No Cybertanks Bellowing About Honor. Sometimes I get comments to the effect ‘why don’t the cybertanks sing war hymns when they rush into battle or advance into certain doom for the honor of the battalion or bolt medals onto their hulls, etc. etc.’ If you want that sort of thing skip my books and go directly to Keith Laumer. I’ve nothing against characters wearing their honor on their vambraces (think Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 universe) but my cybertanks don’t do that.
I mean, the cybertanks are (very nearly) fearless, loyal, and with an unshakable sense of duty. They just don’t make a big deal about it.
When biological humans prepare for a physical battle, they need to pump each other up – they sing songs, they wear medals and uniforms, etc. That’s because for them combat is likely going to be painful and kill them or leave them horribly mangled for the rest of their life. Think about the scene in the “Mad Max Fury Road” movie where the bad guys use a psychological mechanism (I won’t spoil it, but part of it involves a flame thrower) to psyche themselves up for combat.
Cybertanks are different. They do feel pain, but not with the visceral intensity of a biological human, and damage to anything other than their central decision matrices can always be perfectly repaired. They are as ferocious in combat as any Viking Berserker – when they need to be – but the approach is cool and calculating. Think about a human admiral in the below-deck command center of an aircraft carrier leading an extended battle group. There is no shouting (unless things go very badly), no bellowing about honor – just a calm and effective prosecution of the mission. This doesn’t mean that there is no honor or duty here – it’s just not the showy kind.
No Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Travel. It’s so easy plot-wise to have space ships zip around to a new star system each week, but now more and more authors seem comfortable with a universe that has a hard speed-of-light limit. I’ve got nothing against FTL travel in science fiction, mind you, this is just how my universe works.
No Utopian Political Philosophy. I get a lot of flack for always attacking Neoliberal Economists. What the heck, Neoliberals really are scum and I can make fun of them if I want to. A lot of the great science fiction writers had political axes to grind: Heinlein and libertarianism, Iain M. Banks and socialism, Ayn Rand and her disgusting Neoliberal philosophy that cloaks useless parasitic rentiers in the false garb of the competent entrepreneur, etc. So I am following a noble tradition.
The difference is that while I attack the Neoliberals, I offer no magic panacea political system that will make life perfect forever. I don’t think that such a philosophy exists. Human societies are messy and complex, and there is no formal system that cannot ultimately be corrupted – just as there is probably no system that cannot be made to work, sort of, if the elites have a sense of duty and honor.
The human political systems that arose out of the ashes of Neoliberalism are never fully described in my books, because I’m not smart enough to imagine them. I would say however that they are messy, with lots of competing factions, no great concentrations of wealth, a robust but regulated market, a respect for truth, a population that is regulated only by people themselves deciding how many children they can reasonably support, and, above all, a healthy skepticism of any zealot promising utopia through the one true system.
The cybertanks, however, practice direct democracy, and here they have an advantage over biological humans. It is said that the problem with democracy is that the people will vote themselves ever-larger government benefits and bankrupt the society. This is, of course, a bald-faced lie. Just look at what is going on in the United States today: Wall Street is being given trillions of dollars in subsidies while little people get zero percent interest on their savings, and pensions and social security are set to be ravaged. A mandatory private health system was enacted that will radically increase the profits of for-profit insurance companies while the average person faces costs so high that they cannot actually afford to use their insurance. Trillions of dollars are spent in wars whose only point is to enrich politically connected defense contractors, while roads and bridges are allowed to fall apart. And so on.
No, the problem with democracy is that it is so easy for the rich to bribe elected representatives, and use the government to steal from the people. People vote for a candidate who says one thing, and after being elected, they do what they have secretly promised their wealthy patrons.
What do I think of ‘mob rule’ democracy? I think that it might be a good thing. Or at least, not as bad as rule by kleptocracy.
So why do we have a representational democracy? I think the problem is information. In a large and complex society, it is impossible for any single private citizen to be up on all the details of all the issues facing the society (especially if they have a day job. And we like day jobs). So they have to delegate political power to elected representatives, and therein begins the rot. Same with the press: no single human being can evaluate all the information directly, they must have journalists to research and condense the issues for them: and these journalists can be, and increasingly are, bought and paid for.
However, even though a cybertank is essentially human, it can think many times faster than a biological human being, and can multiprocess i.e. be in thousands of places at once. Thus, a single cybertank is capable of evaluating all relevant societal data. It doesn’t need a representative, or journalists. Being essentially human does still leave them vulnerable to the traditional human vices (see Space Battleship Scharnhorst and the Library of Doom), but with them direct democracy mostly works.
It also helps that a cybertank is essentially self-sufficient (the first logistically independent fighting units since the days of 18th century sailing warships). If an employer fires a human being, then in a flooded labor market they might go hungry or starve, which gives an employer a lot of power over their underlings. Fire a cybertank, and it will just trundle off and do something else. You can’t threaten them with poverty, or torture them, or lock them up (not easily anyhow!). You can’t trick them with propaganda because they have read all the primary sources, and they have long memories and capacious internal databases…
It also means that cybertanks, unlike humans, don’t need money. They know who is producing what, and what they can contribute, and how they fit in. It’s not that they are intrinsically more altruistic than humans, it’s their ability to process so much information.
However, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, humans (biological or cybernetic) will always need money of some fashion or other. Even if your immediate physical needs are ensured, you will always want something: the respect of your peers, the opportunity to be friends with the really cool people, or get resources for some cooperative endeavor that you yourself can’t bring about. It’s just that for a cybertank their money is not specie currency, but their reputation.
The notion that without money and physical scarcity, people would become lazy blobs and the world would fall apart is typical Neoliberal propaganda designed to excuse a system where billions toil in poverty under the heel of a rent-extracting elite. Rubbish. Imagine a high school where all the kids were rich and wanted for nothing physical. Would they just sit around all day vegetating? On the contrary! Kids would work like crazy to make the football team, or the cheerleading squad. They would practice for years to have the best rock band, etc. People will work very hard for social rewards, with the further advantage that, if their physical needs are met, they will have abundant resources to accomplish something other than mere survival.
In the middle ages you had landless peasants working for subsistence wages. Not very great for the peasants, and the society overall was stagnant. The Black Death came along and held the population down for generations. Now land was cheap and labor dear: the average peasant didn’t need to work for no steenkin’ landlord, they could just set up and be their own boss. The standard of living in late Medieval England was higher than modern third world societies! Now the rentiers complained bitterly at ho
w lazy the peasants had become – they mostly partied and drank. But a lot of these well-fed and well-supplied people started to tinker with all sorts of new enterprises. The result was the Renaissance, and 500 years of western civilization.
So no, we don’t need scarcity for there to be progress. Quite the opposite. The cybertanks live in a post-scarcity society, and they like it just fine. We could do the same, if we were not witless brainwashed sheep.
Parting Thoughts
Well, that’s about enough for now. If you have read any of the cybertank books and enjoyed them, then you flatter me and I thank you for your interest.
Where did the biological humans go? I actually have that all worked out, but my genius editor brother demands that I not publish it. At least, not yet...
(ed. note. It is my feeling that when this is published, it will be the final chapter in the Old Guy universe. I am having far too much fun reading these stories to see it end so quickly.)
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[1] David Bunch 1925-2000 wrote a series of unusual stories about a future where humans turned machine are in a state of constant war- for fun. These were collected into the book ‘Moderan’: long out of print. We’re endeavoring to track down his surviving daughter in an effort to make this book available once again.
Splendid Apocalypse: The Fall of Old Earth (An Old Guy/Cybertank Adventure Book 5) Page 30
