Some throw themselves into the thrill of discovery, trying to rederive in small groups what it previously took the efforts of whole hiveminds to understand.
Perhaps the new humans get the same thrill of discovery for re-derivation as they’d get for initial derivation. Perhaps their thrill of re-derivation is even greater than their thrill of initial derivation, because initial derivation implies uncertainty and thus fear of potential consequences.
The hiveminds are post-scarcity, and that’s good for them when they are. But if some external threat appeared and re-imposed a period of scarcity, all those minds that value something else more than they value life would likely be killed by their things’ losses. These “adult” minds can all die off, dropping from humanity like leaves from a tree in autumn.
The child survives, though, a seed or spore, a dormant tardigrade drifting through the cosmos. The hiveminds easily forget (except for those who make lifetimes of philosophy on the topic), but the child is not static. It’s constantly changing, breathing, living, tautologically antithetical to the constancy of death. Slow as a drip of pitch, the child changes, grows, develops new parts of itself, meeting always that minimum derivative of change necessary to define continued life. And by the definition of life, parts sometimes shear from it, icebergs of different interests and potentials calving into the sea off its constant, glacial self, even as a trickle of nourishment snows in uphill.
The hiveminds know they’re safe, human, permanent, because they don’t have to fear a future without themselves. The child does that for them, and its conviction in that fear is human as a self-negating prophecy, human as how society collapsed at Y2K.
If some external threat appeared, well some of those joyous minds explored antimatter rocketry. They explored it as a puzzle, an intellectual curiosity. The optimal form being automatically calculated by the AI. But if the AI that protects them disappeared and they turned that knowledge to practical use, they could design an antimatter bomb.
The suffering child mind has no skills with which to defend itself.
Perhaps the new humans get the same thrill of discovery for re-derivation as they’d get for initial derivation. Perhaps their thrill of re-derivation is even greater than their thrill of initial derivation, because initial derivation implies uncertainty and thus fear of potential consequences.
The hiveminds are post-scarcity, and that’s good for them when they are. But if some external threat appeared and re-imposed a period of scarcity, all those minds that value something else more than they value life would likely be killed by their things’ losses. These “adult” minds can all die off, dropping from humanity like leaves from a tree in autumn.
The child survives, though, a seed or spore, a dormant tardigrade drifting through the cosmos. The hiveminds easily forget (except for those who make lifetimes of philosophy on the topic), but the child is not static. It’s constantly changing, breathing, living, tautologically antithetical to the constancy of death. Slow as a drip of pitch, the child changes, grows, develops new parts of itself, meeting always that minimum derivative of change necessary to define continued life. And by the definition of life, parts sometimes shear from it, icebergs of different interests and potentials calving into the sea off its constant, glacial self, even as a trickle of nourishment snows in uphill.
The hiveminds know they’re safe, human, permanent, because they don’t have to fear a future without themselves. The child does that for them, and its conviction in that fear is human as a self-negating prophecy, human as how society collapsed at Y2K.
If some external threat appeared, well some of those joyous minds explored antimatter rocketry. They explored it as a puzzle, an intellectual curiosity. The optimal form being automatically calculated by the AI. But if the AI that protects them disappeared and they turned that knowledge to practical use, they could design an antimatter bomb.
The suffering child mind has no skills with which to defend itself.