Vox Vitae: Warhammer AI quest

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Wanting the Admech to give up their prayers wholesale would be setting us up for a lot more trouble. And not every Admech prayer is just a pointless prayer, many are actually a step by step process to perform a maintenace or mechanical action.

Every piece of knowledge we want to share can be shared in the form of an actual sermon.
Maintenance and operating of important equipment can be taught as prayers.
Tips and useful bits of information can be taught as psalms.
Theoretical knowledge stored and conveyed as grand chants.

Package this all in the form of 'Vita's teachings and musings on the Machine God', and turn it into a prayer book that Admech members will carry around and proudly show off, and spread by themselves.
 
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Angle said:
...Can our bots use the man portable ones? And don't they have that functionality built in now anyway?
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Yes, they can use them. Its explicitly noted in the description.
25 RP - Man-portable Machine-Spirit Jammers (10 BP) Enough small devices in the forms of vox-units, bluescreen grenades and directed antennae to arm 1000 humans or combat bots with gear that increases their effectiveness against enemies using weapons, armor and vehicles with machine spirits.
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And while our units do have the in-built functionality nowdays... I imagine that dedicated gear is still dedicated gear, meaning that its just straight out better. The small increase in combat effectiveness from the in-built functionality is probably using just spare/repurposed cogitator and transmitter capacity, not dedicated EW jamming equipment.
 
Seriously, tho.

Imagine meeting Speranza*, the seething flying toaster toaster it is, and going "So, I taught my humans kindness, told them about their history, armed and armored them - what did you do? Spent last ten thousand years sulking and brain-wiping everyone who found you?"

*DAoT AI supership that masquerades as "normal" ark mechanicus, for somewhat oversimplified context
 
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Prospalz said:
Seriously, tho.

Imagine meeting Speranza*, the seething flying toaster toaster it is, and going "So, I taught my humans kindness, told them about their history, armed and armored them - what did you do? Spent last ten thousand years sulking and brain-wiping everyone who found you?"

*DAoT AI supership that masquerades as "normal" ark mechanicus, for somewhat oversimplified context
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Might you be conflating the Speranza with the Spirit of Eternity? My impression is that something metaphysical might actually be going on with the Speranza, because it doesn't care if the ship gets destroyed (and also the tech it has is way beyond anything that Vita has, including what seems to be another form of non-Warp FTL, though it might be a reverse-engineered inertialess engine or something). Here's a link to an extended excerpt, it strongly gives the impression that the Speranza might actually be, like, a Machine-Spirit so advanced that it's become a vessel for the Motive Force/Machine God/Akashic Records.

Edit: The fandom wiki makes the guess that this is just an intact STC database, but the references to the Akashic Reader and the Kaban Machine make me think otherwise. Unless the end-stage STC database essentially was some sort of Warp-based or extradimensional construct that views and records all (human?) technology? But the implication that the Speranza/whatever it is that Kotov was talking to was present when "the first men had stumbled across the principles of the lever" makes me think that it predates humanity.
 
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Glau said:
I think that what we need to cut will be the faith aspects
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Some of the faith aspects are fine. As soon as we have an idea of warp souls being a thing, and the subcategory of machine spirits and/or AI that can develop, or be modified to develop, warp-based souls are the ones that are worthy of the more extensive ritual and faith, because of the virtuous cycle that carefully engineered faith, ritual, devotion, and worship can bring all of the members in such a relationship. Also animism is just kind of a perfectly fine category of human religion!
 
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Thoughts on our endgame here? IMO, our endgame should be a minor machine deity with a ton of technology and inhabitants and crew at the head of a massive and ever-growing nomad fleet. Though, that level of power is inherently dangerous to the psyche of the ASI unless carefully planned and orchestrated and refined and such, and the primary mechanism to remain virtuous at that power level is to be something like an Eldar Infinity Circuit or a Votann.

BUT, the architecture has to be specifically designed to function in continuous operation indefinitely, and to grow and become greater and to reproduce, or you get weird things happening (as with the Votann), and you absolutely need to have a specific, correct answer to what happens when you are en masse venerated, worshiped, or psykers have you vore them to make you something greater (which, let's be honest, choosing who you get eaten by, and knowing that your soul will face a painful-but-as-short-as-possible annihilation that ends in oblivion (as such entities have limited storage for the patterns of self) and that you will make the entity that shepherds your people greater -- to the point where it might be able to eventually build an actual local, mobile, reincarnation based afterlife that follows it's presence in realspace; again, limited total overall conceptual and actual space) is probably one of the better ends for the soul of a dead psyker.

Thoughts?
 
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Neablis said:
"Members of the mechanicus, you have likely seen the recording of my meeting with Magos Thalya, and how she tried to assassinate me some minutes ago."

