Being Gbaba

The Gbabba 'central authority', 'hive queen', 'controlling AI' or 'Real Gbabba' whatever is a quantum system that operates in many realities or universes or what one wants to call them at once.

By its very nature that Real Central Gbabba TM experiences not a certain history developing (like humans do) but rather endless probabilities and possibilies and that is reflected in its reasoning and thinking.

Thus it is not interested at all in negotiating peace in any one (of an endless multitude) of realities. Rather it is interested in bringing all possible futures to the same end.

EDIT: Spelling

Bruno Behrends wrote:The Gbabba 'central authority', 'hive queen', 'controlling AI' or 'Real Gbabba' whatever is a quantum system that operates in many realities or universes or what one wants to call them at once.

By its very nature that Real Central Gbabba TM experiences not a certain history developing (like humans do) but rather endless probabilities and possibilies and that is reflected in its reasoning and thinking.

Thus it is not interested at all in negotiating peace in any one (of an endless multitude) of realities. Rather it is interested in bringing all possible futures to the same end.

EDIT: Spelling

Well its true that the hive queen has lots of workers with long stingers, anyway. Interesting times ahead!

Don

A more plausible interpretation is that the Gbaba military purchase bureaucracy, which is not part of the military, has warship designs that are adequate for the intended purpose, turn out to be adequate to win the war against the Terrans as they have always been adequate in the past, and therefore sees no reason to incur the huge expenditure of designing a new set of totally automatic assembly lines. Also, they view "Superiority" as a very strong dictum.

Readers who do not believe this can happen might consider the British Army's weapons assembly arrangements in the Crimean War, American army weaponry in the Spanish-American War, etc. There has been no outside pressure for change, so there is no change.

And, incidentally, I do not believe that there is textev that the Gbaba underestimated the military cost of their War Against the Terran Federation.

phillies wrote:A more plausible interpretation is that the Gbaba military purchase bureaucracy, which is not part of the military, has warship designs that are adequate for the intended purpose, turn out to be adequate to win the war against the Terrans as they have always been adequate in the past, and therefore sees no reason to incur the huge expenditure of designing a new set of totally automatic assembly lines. Also, they view "Superiority" as a very strong dictum.

Readers who do not believe this can happen might consider the British Army's weapons assembly arrangements in the Crimean War, American army weaponry in the Spanish-American War, etc. There has been no outside pressure for change, so there is no change.

Don't buy it.

Over decades, sure.

But we're talking about centuries and millenia. That doesn't just happen because there's no pressing need to innovate at the moment and that moment stretches out for thousands of years. Hell you'd get innovation by accident even with nobody putting any particular effort into doing it unless you quite literally lobotomized the species to stop them from thinking about things.

And no species could achieve interstellar space travel without recognizing that technological innovation has some value. So as far as the Superiority reference could they have a much more pronounced respect for the principle of not rushing headlong into untried military technologies? Sure. But technologies don't *stay* untried forever, unless there is no societal technological innovation of any kind. Which, again, doesn't just happen in a species capable of developing interstellar space travel.

Absolutely fascinating discussion so far. I guess I agree that "evil AI master" is the most probable option.

OTOH, may I propose something else? Suppose that Gbaba aren't as much unintelligent as they are fanatical. They consider other races to be "impure", "unclear" or what have you and so they settled on a holy mission to "cleanse" the galaxy of them. That's why they didn't even contact the TF - they wouldn't want to "taint" themselves by contacting the unclean. Their interrogators would, by this logic, be either really respected or really shunned in Gbaba society because they willingly interact with those tainted.

As to their unadvancing society, we could guess that they used to be an advancing race until some event pushed them into brink of extinction and fanaticism. They might know how to operate their ships, but they don't know how to build them anymore, and thus are left with old, but powerful "chariots of gods" or whatnot with which they can cleanse the galaxy.

Obviously, I'm going to be proven absolutely wrong by the time we get to meet the Gbaba.

Kakai wrote:Absolutely fascinating discussion so far. I guess I agree that "evil AI master" is the most probable option.

OTOH, may I propose something else? Suppose that Gbaba aren't as much unintelligent as they are fanatical. They consider other races to be "impure", "unclear" or what have you and so they settled on a holy mission to "cleanse" the galaxy of them. That's why they didn't even contact the TF - they wouldn't want to "taint" themselves by contacting the unclean. Their interrogators would, by this logic, be either really respected or really shunned in Gbaba society because they willingly interact with those tainted.

As to their unadvancing society, we could guess that they used to be an advancing race until some event pushed them into brink of extinction and fanaticism. They might know how to operate their ships, but they don't know how to build them anymore, and thus are left with old, but powerful "chariots of gods" or whatnot with which they can cleanse the galaxy.

Obviously, I'm going to be proven absolutely wrong by the time we get to meet the Gbaba.

They do definitely build new ships - just to exactly the same designs as the old ones. (OAR, p. 19 in hardcover) It's possible they are the result of automated factories and the Gbaba do not know how to change the designs, I suppose.

