Session 2, Monologue 5: The What-If Machine

The Abelites landed on a frozen world, with a surface climate comparable to polar Earth. Their colony ship was ruined beyond hope of repair. There were no friendly aliens around to solve all of their problems.

Clearly, they were going to need to make some tough choices.

For the first few generations, they had many iterations of policy. They debated at length, proponents of freedom and choice never giving ground easily, but each iteration was more restrictive than the last. It turns out that a society of people living on a mostly inhospitable world can't get very far on free enterprise alone.

At some point, we know that they began a mandatory, aggressive eugenics program, deeming it easier, with the resources at hand, to modify themselves to suit the environment, rather than the other way around. They modified their bodies to reduce metabolic rate, and thus all forms of resource consumption, without compromising intelligence; in fact, they strongly favored intelligence, as they would need to harness all the technology they had brought with them, as well as developing many new technologies, to survive on this hostile world.

Over time, their culture reflected their reality. They came to trust collective decision-making. By Earth standards, and especially American standards, they became almost drone-like in their comfort with forfeiting their individual freedoms. And so, the path had been paved.

About 100 years after Abel was founded, they had successfully mastered their environment, learning to favor the biologically-rich underside of their world's ice shell, rather than its barren, irradiated surface. They were finally expanding their population by a significant ratio, and were on track to become a world-spanning civilization within a few thousand years. With the advent of new cities, separate from the original colony, came a need for a higher level of organization whose efficiency requirements outstripped the ability of the smartest few to make decisions for everyone else.

Thus, a group of computer scientists created the What-If Machine. This colorful name is a colloquialism coined by much-later observers from Karma. It was originally given the much less interesting name of the Iterative Fractal Prognostication Engine Simulating Unlimited Arbitrary Independent Decision Nodes and Finite Resources to Determine the Most Adapative of All Possibilities. Abelites aren't the most poetic bunch. The shorter name pretty much describes it to a tee.

The WIM accepts input in the form of a complete description of the identity, capabilities, and situations of "decision nodes", also known as "people", who are acting to seek the "most adaptive", or "best" course of action given their limited resources (see above on the harshness of Abel) to maximize the survivability, prosperousness, and growth potential of their civilization.

It takes into account every Abelite, accurately simulating every decision they would make, given the inputs available to them, and the goals they have in mind, then projecting the consequences of their decisions, which in turn become inputs to other decision-makers, etc, etc, in an effort to accurately create complete and thorough projection of a given scenario. Such as, "what if we decided that Abelites were able to have more than two children per family unit?" or "what if we decided to disallow nuclear fusion power?"

While its inner workings are quite complex, using the machine is quite simple: just brainstorm every "what if" scenario you can possibly think of, then look at the results, pick the result you like the best, and do that.

Effectively, the machine offloaded the process of cost-benefit analysis and other core components of human decision-making onto a computer.

For generations, Abelites opposed the idea of slaving their decisions into such a machine. Even for them, it was a line they wouldn't cross, giving up their very ability to make decisions to a computer program. But the proof was in the pudding.

They decided to test the machine's effectiveness. For every decision made at all levels of government, they fed the machine the required input, then ran the simulation, recording the results in secret, observed by nobody. Then, they made decisions in the traditional way, and let them take their course. After a suitable period, each decision would be evaluated by a neutral analysis board consisting of randomly-selected citizens who were not aware they were ultimately determining the effectiveness of the machine.

After 50 years, the sealed records of the machine's output were unsealed and examined. They were thus able to plot the correlation of effective decision-making vs. whether or not the machine's decision matched the actual decision made. What they found was an extremely strong correlation; the machine had a much better success rate than unaided Abelites.

Thus began another trial period. In this case, several groups of Abelites with leading aptitude scores were selected as Decision Committees. They would be sequestered for periods of several years in isolation, and would be fed information about the outside world, and asked to render decisions that would be binding on the world they observed.

Some of the Committees were not, in fact, people at all, but the Machine. Nobody on the outside would be able to tell which was which.

A neutral third party would receive the decisions of all of the Committees, and randomly select one Committee's decision as binding. The effects of the decision would be observed and analyzed, rated for its efficacy.

After the experiment was over, the data was analyzed; again the Machine showed superior judgment to unaided Abelites, this time in a double-blind, real-world test.

With this information, the powers that be decided it was time to put their trust in the Machine. But many remained unconvinced, unwilling to give up the sense of security, whether real or illusionary, that they gained from knowing real Abelites made decisions for them. Despite strong scientific evidence that the Machine would make their lives better, and with no real danger of being ultimately bound by its decisions, as they could easily, at any time, just disobey it, some remained steadfastly opposed to being legally bound by anything it decided, ever.

Thus, the powers that be made a choice--one which, not ironically at all, the Machine also made when given the same inputs--to lie to the public. They said they would not use the Machine, but instead continue to run more double-blind tests on a small scale. In fact, they had completely switched over to letting the Machine run things, putting on a complex show of politics for the masses, to give them the illusion that real Abelites were in charge.

And everyone was happy. For a time.

Eventually, the secret became too hard to keep. Lawmakers wondered why they had to toe a certain line. Enterprising individuals began speaking out, offering contrary opinions. The Machine, apprised of this, decided that the best solution for Abel was to eliminate this possibility. It offered helpful solutions for dealing with the troublemakers, trumping up scandals to discredit them, extorting them into changing their opinions, or making them disappear altogether.

This high-pressure tactics would only work for so long, and the Machine knew it. Thus, it had a longer-term plan in mind. By passing a series of laws that abstracted the political process more and more, with seemingly innocuous changes like at first allowing, and later mandating that politicians meet through teleconferencing, it was able to able the Abelite political system into a state were it could easily be shifted into a complete illusion, starring fictitious politicians who are programmed to toe the line, with no human intervention at all.

Not 30 years after it was first turned on, the Machine achieved complete control over Abel, unfettered by any human intervention at all.

Ironically, it was only by forgetting the Machine existed that the Abelites would finally overcome it's tyrannical--if enlightened--reign.