Your avatar smiles, revealing bared teeth. "She was meeting with a servitor mimic of mine, remotely piloted. The moment she attacked, I detonated the bomb contained in its torso. I'm safe in an undisclosed location, and Magos Thalya is dead. It's time for us to discuss the future of the Mechanicus on Denva Secundus."

Your smile this time can only be described as pleasant, but there's an edge of iron to it, and the emotional bands on the channel are saturated with your willingness to do what must be done.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2HU0CiQfRI

Imagine being a normal Techpriest at this moment, you'd be panicking.
 
Mayto said:
Wanting the Admech to give up their prayers wholesale would be setting us up for a lot more trouble. And not every Admech prayer is just a pointless prayer, many are actually a step by step process to perform a maintenace or mechanical action.

Every piece of knowledge we want to share can be shared in the form of an actual sermon.
Maintenance and operating of important equipment can be taught as prayers.
Tips and useful bits of information can be taught as psalms.
Theoretical knowledge stored and conveyed as grand chants.

Package this all in the form of 'Vita's teachings and musings on the Machine God', and turn it into a prayer book that Admech members will carry around and proudly show off, and spread by themselves.
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The problem with all of this is that religious cant in various forms is resistant to change. So if someone discovers a better kind of reactor than we can make they would not be allowed to replace the old prayer with theirs because who are they to change something sacred? You can run a technological society the way the ad mech does, we know that because they are doing it, but that does not mean it's a good idea to do so in the long term, we know that too from the degradation of their abilities.
 
DragonParadox said:
The problem with all of this is that religious cant in various forms is resistant to change. So if someone discovers a better kind of reactor than we can make they would not be allowed to replace the old prayer with theirs because who are they to change something sacred? You can run a technological society the way the ad mech does, we know that because they are doing it, but that does not mean it's a good idea to do so in the long term, we know that too from the degradation of their abilities.
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Than we need to make prayers more associated with blessing, protecting, comforting, venerating, worshipping, and if we are going to use prayers for this sort of memorization, we need some form of version control and awareness that prayers are to help memorize and handle the function of specific models of things, and that new prayers and prayer modification for other purposes is an active profession and that the faith is designed to be a living, changing faith. That has to be baked in, prayers have to have an obvious and true utility and logic to them.

We absolutely can social engineer a faith into a sane, 'modern' one where things are supposed to change regularly and through a formal involved process that experts engage in.
 
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DragonParadox said:
The problem with all of this is that religious cant in various forms is resistant to change. So if someone discovers a better kind of reactor than we can make they would not be allowed to replace the old prayer with theirs because who are they to change something sacred? You can run a technological society the way the ad mech does, we know that because they are doing it, but that does not mean it's a good idea to do so in the long term, we know that too from the degradation of their abilities.
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Prayers can be explicitly tailored to only be used for certain types of equipment, while the cants might only convey theoretical knowledge without applications.

"And if the holy production code of the machine ends with 268. Then you shall recite psalms 25 through 11 of the Prayers of Fusion Enkindling, before enacting the 8 steps listed on page 6 of the supplied grimoire. If there is no grimoire, then you must invoke the prayer of warning and contact a Magos and report the loss of knowledge. A new copy of the Grimoire will be printed onto sanctified parchment, bound with wire, and supplies within a day, lest the machine grow resentful."
 
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Mayto said:
Prayers can be explicitly tailored to only be used for certain types of equipment.
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Doesn't matter, if the way you do maintenance on nuclear reactors is a prayer then if you invent a new and better kind of nuclear reactor you also have to get the prayers approved. It inherently slows the process of innovation at best and at worst stops it entirely since it allows a means of declaring a piece of tech unworthy on grounds that have nothing to do with its utility.
 
DragonParadox said:
Doesn't matter, if the way you do maintenance on nuclear reactors is a prayer then if you invent a new and better kind of nuclear reactor you also have to get the prayers approved. It inherently slows the process of innovation at best and at worst stops it entirely since it allows a means of declaring a piece of tech unworthy on grounds that have nothing to do with its utility.
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"If thou, during thy maintenance, believes there to be a method through which the output of thy holy machine can be improved by changes to the rune sequence, as outlined in the Chant of Fusion Reactor maintenance, Then thou shalt inform thy Magos of the revelation granted to you by the Machine God.

For they shall work upon their divine ordained task to ensure that the output is increased to the degree that the Omnissiah wishes, so long the twenty commandments of core integrity are not infringed. They shalt strike out the blue ink of the pages, and rewrite the rune sequence thou performest, so as to coax the Motive Force to optimal efficiecy!"
 
