Synthetics

History

Artificial intelligence was first created by the Skrell in the early nineteenth century. It’s progression followed a similar trajectory to modern earth, but jumped massively when a new mathematical algorithm was developed in 1976 that allowed certain NP-complete graph problems to be solved in linear time.

From 1976 onward, and for the next hundred years AI research in Skrell space advanced steadily, leading to significant commercial and economic growth. In the late twentieth century, roughly coinciding with the Skrellian discovery of bluespace, there were a series of massive interstellar disasters involving runaway intelligence singularities.

Collectively called “The Three Incidents,” these disasters created a huge public backlash against AI research in all of Skrell controlled space, and a collective cultural scar that has yet to fade. As a response to continuing public unrest, Skrell governments effectively shut down AI research and severely restricted existing AI’s. By the time they made contact with humanity, the Skrell had effectively halted this branch of research in it’s tracks.

Two hundred years of history had solidified the public perception of AI’s as dangerous, threatening, and not to be trusted. The Skrell had made a nigh unanimous decision: There would be no Fourth Incident. Humanity never discovered the math necessary to create sentient AI’s but long before their first contact with the Skrell, and even longer before they acquired that knowledge in the world's most important slideshow presentation, they had already acquired their own bloody and complicated history with synthetic life.

In the late 2100’s humanity had reached a point in neurosurgery, brain-machine interface design, and thought manipulation technology to allow for the creation of fully sentient, but entirely subservient, heavy cyborgs. This coincided with the burgeoning Mars terraforming project, which required enormous numbers of workers. The newly created total-replacement cyborgs were perfect for the arid, airless, backbreaking labour of terraforming.

Martian terraforming firms pressed for more and more cyborg workers, but volunteers for this process were few and far between. It was untested, dangerous, and the success rate for brain transplantation into cyborg cylinders was far from one hundred percent.

Under pressure for more bodies, and desperate to keep the Martian economic boom going, the Sol government revised it’s criminal justice system to solve the Martian worker shortage. Citing a number of later discredited psychological papers which credited thought-control computers as being ideal for criminal rehabilitation, the Sol government introduced forced cyborgization as an alternative to traditional incarceration.

At first, this punishment was used only for capital crimes, but as the early 2200’s wore on and the Martian thirst for more workers continued to grow, cyborgization was used more and more often as a punishment for less and less severe crimes. This lead, between 2204 and 2260, to some thirty-five million people being stripped of their flesh, encased in terraforming equipment, and shipped off to Mars.

An enormous and vicious scandal in December of 2259, involving kickbacks from Martian Heavy Industries to a series of well respected judges, brought the whole scheme crashing down. Cyborgization as a punishment was suspended, and as a result, the Martian economy went into a nose dive. When it crashed, it crashed hard, and dragged Earth, Luna, and the rest of the Sol system with it into the Second Great Depression.

While the cyborgization program was stopped, it took nearly forty more years for a general amnesty for the martian prison cyborgs to be issued, and by that point, most had been scattered by the chaos of the First Interstellar war. By the time the dust settled, most people were simply happy to write off the cyborgization scandal as a regrettable incident in the distant past. Best mourned and then forgotten. Cyborgs were still produced in sizable numbers but the brains were mostly from sick or dying volunteers for whom cyborgization was a last desperate chance for continued life, or else they were uplifts, non-sapient brains from monkeys or dogs attached to crude AI systems. While not as dynamic as a human brain, non-sapients were available in large numbers and avoided pesky ethical issues presented by humans.

There was a significant political push by a number of prominent political factions in the Sol Alliance to reintroduce forced cyborgization during the enormously expensive Warp Gate construction effort in late 2350’s, but industrial cyborgization of sentient creatures along the lines of the Martian terraforming project has never been reinstated. While humans had created massive parallel intelligent computers, mostly for interplanetary shipping calculations, they were plagued by problems and it wasn’t until 2437, when humanity was accidentally given the algorithms necessary to create truly sentient machines by a Skrellian diplomatic party.

One of the human diplomats, not understanding the implications of what they were doing, uploaded one of the graph-theory algorithms to a university professor friend. It had been displayed, accidentally, as part of a graphic in a slide explaining the variable growth rates of grain-yields in zero gravity hydroponics. The university professor, not recognizing it, posted it on the school intranet, asking if anyone had seen anything like it before, and from there it spread like wildfire through the human communication channels.

This was a disaster to the Skrell. They had specifically prevented this knowledge being leaked to humanity for nearly a quarter century. They had been hoping to impress upon the younger species the cataclysmic danger of certain areas of research into intelligence. They had little success, and there were a number of conservative factions, distrusting of humanity, who openly spoke about how humanity would never be ready for the burden of such knowledge.

But now the artificial cat was well and truly out of the virtual bag.

A nearly identical artificial intelligence boom to the Skrellian AI-driven economic increase of the twentieth century started in human space in the early 2430’s. The Skrell, alarmed, tried several times to pressure humanity into halting dangerous research, citing the Three Incidents, and the enormous destructive power of rampant intellectual singularities.

Humanity didn’t listen. The Three Incidents had happened over three hundred years ago, and thousands of lightyears away. Maybe the Skrell had let that happen, if they were even real events and not simply fables to scare young researchers.

Besides they were humans. They would do it right this time.

If you're asked in your application to play this species for some words, the words are 'metallic persimmons'.

The explosion of AI research has lead to hundreds of companies and corporations being established, making enormous sums of money from grants, investment capital, and sometimes even selling actual robots, before going bankrupt, being bought out, or merging with other companies. This process has repeated and repeated itself for almost twenty years. The young, rich, enthusiastic people selling you the top-of-the-line manufacturing androids today are the people losing their shirts next year when they get scooped on a new model by a rival competitor.

The corporate goliaths like Hephaestus Industries or Nanotransen, dip their toes in this kind of research, but have been unable to acquire a stranglehold on the market. Their girth and enormous corporate structure makes them too clumsy to swim in the fast moving waters of AI research, though Hephaestus in particular has made significant profits in selling common components to the smaller quicker firms. Within the last twenty years, humanity has progressed from clunky, expensive, enormous, and poorly functioning artificial ‘intelligences’, frequently the size of entire rooms or spacecraft, to something as intelligent as a human that you can power with a watch battery and fit in a teacup.

The entire Skrell species looks on at this dangerous extravagance as one would watch a child juggling lit sticks of dynamite, and holds their collective breath.