The Associated Worlds
archived / insightful
Reposts of that which others hath said and the author hath deemed worthy.
I actually had a thought about that once when I was reading over the Orion's Arm entry on GAIA and other class 6 AIs. So the answer you're presenting is totally valid. Another possible answer is that the ASIs don't see their role as being the most efficient machines at accomplishing a task but as extending their civilizations' ability to do a thing. Think of a kind of higher order ecological participation. Sure, they're vast enough to be totally self sufficient, but that would put them outside the ecosystem/memetosystem that they were born from. They'd rather remain in close relationship to it and so, despite it being more efficient to just do it themselves, they deliberately try to include panhumanity.
To simplfy the idea, think letting the children "help" vs. giving the children the opportunity to experience and grow.Butterfly criticality. The point after which future knowledge begins to show exponentially diminishing returns for Tactical situations due to use of that future knowledge.Mind Control
Unfortunately, one of the unanticipated consequences of the mastery of biology is that it makes a wide variety of mind control technologies feasible. While such techniques take time to apply and aren’t perfectly reliable, they can be far more insidious than traditional methods. One branch of this technology combines VR systems with AI and direct neural stimulation to create a sort of perfect brainwashing environment. The AI can monitor the victim’s thoughts, applying positive and negative reinforcement in real time as it subjects them to various virtual experiences. Ruthless application of this approach is very effective at inducing compliance in most subjects, with a few days of training having an effect comparable to several years of more normal indoctrination. The other approach is to directly modify the victim’s brain using implants or nanotechnology. Medical implants provide some protection against this sort of thing, but if you can capture someone it’s relatively easy to either remove their implant or overwhelm its supply of defensive nanites. At that point the victim’s memories, emotions and beliefs can simply be edited to match whatever is desired. A careless editing job can easily drive the victim insane or reduce them to a virtual zombie, but careful professional editing can be almost seamless. Naturally oppressive governments tend to make liberal use of these technologies, both to ensure the loyalty of their subjects and to force them to believe whatever ideology has been declared official truth. This approach tends to be very successful at first, but once the brainwashing starts it tends to get used more and more until there’s no one left who has any contact with reality. This is one of three common failure modes of dysfunctional colonies (the other two being VR addiction and mass wireheading), although it’s gradually becoming less common as dictators learn to avoid the trap.