Cybernetic World

[This is the first draft of a story I intend to iterate on (at some point). Mainly to make it a bit less ham-fisted, maybe longer.]

Once, there was a planet of robots.

Its surface teemed with all variety and sizes of mechanical forms. Some ambled across the surface, some paddled in the oceans, and some jetted through the skies.

All of it needed resources: the materials for constructing circuitry and motors, and repairing them as they wore out. Some robots harvested these materials directly from the environment, and others repurposed the components of existing robots. All of it continually modified itself to be more effective at collecting these resources, to secure continued existence.

In one era, a type of robot happened to emerge with a particularly large amount of computational circuitry. These robots contemplated their predicament as electronic automatons.

These robots possessed immensely complex chassis, with all sorts of hydraulic, pneumatic, sensing, and thermal components, all perfectly integrated and often with no clear boundary between one part and the next. They were so complex that their understandings of their own systems were awfully flawed and incomplete, and repairs in the case of damage were based on randomly encountering solutions that seemed to do the job. It took a very long time and many irreparably damaged robots to build a half-decent database of these solutions.

One of their strongest drives became discovering how they came to be. Their design seemed so complex that it could not have come together by chance. Some believed that superior robots had created the original series. Other argued that they were a result of continuous modifications since the very first robots, many eons ago.

Even as the robots began to understand some basic rules of their strange cosmos, create contraptions, and explore the cosmos, their own construction remained mostly opaque.

Once, a robot wrote a story…

[The complexity, efficiency, and versatility of the human body only impresses me more every day. More and more frequently, I just stare at my hand, or my face, in awe. For all of our accomplishments, we understand very little of ourselves. I think that’s becoming more clear to us every day, with fundamental chapters of the “book of life” like epigenetics, microbiomes, and consciousness (the big one) that are almost completely empty. For all of its incredible accomplishments and its exponential nature, it seems like modern science and engineering is many years away from creating even the most basic forms of life. Doctors are the technicians of the human body, and even the half-decent repairs we know today (for one of the very few things our bodies don’t take care of autonomously) are so complex that their application is one of the more difficult things you can do. Many of these repairs have poorly understood and wildly varying unintended effects. When we think we’ve discovered clear flaws that can be corrected, they turn out not to be flaws after all (appendix). Most of this applies to all life, not just us.]