Better late than never

[Vaktus]

extherian

It's true, but this is something of a Hobb's choice. Whether you can leave the Archai or not doesn't really matter, since without their protection an Ahuman ISO will inevitably come along and devour your system. Considering that the likes of the Queen of Pain are out there, humans don't have a choice but to be at the mercy of the Archai. If you don't come to the gods, the gods will come to you, so to speak.

If I recall, the Encyclopedia Galactica goes out of its way to emphasise that modosophont run societies never last more than a few centuries without Transapient guidance for this very reason.

Depends on what it is you consider to be "freedom". The modosophonts themselves have no say at all in the direction that their Sephirotic takes , since these empires aren't democracies and the common person has no influence over their Archai. But they are utterly free from constraints on their mental potential and capacity for self-actualisation.


Personal control over your own destiny has never been greater in Y11K. Collective control over the direction your society takes is gone, no more than gut bacteria can vote on the behaviour of their human host. But someone born into the OA universe wouldn't value something like that anyway.

I agree with you mostly. In the Sephirotics, you have it pretty much right on the nose but there are plenty of societies that are a democracy/republic with no transapient influence. Examples being The New Daffy Panoparchy and The Puppis Democracy. There are also plenty of modos that value the decision to participate in government. That's why hiders, leavers, and people who live in the previous mention democracies exist in the setting. However, I do agree that there is a huge risk of the society falling to some blight, perversity, or dominating AI from taking over these systems.

In the OA universe, certainly. In the present day, on the other hand, human agency actually matters in the grand scheme of things, which is what I find meaningful in life.

I think the reason I find the benevolence of the gods so difficult to believe is because of how utterly unlike humans they are. They don't have families and friends like we have, or anything even remotely like the human experience. Why would they care for humanity? An AI doesn't need empathy, it wasn't descended from sociable mammals like we are. Sure, they can model our behaviours and predict what we're going to do, but so can a psychopath in real life. That doesn't mean they care.

And it's not as though the gods are merely tolerating the existence of humanity on their vast megastructures. Many OA articles show the S2 and S3 powers going out of their way to help humanity wherever they can. The article on Tribe Luxia describes a message sent from the S3 'Boh' that is 'short and full of kindness', almost as if Boh was just a vastly more intelligent human being that still cared for their bacterial ancestors.

I suppose I find the idea of gods that resemble Bitenic Squid far more likely than ones resembling humans.

I actually almost whole-heartily agree with you on this. I would go as far to say why transapient AI care about any modo in the first place other than a sense of nostalgia or sentimentality to what they once were, a pet, or some form of hobby. However, a transapient, from what Drashner has told me, can be as empathetic as it chooses to be. Which makes sense, since they could simulate your life to every minute detail that your brain could hold and completely understand it