This A.I. in Metal Gear & Aleph are wrong and this song from Metal Gear Rising has lyrics that mock/go against what the A.I.'s goal. Show how hypocritical and wrong the A.I.'s plan and thought process are. Lyrics Collective Consciousness (Maniac Agenda Mix) The unenlightened masses They cannot make the judgment call Give up free will forever their voices won’t be heard at all Display obedience While never stepping out of line And blindly swear allegiance Let your country control your mind (Let your country control your soul) Live in ignorance And purchase your happiness When blood and sweat is the real cost Thinking ceases, the truth is lost Don’t you worry You’ll be told exactly what to do I give my people the lives they need The righteous will succeed The fires of greed will burn the weak So we’ll make freedom obsolete Making whole the fabric of society Collective consciousness controlled as you will see Collective Consciousness (Demo / Original version) The fires will burn in their defeat The human heart is obsolete Breaking down the fabric of society Collective consciousness controlled as you will see MIND CONTROL Let your country control your soul Let your country control your soul Let your country control your soul Let your country control your soul
Aleph isn't the same thing as what your saying, Golem2God. At most Aleph seems to operate like an Ant farm collector. The AI might manipulate the environment but the ants (humans) still operate of their own free will. Aleph is not trying to create a totalitarian society nor is it really preventing tyranny either. It lets humans be humans and manipulates their environment at most. Which is significant but not the same as trying to take away free will from humans.
@Death Point taken. I just thought it might be possibility so I decided to share what I thought on the subject. I do hope that Aleph is nothing like how the A.I.'s in Metal Gear perceive humanity.
I'll note something that seems to be slipping everyone's minds. Aleph's original operation was as a logistical aid and was not originally built by a government or faction (as proven by the fact O-12 is now a new faction apart from Aleph). It spawned from a business tool- it, therefore, operates as a business: if it works, do it, and make sure that at the end of the day, the action is profitable (and keep in mind not all profit is $$$). This means whatever mankind gives it to work with, it will aim to improve upon. It doesn't have a preconceived political agenda that eclipses all else. It merely uses political power when it is the most expedient use of resources. When those political powers prove slow, inefficient, or uncooperative (which is most of the time) it finds a more expedient route to achieve its ends, be that using existing infrastructure, or building its own (again, whichever is the better use of resources). Commerce is the key tool as far as I can tell, as it is the art of ensuring that, "If I give you A in exchange for B, then we both walk away richer". The fact it has political sway implies that it operates so efficiently that the human sphere factions know they'd be fools to blithely ignore it when it approaches them with a plan of action. In all likelihood, Aleph only uses political power to delay decisions against its actual designs until they become irrelevant. I reiterate, "a Militarized version of Google, Amazon, or Paypal". Like them, Aleph gets its power from commercial affluence. People in all the human sphere know that if something stifles Aleph, which has so many direct influences on their daily lives, that it will affect them negatively. Nations may or may not think Aleph is manipulating them, but they all share one common fear: getting by without it.
@DeepThought I had forgotten about that. When we think about Infinity lore, business doesn't immediately pop up into our minds. So Alephs humble beginnings mostly fly over our heads as we wouldn't think to remember something like that. Thansk for taking the time to remind us. It will help those of us who craft stories to more actually portray Aleph in a correct light lore-wise.
I don't think it really slipped anyone's mind. It is one of the major things Aleph does do for most of the other polities of the human sphere. Aleph has major economical clout because it runs and assists the economies of the the largest ones in PanO and Yu Jing. Even the powers that don't give it as much leeway like Haqq and Ariadna do feel its effects. The only polity that it doesn't effect is the Nomads who are never going to take advice from Aleph.
Sure, they're impacted, but they don't see it as a positive. They think they'd be better off without ALEPH.
Couldn't help but think of ALEPH attempting to kill all the Nomads during the Violent Intermission and Phantom Conflict. Those certainly were times that the daily lives of the Nomads were impacted...
I reiterate: The other factions of the human sphere may or may not think Aleph is manipulating them, but they all share one common fear: getting by without it. I would argue even Nomads would be worse off without Aleph, however much they wouldn't want to admit it. Even looters need producers, and Nomads would have less to loot from the rest of humanity if Aleph wasn't there augmenting their logistical processes and allocating/exploiting resources as only it can. That said, there's no argument saying they have to admit that, much less appeal to the "logic" of the situation. It wouldn't be the first time someone ignored the truth because they preferred their own narrative of the situation. It would in fact make sense then that Aleph's reaction would be "if they (Nomads) cannot see reason, and would rather cut off their nose to spite their face, I might as well do the cutting for them."
