Minor Civ - Overly Enthusiastic Consumerist Robots

Space-faring computer programs. Awesome! I never played Mass Effect so this is a new idea for me.

   So do they prefer live in a cyber world, ala Tron, that is largely withdrawn from the physical world, or do they revel in sensing and interacting with the real world in the various platforms they inhabit, or do they prefer to experience a combination of both?

   As a rhetorical aside, I really like the Infinite Ladder of Ordinance concept! You formed that idea yourself, friend? I can't find it on google searches.

   It speaks to me about the time that we find ourselves in. Parts of the world clinging desperately to the tattered remnants of fallen communist order while kicking and screaming to deny ideological victory to supply-and-demand and the other theories about the chaotic and emergent nature of economics that western intellectuals have articulated over the course of recent centuries. I've read parts of the Communist Manifesto and it's shocking to see Engels describe things we now know as Factory Efficiency, Affordability, Class Mobility, Meritocracy, High Specialization of Expertise, Technological Innovation, Unplanned Obsolescence as negative things and describe the actual negative things we now call Planned Obsolescence, Mismanagement, Over-Production, Economic Recessions, Junk Science, and Big Money in Government as incorrigible sins of a corrupt system, all while pleading nostalgia for the rigid caste-based serfdom of fuedal economics.

   Engels failed to see the strengths of Captialism for what they were (unstoppably titanic forces of developement), and didn't bother putting a single ounce of brainpower to how his most valid critiques would overcome by borgeois society in the decades that followed the manifesto, and how the other critiques that remain valid to the modern day would not hold back the economic behemoth that is a massive middle class. He lamented miracles of innovation like the steam engine and the telegraph!

   If he were alive today would he lament the Internet and the automobile? Good god what a short sighted fellow that Marxist was! Might as well call it the Amish Manifesto for crying out loud! There are many Marxists in the world today and if you are one of them LordCaledus I mean no offence to you personally, I only point out that Marxists really limit themselves to dwelling on the bottom rungs of your Ladder. They are so busy looking down that they don't know how to truly look up at the next rung to grasp.

   Humans took hundreds of thousands of years to climb the first rung of your Ladder; a few thousand years of early agricultural kingdoms ascended the next couple. The rational economic and physical theories following the Enlightenment however... oh boy that's when we really started climbing! Talk about serious action! The true beauty of it is we have experienced exponential growth in the number of scientists the economy can support to work full time on problem solving and innovation in theory and production. I don't know about you, but I am in awe of the modern world.

  I see your Infinite Ladder idea as a natural extension of modern rational theories, and when we unlock the secrets dwelling just outside our current reach, I see Capitalism and Marxism both falling to the wayside, replaced by a more refined and fundamental understanding of reality that will make your ladder seam like an elevator that we ride with ease.

I apologize for the rant, but your Infinite Ladder idea really gets my juices flowing! Great stuff!

I appreciate the comment!

The Infinite Ladder of Ordinance was something that came from taking ideas that come up fairly often in Endless games (such as the theme of poor stewardship of the environment quickly and easily leading to extinction, and the question of how best to balance scientific advancement, environmental care, and economic advancement) and applying them in a different way. The Illo were also a big inspiration. Most machine societies are given purely anti-religious belief systems, and I thought it was a nice and creative change of pace to have fervently religious machines instead. It's a subversion of expectations that I have always appreciated ever since I first saw it in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica TV series. I wanted to have a similar subversion to that, but on the industrial and emotional side instead. Machines driven by philosophy rather than raw emotionless logic. The main real world inspiration for it was the Kardashev Scale, just with a bit more of a philosophical bend to it and focused more on measuring civilizations based on physical resource availability rather than energy output.

The Ikonus themselves are very much physical world-oriented. They have a manic obsession with remaining in the now and looking toward the future in the physical world, partly because they know if they ever retreat from the real world, then they will face the threat of collapsing into a depressed stupor that they cannot get themselves out of.

On a political side, this actually isn't particularly influenced by my own political views. I'm not a fan of putting my politics into my ideas unless it is relevant in-universe, and even then only if it serves the personality of the species or individual in question, and even then I'll use someone else's political views if I think they would work better. In the context of writing fiction, my political views are of no inherently greater value than anyone else's. It's all about what best serves what I'm working on.