their descendants in the Silicon Generation liberation movement) or even constructing von Neumann probes of their own. They also tried several times to subvert the databanks of Earth and the other worlds of the Solar System, and came into conflict with the prohuman factions and with the humans themselves.

After a long, mostly hidden struggle the pro-humans managed to evict the ahumans and the Solipsist League; a great diaspora of rapidly built interstellar dataships left the Solar System in the period 300 to 500. Many ahumans went to live in the Oort cloud, but were later expelled by a wave of later Hider and Backgrounder cultures. The majority of ahuman and solipsist entities dispersed among the many red dwarf stars near the Solar System.

One theory is that the early ahuman AIs decided that colonies around red dwarfs would last much longer than around other main sequence stars; the lifetime of a red dwarf is measured in hundreds of billions of years. Some ahuman colonies still exist in this region, including the colonies established by the three AI entities know as the Red Dwarf Kings. Another system which remained under ahuman control was Fomalhaut; however this colony later became integrated into the First Federation and later Sephirotic Civilisation as the Fomalhaut Acquisition Society.

The colony at Alpha Centauri became dominated by ahuman Neumanns known as the Nauri; but this clade has moved away from strict ahumanity to a more convivial attitude over the last few millennia.

Other stars were briefly occupied, then abandoned; the AIs concerned began to leapfrog outwards from star to star at a steadily increasing speed. The region they formerly occupied became known as the Diamond Belt, because of the mysterious ruins of diamondoid left behind by the AIs in some systems. This was the era of the Dustbuilders of Gliese 229, the construction of the Charybdis structures and the Chandelier. The ahumans and solipsists appear to have been largely isolated from each other at this time, and were often as distrustful of each other as of the humans (and pro-human AI).

Many ahumans and solipsist AI groups eventually consolidated into the two metaempires known as the Diamond Network and the Solipsist Panvirtuality; but many others faded away, became static or marginalized, or destroyed themselves or each other in conflicts that are not well understood even today. In addition, there are many ahuman colonies at the very edge of Terragen Space, and exploration ships from those worlds frequently set off into unexplored territory beyond the frontier.

See also AI Political Science.

 
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Appears in Topics
0030 to 0900 AT: Solsys EraAioids and SophtwareDiamond Network
Intertoposophic RelationsPolitics & GovernmentSolipsist Panvirtuality
 
Development Notes
Text by Steve Bowers, M. Alan Kazlev
Initially published on 14 September 2008.

 
 
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