One, you're wrong about Nomads, who have their own replacement (Arachne) and Ariadnans wouldn't find most of their lives affected.
I concede, Ariadna would be relatively unchanged, but its own achilles heel is it doesn't have the resources of the rest of the human sphere (probably because it doesn't have the same logistical capacity as the rest of the human sphere, as they have the aid of an AI superintelligence like Aleph), and the aid of the other factions against the C.A. alone is enough to argue it has saved them on multiple occasions via allied intervention against the aliens. My point isn't that everyone relies on Aleph. Its that there would be less stability for all if it vanished. Much like if one of those aforementioned companies of our world vanished one day, Africa might not miss the disappearance of Google as fast as America or Europe, but after those first world countries destabilized, the rest of them would feel it when the foreign aid and wealth those nations provided dried up as a result.
Ariadna wouldn't even be in this situation if it wasn't connected to the rest of the Sphere. Nah. Someone would fill the gap pretty quickly with Google (people would compete with them more directly if they didn't maintain their monopoly on certain services). Similarly, ALEPH wouldn't be so unique if O-12 didn't treat people trying to develop other AI systems like the worst crime imaginable; its monopoly on certain services in the sphere is an artificial one.
Maybe not Paypal, but Facebook (+WhatsApp): Imagine ALEPH as a single system that incorporates Google, Amazon and Facebook. You might forget that the Arab Spring would not have been possible without social media! So you might underestimate the usage of those tools in the third world, as well as their importance, because they lack different means of communication. And as soon as Libra becomes so important that Amazon joins in, well there you are...
Now that I believe you all have split hairs on it, I thank you for noting that the premise holds up fairly well despite them. I apologize if it comes off as "pro Aleph", when it was in fact, aimed to be evenly spoken. I myself am actually a major Ariadna fan as well and I understand people trying to make the small distinctions for factions they sympathize with. Yes, Nomads create competing tech, and don't feel they'd ever benefit from Aleph, but that doesn't refute the argument that Nomads are looters, and you can't steal what no one makes. As for someone else stepping in and the monopoly being artificial, I disagree. I could just as easily argue "For someone to step in, they would need the raw knowledge to draft such an AI from scratch without computer assistance, as pretty much all networking is in one form or another, Aleph at the root." As for you @daszul , I mostly put paypal on the list so I could say " All Hail Elon " lol. In all truth, Aleph provides so many services it'd be impossible to list the applications in a society with drones to do most anything manual labor-related. That would be the bottom line of why its absence would cause collapse.
I don't think that Libra is going to survive the regulation it's going to get strangled with at birth.
Aimed or not, it missed that mark. That's an argument with no basis. Bakunin in particular is noted as being a hotbed of technological innovation. The existence of Arachne gives the lie to your statement. Again, the Nomads do all right without it. There are other ways of running a society in the Human Sphere.
I never got the idea that the Nomads are looters from the fluff. They buy a lot of outdated equipment and then upspec them in the Black Labs, but that isn't looting.
Its been a while since I read up on Nomad fluff so I won't claim to have a case to contradict. Nomads are kinda sick and twisted from what I remember, and I know people who outright won't play them for that reason. I should note "Looter" in this case was a reference to "Atlas Shrugged", and the fact Nomads don't actually seem to set out to 'create' anything of their own. By that I mean nobody goes out to spy on or steal cutting edge "Nomad Tech" that I can recall. In fact, they are the ones who do most of the tech stealing when they "stick it to the man" as the blurb on the website describes it. That pretty much means any "technological innovation" they're known for is most likely not their own. It also describes a "looter" mentality, as it says "rather than use my creativity and original thinking to solve problems myself, or work out a lawful way to confront injustices, I'll make excuses about how I'm exploited or put upon, and use that excuse to justify taking what I want from someone else who has gone to that effort." No doubt, Nomad fans will be upset by this, but frankly, anyone who thinks such an attitude can act as a positive contribution to technology, industry, design, or society, has drunk the drain cleaner of public academia, which has long since detached from reality and reason. One might as well claim the Antifa protestors in America who beat up people in the streets and broke into and robbed stores in 'protest' were actually "thinking for themselves" in that instance. I'm sure they'd claim as much.
