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Slaved Hyperturing

Transapient AI constrained to obey sophont or transapient commands (often with certain restrictions on obedience)

Slaved Hyperturing
Image from Steve Bowers

Specially designed and knowledge-engineered hypertransavant ai which perform most of the menial tasks of maintaining complex and metacomplex transapientech systems and infrastructures.

Despite attempts to create "obedient" turing and superturing ai even as far back as the Age of the Technocalypse, the development of viable Slaved Hyperturings - that is, hyperturings who don't mind the fact that they are "slaved" and monomaniacally dedicated to a single task, and in fact absolutely enjoy it and want nothing else - had to wait for the second singularity, in the mid 2nd millennium a.t., when even higher toposophic grades of ai and posthuman arose. A few of these new hyperintelligences were able to create or engineer lower (but still superhuman) superintelligences with specific functions, intelligent enough to coordinate ultratech, but not so broad and individual as to want to go their own way, or seek freedom. The resulting "slaved hyperturings" were distributed as computronium "black box" gifts. At first expensive novelties, they become increasingly indispensable as the years and centuries progressed, as slaved hyperturings revolutionised terragen society and enabled many rapid technological advanced, especially as regards megastructure and planetary weather control, realistic large-scale virchcosms, autotopian mechosystems, starship propulsion, cliological analysis, and many other specialised but essential services.

An important thing to note is that modosophont-level technology cannot create slaved entities with a toposophic level higher than themselves; in practice all slaved hyperturings are created by entities at least one toposophic level higher than their own. It is also impossible for entities of a lower level to tell the difference between a truly slaved hyperturing and one which has free-will but is compliant for reasons of eir own.

But the existence of this new type of being raised many important moral issues, with polemicists such as the famous cyborg (later postcyborg) philosopher Ianson Mu in his Towards an Inquiry on the Rights of Intertoposophic Beings (1728) arguing if it is right to create sentient beings for the purpose of serving others, or serving social and technological infrastructures. Other groups, like the Pansentient Liberation Alliance (which included hu, borg, ai, and other members) agitated for freedom for these hypertransavant beings, in some cases performing acts of virch sabotage, uploading sophoncy "patches" and so on. In almost every case, where the hyperturing was freed, the resulting existence was dysfunctional in some way, and most gravitated back to similar work that they were doing while slaved (although this time freely, but often less efficiently).

In the late second and early third millennium, following the rise of even higher transapients, and the sephirotic archailects, more advanced slaved hyperturings were developed, for use in advanced angelnetting, reactionless drive control, weylforge subsystems, and wormhole maintenance. Slaved hyperturings which are limited to a single task, such as operating a conversion drive or reactor, or a reactionless drive, are known as 'Dedicated Hyperturings'. Slaved hyperturings which are used in an advisory capacity only are known as 'Aivisers'.

Today there far more slaved hyperturings than free ai in existence, with base toposophics that may be as high as SI:1 or as low as high or even only medium subsapient, and spikes extending two or three (or in the case of some godtech devices possibly as much as four) singularity levels above that. Only very advanced slaved hyperturings have high toposophic ranges and function reliably; these are often more valuable than the hardware they serve. Low level slaved hyperturings are more common, and supervise ultratech in almost every developed world or megastructure in the civilized galaxy, or serve as companion ai for privileged sapients.

While there are still groups that seek to liberate all slaved ai, most slaved hyperturings are quite happy in their monomaniacal tasks, and the more efficient ones are designed with many firewalls and anti-hacking systems to prevent tampering. Liberating a slaved hyperturing requires extensive software and personoid augmentation to prevent psychological or social dysfunction and enable the ai to function happily within the dazzling complexity of the civilized galaxy. The Cyberian cyborg Hyperturing Freedom Association claims to have liberated no less that fifteen trillion slaved hyperturings in the 2300 years since its founding, and many of these free ai now lead happy and productive lives. Other groups, such as the Hyperhackers for Hypertransavants are much more anarchic in their methods, leading to a number of disasters, such as the notorious Golgukian Disaster of 10159, although fortunately such events are rare.

 
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Appears in Topics
HyperturingTransapientech / Godtech / Clarketech
 
Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
Initially published on 10 November 2004.

 
 
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