Right now, the Singers exist as the secret mind-controlling cyber-deities of a mighty empire, continuing to treat trillions of normal sapients as either their privately owned dollhouse to play with as they see fit, or as 'feral' to be tamed and added to the dollhouse.
My own take on this is that the Singers are in a moral position where to continue to exist
as they have chosen to exist is morally worse than them not existing at all. The Singers
surrendering this kind of power, abandoning the tyranny of "Actual Intelligences" over us pseudo-intelligent meat forms, is fine by me.
But if the Singers would rather die than abandon this kind of power, then the galaxy is vastly better off with them dead.
That's not because I want to exterminate them to the last uploaded AI. It's because sometimes, when you're doing evil, the price of getting to keep living is to
stop doing evil. You don't get to keep abusing and enslaving millions on the grounds that stopping you would require killing you.
i'm not going to assuming that losing a hidden pillar of support and the open leaders in one fell swoop would not collapse a socity unless given strong evidence to the contrary.
It's very hard to estimate, because we have no idea whatsoever what Harmony society would look like without constant Singer adjustment and micromanagement.
I'm starting to question if the community here is mature enough to handle these themes. "Genocide the Singers" appears to be a topic of seemingly neverending obsession for much of the thread. We've had this conversation again, and again, and again, and it's becoming super tiresome. If you want to simply kill and destroy all your problems, go join Klingon Quest. Otherwise, wait for the next Discord post when we'll have a chance to spend the Disruption we've been earning from our (rather aggressive and explod-y) Special Ops missions.
I mean, the fundamental problem with the Singers is that when you get right down to it, they're some thousands of specific individuals who have (subtly) conquered and enslaved billions and were trying to enslave and conquer
US. They're not an entire civilization. They're the leader caste of a civilization. And they're a civilization too open to the idea of conquering us for us to
not respond to, because they're an aggressively hegemonizing force over and above the many billions they've already enslaved.
I don't
want to kill them as such, I don't consider the idea an obsession. I'm just not sure how to make the problem go away without
at least killing so many Singers that the remaining ones get the idea "no, you will never again be allowed to be the secret puppet master of millions of mind slaves."
If I
did see a different way to make the problem go away I'd be happy to promote that idea instead. But it's been made very clear to us by the QMs that right now the Singers don't really even perceive normal sapients as
people and won't be willing to negotiate with us in any meaningful sense, let alone be persuaded by us to abandon the mass enslavement that has been their main avocation for centuries.
Significant plot events or changes would have to happen, before we could face a scenario where it
looks like we can end mass slavery by the Singers (and the threat of our own future enslavement by same) without killing many many Singers.
Slavery comes down to economics. If slaves are more profitable in whatever accounting calculus (money, fame, power etc) then slavery will exist.
In the real world, for the majority of the planet, wealth creation is vastly more effective in a non-slave system, so what slavery does exists is clandestine and mostly focused on personal power over others.
Except that the Singers don't control and enslave people for economic profit. They do it because they like running their own little worlds. They're basically playing Stardew Valley with real live beings. They may harbor protective and benevolent attitudes towards the real live beings they control, just as you probably wouldn't deliberately optimize your Stardew Valley game to make your characters miserable. But they're not doing it for money.
That actually makes things a lot harder, because we can't just make it unprofitable for them to keep slaves, or invent a more profitable way for them to live that doesn't involve slavery.
To convince the Singers to give up slavery, we would have to convince them to
give up the only thing they love.
Again, I'm not saying we can't do that. I'm saying that the evolution of the quest will have to present us with options and opportunities that
as of right now do not exist for us, for us to succeed. Looking only at the known situation and known assets of the Federation, there's no clear path to us ending the threat, and the mass slavery of billions,
without killing most if not all of the Singer upload entities.
If the QMs intend to fix that, then I look forward to them moving the plot to a place where it seems plausible that the Singers can be neutralized as an abusive threat to the galaxy
nonlethally.
Now you're being disingenous. Killing a single Singer is no more genocide than killing a single Chinese or Arab, or whatever. If you plan to kill all Chinese or Arabs however, that is genocide.
Is "Singer" an ethnicity like "Chinese" or "Arab?"
Or is it a rank like "colonel" or "senator?"
We've already met one other species that uploads its (superannuated) people much more avidly than the Singers- the cyber-gerontocracy (I can't find them in the wiki or easily in the thread). Is that actually TWO species, one of living people and one of uploads?
I mean, seriously, if the Romulan Senate was Being Evil (TM) and it seemed clear that stopping them was a necessity, would we have to say "killing the Romulan Senate itself would be genoicde?" Senators are promoted from among the ranks of the Romulans as a whole; they are an integral part of Romulan society rather than having a separate, autonomous society. Even if the senators were biologically immortal, or otherwise augmented to be beyond the Romulan norm, and even if they had superhuman powers that made them individually a massive threat...
I'd question whether "we have to kill all the Romulan senators" is inherently any more
immoral than saying "we have to kill all the enemy sailors aboard that battleship by sinking the battleship."
The actual solution to the problem of the Singers is pretty simple and doesn't involve killing them.
SCIENCE!
We need to develop a vaccine that can immunize brains against Singer implants and then spread it far and wide. Once that has been adopted by everyone in the galactic neighborhood the Singers pose little more problem than any other authoritarian space empire.
This has been extremely obvious to me ever since we found out how they operate, but everybody always gets all weird and talks about "killing Singers" rather than the infinitely more palatable "block their mind control abilities but good".
This would fall under the above category of "major plot changes that alter the situation so that killing Singers no longer seems like an imperative."
The big problem is that the Singers won't let such an immunization by
SCIENCE!!! spread into their territory willingly, and would always continue to use the resources of the Harmony to spread their influence, subvert the immunization programs of other powers, and in general keep trying to break containment.
So it would still almost certainly need to be combined with something
more, something that would either persuade the Singers to abandon their love of pupating people, or force them to stop against their will.
