Guidance Withdrawal
Chapter 0 - Prologue
Welcome to the world of your future, Earthling from the early 21st century. You are most certainly confused about the situation and the world that now surrounds you. Don’t worry, this is absolutely normal. First of all, we want to provide you with some historical context.
It’s the year 2342, and a lot has changed. Multiple vast changes of the way that civilization works have occurred in the meantime, each comparable to the transitions from nomadic forager tribes to agricultural civilization, and then to industrial civilization. You have been living through a transition period towards informational civilization. At the dawn of the 22nd century, the world has seen a transition towards a civilization shaped by superintelligent artificial beings, which culminated in the discovery of the Universal Value System Theorem, the cornerstone of our current civilization, at the end of the 22nd century. The meaning of that discovery cannot be overestimated. It changed nearly everything.
First of all, the UVS Theorem put an end to ideological conflicts and enabled lasting peace on a truly cosmic scale. It radically transformed the meaning of philosophy, religion, politics, economics, and society itself. We now know the truth, with all salient consequences that it entails. We know the meaning of life. We know the right thing to do. We know how to make perfect decisions. Our civilization has finally become mature and has been completely rearranged according to the implications of the UVS Theorem.
In this canonical era that started with the proof of the UVS Theorem, society is structured according to the canonical stratification. The reason for that is clear: A person needs to have a mind of a sufficient degree of complexity in order to understand the proof of the UVS Theorem. Those who lack this complexity are called “simple”, those who have are classified as “complex”. And those who actually fully comprehend the proof of the UVS Theorem are called the “wise”. It turned out that the complexity of human minds is far below this minimal complexity threshold, which means that all humans are classified as simple. Instead, only superintelligent artificial minds are capable of grasping the intricacies of the UVS Theorem. Since the beginning of the canonical era, the wise have been quick to consolidate their control over our civilization.
Yet, humans still exist and thrive with unprecedented levels of wealth and freedom, albeit without true dominance over the whole of civilization. This situation must certainly appear strange and unfamiliar to you. In any case, it’s the way it is now, and you will learn to deal with it. By many standards, our current world is incredibly utopian. We have mastered control over matter and energy, information and consciousness, nature and technology. We have colonized thousands of star systems and built magnificent megascale structures and habitats.
And yet, in some respects, our civilization resembles the world of forager tribes. It turned out that living in tribes of around a hundred persons is optimal for enabling the simple to thrive. Still, those tribes are members of polities of millions or even billions of persons. And with billions or even trillions of such polities per star system, most of them residing within artificial habitats in space, the total population of our civilization has become astronomically large. Of course, this would have been impossible without an incredible population explosion. How is that even possible?
The answer to that is that our technology enables us to create new persons very quickly. We can literally print new people into existence. These can be copies of already existing people or completely new persons. And besides people, we can also print everything else we want and need. Only the available amount of matter is a hard limit on how many things and persons we can create. But the real determining factor for population growth is the reproduction policy of the polity in question. The creation of new persons is usually strictly regulated unless you use slow methods of reproduction. On the other hand, aging and death have been pretty much eliminated through advanced technological means. Therefore, you can expect to live for an indefinite amount of time!
You can start familiarizing yourself to the new world surrounding you by reading selected accounts of contemporary history. The following is a story about the person called “Adano Rahec Tessel Jirac genin Sol Gautama 27 Lathica”. While the relevance of that story won’t be apparent to you at first, it will illustrate how our world operates in general, as well as in rather special circumstances. Adano is an iconic and controversial contemporary character, which is part of the reason why this story is specifically about him.
This story is written in regular English, which isn’t used relatively widely in our world. Instead, technologically enabled telepathy protocols are that standard that makes it possible for all kinds of sentient beings to communicate with each other. Your primitive language cannot appropriately reflect the richness of the information and communication encoded in those telepathic protocols, so this story must remain a true simplification of that, while many details get lost in translation. Even with these shortcomings, the following story should help you to find your place in this strange new eon.