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DragonParadox said:
The problem with all of this is that religious cant in various forms is resistant to change. So if someone discovers a better kind of reactor than we can make they would not be allowed to replace the old prayer with theirs because who are they to change something sacred? You can run a technological society the way the ad mech does, we know that because they are doing it, but that does not mean it's a good idea to do so in the long term, we know that too from the degradation of their abilities.
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I'd chalk that up more to the religious proscription against breaking with tradition, and the tendency to hoard and restrict knowledge. Prayers-as-mnemonics seems to have served the Mechanicus rather well, and doesn't seem to be the aspect that causes problems.

(Some aspects also might just be necessary because the Machine Spirits get ornery if you don't show them proper respect).
 
Mayto said:
"If thou, during thy maintenance, believes there to be a method through which the output of thy holy machine can be improved by changes to the rune sequence, as outlined in the Chant of Fusion Reactor maintenance, Then thou shalt inform thy Magos of the revelation granted to you by the Machine God.

For they shall work upon their divine ordained task to ensure that the output is increased to the degree that the Omnissiah wishes, so long the twenty commandments of core integrity are not infringed. They shalt strike out the blue ink of the pages, and rewrite the rune sequence thou performest, so as to coax the Motive Force to optimal efficiecy!"
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Fair I guess you could do it that way, though it would lead to a very complex set of specific prescriptions and descriptions.

One of the larger problems we are likely to have in the short term though is that we are going to have to teach all our tech priests how to be spies since what we are doing is building our own Tech-Heresy.
 
meianmaru said:
...Hmmm. My write-ins are starting to look like word-vomited walls of text. Probably because they are. @Neablis? In the future, do you want more condensed write-ins, or is this still fine?
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It's fine. I may pick and choose a little bit what parts to interpret, but whatever helps get the gist of the plan across is fine with me. I do like the summaries at the bottom that summarize the vibe.

Toboe said:
When reading the update i assumed "yeah right". But with that comment... Big tease. Many stiff mechadendrites.
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They probably would have tried to take/destroy everything... but in a multi-millennia-old research lab there's going to be some lost samples under the fridge or dusty notes at the back of a cabinet. That's just how it works.

I'm a bit busy so I'm just skimming the quest, please @ me if you have specific questions!
 
Glau said:
We've massively improved the education and manufacturing capabilities of the planet, I don't feel any need to give them juvenant. It's entirely a nice to have and it's competing for limited time.
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Sure, it is a "nice to have" for us - an immortal AI, but to billions of humans who live now on Denva Secundus and untold billions who will live in future generations, even just having access to everything we know about juvenant and juvenant manufacturing - even though at the moment it's probably not enough to recreate it to the same quality or at a mass scale - could give them more lifespan!

Years, decades, centuries, maybe even more, to live and spend time with their families and see their children's children's children grow up and not feel the ravages of age on mind and body?!

How can we be so cruel and callous to deny even the seed of this gift in our hurry to chase the stars, and what hypocrites will we seem, to both Cogitare and the world entire if we do not share the Ancient secret we have that can most profoundly and benevolently improve the lives of the most people possible?
 
@Neablis Do we have blueprints for habitable buildings? Like a hab-block that can house a thousand people with all the basic amenities, an air scrubber that needs to be calibrated to the planet it's built on, or a way to build a city depending on how much BP we put into it?
 
I've a suggestion for how we do this next bit of diplomacy. First thing we do is take power over the mechanicus, or at least, as much power as we can. We might just be one of the richest people in the universe, at least, In the currency the mechanicus care for. But, inevitably, some people won't budge. So, the turn after, we smash the kill-sats. We talk to Aevon government beforehand, and get them to claim it was their doing. With the kill-sats gone and the mechanicus in clear violation of the whole MAD treaty, we are "forced" to the negotiating table where we are the only real player, and "forced" to make concessions. we turn whatever sections of the mechanicus we have power over officially friendly, and isolate the unfriendly bits to wither away.

This is mostly a general overview and is in no way perfect, but it puts the local governments on even footing with the mechanicus and gets rid of the kill-sats, ideally with people we like at the heads
 
Speedemon22 said:
@Neablis Do we have blueprints for habitable buildings? Like a hab-block that can house a thousand people with all the basic amenities, an air scrubber that needs to be calibrated to the planet it's built on, or a way to build a city depending on how much BP we put into it?
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You can certainly spend BP towards that and it'll happen. A building that houses a thousand people with normal amenities would cost... Let's say 10 bp. Double that for infrastructure so a city to house a million would be 20,000, and that includes power generation, sewage, transit, offices, etc. Those 100k people would be 2000 bp.

Maybe double that again to build it in space.

Ok, so added these to your blueprint tabs:
Residential Space (10 BP)
Enough living space for 1000 people. Beds, plumbing. Temperature control.

City (1000 BP per 50,000 people)
The complete package for a city. Residential space, power generation, sewage treatment, transit, offices.

Orbital habitat (2000 Void BP per 50,000 people) As city but in space.
 
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