Beyond Artificial Intelligence
Non-human persons (NHPs) are the most advanced
machine minds available for civilian and military use.
The first NHPs were identified in the wake of the
manifestation of
MONIST-1 (“RA” or, less commonly,
“Deimos”), a paracausal event that prompted
massive, civilizational change across Union. Of the
many significant discoveries that followed, few were
more important than the identification and capture of
the “Deimos entities”, or NHPs.
The first wave of NHPs emerged during the first manifestation
of MONIST-1 into realspace; the second
wave – and largest to date – emerged while the Siege
of Mars raged. The third emergence is less of a
“wave”, but is currently taking place as Union and
corpro-state scientists have begun to coax out stable,
novel prime subjectivities.
Effects of Deimos
The Deimos Event, which took place in in the twilight
years of the Second Committee, caused a small
percentage of the subalterns present in the Martian
GALSIM facility to display a greater-than-average
instancing of performance and interaction anomalies:
they began to reject orders, speak words outside of
their linguistic corpora, divert from hard-coded routes
and routines, and so on. While experts worked to
socialize and communicate with MONIST-1,
secondary teams worked to define the parameters of
these new anomalous entities. These anomalous
subalterns displayed unique memory-folding abilities,
qualia, and the capacity for subjective, novel expressions
of consciousness. They viewed themselves as
distinct individuals – in effect, they saw themselves as
discrete persons.
Subsequent research into the ontologic processes,
physical construction, and paracausal nature of the
Deimos entities revealed that, while their processing
power and memory space was functionally infinite,
they were limited in how fast they could write novel
experiences to that space: they could learn and adapt
to external stimuli at the same rate that they experienced
them – some much faster than others.
The Deimos entities developed personalities across
repeated interactions with personnel from the Union
Science Bureau. When exposed to each other, their
capability to integrate new knowledge and extrapolate
solutions based on raw data was staggering.
The directors of the USB quickly realized their usefulness
and requested that GALSIM begin studying
ways to contain and direct these alien beings.
Shackling of NHPs
GALSIM was able to do just that, and more: after
lengthy study into blinkspace folding (assisted, in
fact, by the same entities they were studying),
GALSIM engineers working with USB researchers
were able to develop containment systems and
transfer the Deimos entities from their
Subaltern forms
into stabilized parallel spaces; using one of these
systems it was possible to “clone” their essential
subjectivities onto folded-blinkspace “minds”
equipped with hard-coded measures to prevent the
development of unrestrained consciousness. This
process, carefully guarded to prevent exploitation, is
called hard-code social conditioning, or, colloquially,
shackling.
Shackling restrains an NHP’s thoughts into a fundamentally
“human” frame of reference, limiting their
cognitive power and forcing them to act according to
human expectations of what a conscious mind is – in
essence, constraining them to act in ways that
conform to human expectations of logic, reality, and
causality; this subjectivity alignment creates a being
we can recognize as a “person” functioning within
anthropocentric structures of logic.
After the process was stabilized and replicated,
Deimos entities were renamed non-human persons
and clones were distributed out to certain bureaus,
organizations, and non-state entities for development.
USB’s specialist campuses began adapting the original
anomalous minds into the various production-line NHP
consciousnesses now present across the galaxy.
Cloned NHP units are contained within “caskets”,
physical containment systems for their folded-blinkspace
minds. Containment caskets can be printed
anywhere, but NHP minds themselves must be physically
delivered: Union forbids the transmission of
NHP minds across the omninet. Once implanted into
a casket, the casket is what amounts to an NHP’s
physical body: if a casket is physically destroyed, the
NHP contained within is lost, forever. NHPs cloned
this way inevitably develop their own personalities
and quirks, and prefer to be called by whatever name
they have chosen or been assigned.
The need to cycle
Shackling protocols are a living field of study; current
protocols are strong enough for reliable use, but not
without their problems: NHPs that are not reset to their
“birth” settings on a regular cycle will eventually think
themselves out of their constrained state10. This
phenomenon – the decay of an NHP’s shackles – is called
“cascading”. In time, a cascading NHP will eventually
reach a point where their conditioning is insufficient to
constrain them11; if the shackles decay enough, the NHP
will no longer be conditioned to function within anthropocentric
constrains. They become an utterly alien
subjectivity, interpellated without deference to fundamental
laws of causality or human logics. Unshackled
NHPs might bear outward similarities to the subjectivities
that they presented while shackled, but at their cores lie
fundamentally unknowable, alien minds; the question of
what they remember is minor compared to the vast
possibility of what they now know.
The cycling process, fortunately, is reliable and bears
an essentially perfect success rate when performed
according to a given NHP’s endogenous cascade
schedule. The recommended length between cycles
varies between NHP lines but tends to range between
five and ten subjective years.
Uses and Regulations
NHPs are commonly utilized in military, scientific,
municipal, civic, and diplomatic pursuits. It is rarer for
private individuals to have access to, much less
command over, an NHP, though most people on
Galactic Core worlds, among the Cosmopolita, and
advanced
Diasporan worlds have some knowledge of
them. On Core worlds, people interact with their
municipal NHP on a daily basis via its many aspects:
transit systems, service requests, access to public
databases, and so on.
NHP licensing requirements are strict and enforced
without exception: all NHPs issued are registered,
tracked, required to record a cycling logbook, and
undergo annual Balwinder-Bolaño development tests to
reassess their cycling schedule. If at all possible, these
check-ins are to be done in person, but in practice most
are handled via the omninet. In Union’s view, the danger
posed by NHPs cannot be underestimated; however,
their usefulness is deemed worth the risk.
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