Page 32 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

The Planetary Steward

reform humanity to the point of letting it go free, in this scenario,
how many generations of authoritarian rule would that take?”
“If you were listening,” said Perversity, “you would have heard
me saying that this would be set a few generations after the P.S. had
taken over. My implication is that the majority of the earth’s
remaining Homo sapiens had gotten that education in childhood,
and was acculturating to the new reality. The natural variation
occurring in organic reproduction will inevitably produce people
inclined to reject constraints or be incapable of understanding the
crisis and its response. And they might find each other. Then the
question becomes this: how can they even begin to form an
opposition group if the P.S. would shut it down immediately? That
raises Brad’s point about omniscience. I would have to explain
this.”
“Okay, I see the problem,” said Izzy Azimuth. “And maybe the
path to a plot, if not a further complication. It’s like theodicy, the
contradiction about the existence of evil at the heart of
monotheistic religions: how can you assign what looks like a flaw to
a flawless entity? Two possibilities: a bug in the system or some
feature that people don’t understand. The theological equivalents
would be either a deity unable to prevent pain and suffering in its
created cosmos or one granting humans limited power to screw up,
as a test of their virtue. Either way, people have found ways to
justify all sorts of mischief and mayhem, leading some to deny the
existence of a beneficent deity. Similarly, when your characters
become aware of an apparent crack in the perfect surveillance and
management of the Planetary Steward, they might come to either of
those conclusions. Maybe the boy acknowledges that it is at least
potentially a problem, and feels either frightened or determined to
urge people to act in accordance with the rules that had saved them
up to that point. And the girl instead says it is a sign that the system
either is failing or is slowly loosening its grip on humanity by
design, and that now is the time to reassert the dominance of man
over machine.”
“That is a lot of intellectual freight for my Jack and Jill to carry
up the hill,” replied Perversity. “I can see making those ideas some

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