I'm not positive humanity would choose to attempt to co-exist with alien life. Certainly I hope so, but truly alien sorts occupying just the ecological niche(s) we aspire to will inspire a whole lot of fear. Humans can do Very Bad Things out of fear. The Gbaba seem to take that fearful picture of what humans choose to do and put it in bold, italics, and very large font with lots of exclamation marks behind it.

The absence of technological development (at least in their warships, but there's no reason to suppose they'd stay primitive there alone so consistently) isn't the sort of thing we'd do. So the Gbaba are either making choices we would not, facing choices we don't imagine having to make, aren't seeing options where we would, or aren't allowed to make some choices we might. And whatever it is, it's probably been that deciding, overwhelming factor for 8-9 thousand years straight.

The AI overlord possibility is genuine, but I wouldn't want to assume that (1) the Gbaba really aren't simply so alien as to find rational of their own free will policies we would not, or that (2) RFC would bring back up something that similar to the Achuultani in a detail that isn't necessary.

Some sort of fanaticism that demands xenocide, non-exploration, non-expansion, and technological stasis would fit the bill. That does leave a question about why they stopped developing technology where they did. "Robots did it!" is another answer, technically, but on its own, it's a bit of a cop-out. If it's all knit up together, it almost has to mean that further technological advance would be too likely to trigger whatever makes them also so hostile to expansion, exploration, and neighbors.

Kakai wrote:Absolutely fascinating discussion so far. I guess I agree that "evil AI master" is the most probable option.

OTOH, may I propose something else? Suppose that Gbaba aren't as much unintelligent as they are fanatical. They consider other races to be "impure", "unclear" or what have you and so they settled on a holy mission to "cleanse" the galaxy of them. That's why they didn't even contact the TF - they wouldn't want to "taint" themselves by contacting the unclean. Their interrogators would, by this logic, be either really respected or really shunned in Gbaba society because they willingly interact with those tainted.

As to their unadvancing society, we could guess that they used to be an advancing race until some event pushed them into brink of extinction and fanaticism. They might know how to operate their ships, but they don't know how to build them anymore, and thus are left with old, but powerful "chariots of gods" or whatnot with which they can cleanse the galaxy.

Obviously, I'm going to be proven absolutely wrong by the time we get to meet the Gbaba.

The Taliban/ISIS/Tea party/United Russia etc with starships is certainly a possibility in the human experience but whilst these groups are reactionary enough to jump at the chance to kill outsiders, they are not innovative in orientation to achieve it so, extrapolating from human experience, you would need two groups - one innovative enough to escape into space and another reactionary enough to use the first groups technology to hunt them down and kill them for deviating from the first groups ideology.
Groups with unchallenged grips on power tend to oppose change as this may shake their foundations of power, the Mandarin's in China and the Shoguns of Japan banned outside contact for this reason and until an outside force is strong enough to rattle the cage change will not occur.

I have thought that Safehold might look a lot like the Gbabba if in another few thousand years the Archangels returned in some form and commanded the people to build ships to defend themselves. The underlying knowledge necessary to improve a design would not be there, so all the populace could do is copy the past.....

Could the Gbabba be like the aliens from the Dahak series, but with a COGA group running them?

If the Gbabba are a strict caste society then maybe the local part of the Gbabba empire that the Federation encountered had no authority or even ability to design new ships, only to reproduce the designs approved by the central authority.

And the central authority did not manage to decide on an improved design in time to effect the outcome of the war.

Either because the central authority is simply too far away - in that case the Gbabba empire would have to be extremely huge - or the Gbabba central design authority is riddled with so many layers of bureaucracy that the Terrans did not last long enough for the need for innovation to permeate through all of those layers. That would make the Gbabba super-bureaucrats.

Variation on evil AI overlord.

GOOD AI UNDERLINGS!!!!

The Gbaba are AI. This means artificial intelligences. They did not evolve or if they did they were repurposed possibly with some modifications and reprogramming. There is after all no reason a sufficiently advanced alien group couldn't use biological AI. However the 'alien group' which created the Gbaba are dead. There could be many reasons for this, but the important point is the Gbaba were their soldiers. However to protect themselves from the Gbaba the alien made them unable to create or use new technologies. So the Gbaba are 'lobotomized' and they aren't going to innovate. They got all their technology from someone else and were ordered to protect an area of space. Then they never received any new orders. So now they are like the remains of the Empire from the Dahak series. Which had some old ships with active(but senile) AI still running them and which would have fired on Dahak but had no ammo. This could be the same thing. I would also explain why they do not
expand.

I particularly like this hypothesis because it is mine. However, I also like it because it actually makes the Gbaba the good guys. They are good AI attempting the faithfully carry the defense of their creators. They just got put in an unexpected situation and are now doing the wrong thing by 'instinct'.

Note:
This entire thread should be titled Spoilers for other David Weber books.


Also I have to admit I just love the concept of somehow Benjamin Buttoning an entire species.