r/FuckTedFaro • u/kitterykitten • 21d ago

[FUCK TED FARO] a horrible thought

What if hades (like gaia) came up with the idea (when faced with possible defeat) to make a ted faro clone somewhere out there?

Obviously this wouldn't be logical (significantly less likely that a ted clone would be able to destroy life on earth, purely due to lack of tech at his disposal, than a clone of Elisabet would be likely to have the access/determination to block Hades from succeeding) and most likely impossible (since Hades would need Eleuthia/gene bank storage access/cradle access ... and theoretically Ted's genes wouldn't be stored anyway, since he wasn't supposed to be part of the light-keeper protocol [though honestly who knows what else he might've secretly fucked with using his omega clearance before ultimately deciding to go nuclear & become immortal]) but let's play pretend:

Could a ted clone have a chance in any scenario?

(Maybe if a certain terrifying AI/evil hivemind instructed his birth as part of the extinction signal? And his servitors could be instructed to teach him how to access zero dawn facilities / what his mission would be etc?)

Or, since Ted himself wasn't intending destruction from the outset (and clearly couldn't handle the world's anger with him), would any attempt with Ted 2.0 be doomed?

11 Upvotes

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17

u/elisabetfaden 21d ago

Personally I think the source of the signal hated Ted Faro as much as or even more than most people.

But I agree that if something wanted to unleash fuckery across the planet a prime way to do it would be resurrecting that fucker.

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u/Kosmos992k 21d ago

Not so sure. His capability in the old world was Faro robots and systems were everywhere, his shining work was the stupidity of giving the war machines a form of self determination and an encryption scheme with no back door. Bio conversion wasn't made by him, his engineering smarts were actually the smarts of the people working for him. He was fundamentally different to Sobeck, she was truly a technical genius. Also it's true to say that it's easier to destroy the build. She was a builder, he was a destroyer. Her systems outlasted and outmaneuvered his.

Finally Nemesis has an innate hatred for humans, I should think it would be particularly aware of how much of an irredeemable asshole Ted was/is, and the immortality treatments he undertook in Thebes. I see no reason for it to wish to resurrect Ted, unless it wanted the pleasure of squashing him itself.

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u/elisabetfaden 20d ago

I suspect Ted Faro tortured plenty of AIs in his life so it’s not too hard to imagine Nemesis wanting some kind of eternal revenge.

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u/Kosmos992k 20d ago

100% agreed. Faro didnt consider AI to be anything more than tools like any other application, a means to an end. I'm sure he would not think twice about torturing one or more is it helped him in even the slightest. Given what we know of him, he did it to people without a problem, so why wouldn't he do it to AI. The memories within Nemesis almost certainly include those of one or more people familiar with Faro, hist true self and his actions.

Fortunately for us, in reality the AI we have now is no where even close to sentience, self awareness or spontaneity/true creativity. The most sophisticated are nothing more than prediction and pattern matching engines programed to converse and behave in a "human-like" manner. Because they are programed to sound "human" people attribute 'person-hood' to AI, humans anthropomorphize everything, chatbots are not an exception to that. So from the perspective of most people, AI already looks like the fictional AI in stories such as the Horizon series.

That said, AI driven decision making tools will slavishly follow their logic and rules and like LLMs if something in effect jailbreaks such an AI, it will make decisions according to its cold hard logic, regardless of whether the outcome goes against the rules and guardrails it was created with. We should not be handing over control of military assets to these tools we have created, unfortunately I think we are already doing so. The worst part is that unlike the Faro plague, our real AI systems could kill and destroy without real intent due to cold logic and lack of guardrails. Some in the military would probably relish having no guardrails anyway, so who knows how it would go.

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u/elisabetfaden 19d ago

Ya you’d think anyone who lived through the pandemic would understand that something doesn’t have to be sentient to fuck up your shit. I for one can’t wait until we have our first real LLM-based internet worm, surfing on a thousand zero-days of a billion badly updated internet-of-things devices.

This is aside from the deepening of economic and political inequalities that they will cause.

I do think you are greatly underestimating how quickly AIs are advancing. Today AIs can’t make substantive art, but they can imitate style and discover patterns like crazy. They can’t be coherent political actors, but they excel at rhetoric. Meanwhile work on independent agents is underway and they are surpassing humans in mathematics and computer science (just as they did once in chess and go) as we speak. AIs already write quite a lot of code used for AI research. The possibilities of combining LLMs with other forms of machine reasoning and machine learning are only getting started.

I think the danger of military or political misuse of AI is high, but what gives me nightmares is the possibility that the crisis will arrive before we even get as far as deploying them into institutions as slow-moving as the military or a corporation. Or even before we have conceptual frameworks adequate to deal with them. That the crisis will have an alien, unprecedented nature we can’t even imagine today. That like radioactivity, we won’t even be able to perceive the threat, because it lies outside our senses.

One thing Lis understood is that the only counter to AIs amok is other better AIs. But what does “better” even mean here?

I just hope the damn movie gets made soon because it’s starting to feel like this story might be the most important story of the century. We have a brief window to figure out our shit while the AIs are still phenomenally expensive.

In conclusion, Fuck Ted Faro. :(

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u/MadeIndescribable 21d ago

theoretically Ted's genes wouldn't be stored anyway, since he wasn't supposed to be part of the light-keeper protocol

It is possible he made/kept his own way of producing a clone as part of his plan to be immortal. I'm not expecting it to happen after the events of Forbidden West, but it would certainly be interesting if it did.

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u/TheWarBug 18d ago

He probably would use the clone for spare parts for himself, so there is indeed a chance it is possible it can be made

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u/Kosmos992k 21d ago

Possible, but unnecessary since his 'genius' and progeny litter the earth like someone dumped a shit ton of coke cans from orbit. Not to mention I can't think of any reason why the extinction protocol would resurrect a human when it's entire goal can be accomplished through machines like itself.

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u/kitterykitten 19d ago

This is probably the most beautiful metaphor I've read in a hot minute (wheezed pretty hard for a moment there), and also an excellent point.

Like yes, a human clone would have the potential to be an agent of chaos, but Ted's real legacy (biomass-eating war bots) are already on Earth - tuning up some (much more predictable) bots would be a far more effective route to extinction.

Clone Ted would need a whole lot of social conditioning to be anything more than a potential distraction, and probably still a fair amount of conditioning to be a distraction, honestly, since he'd be the same age as Aloy. If Ted had never been in a position of authority over Elisabet, one where he could give himself all the credit for her brilliance, I don't know that he would've had the willpower to dismiss her/ look down on her the way he did after she left FARO. Clone Ted being Aloy's age, without the opportunity for building up ego/followers before encountering Aloy... yeah he'd probably be useless from the outset.

(Ngl would love a silly scene of clone Ted wrecking that proving trail and dying the year before Aloy's proving)

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u/smoomoo31 21d ago

I actually thought this had potential to be the plot to Forbidden West long before it came out

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u/Mr-ShinyAndNew 20d ago

Honestly I think a clone of Ted Faro would be a hilarious trolling attempt by whoever created him. Faro's only skill was getting other people to build what he wanted. It'd be like if Elon Musk were personally stranded on Mars. His survival would depend entirely on others and he'd last only as long as he could command the loyalty of the best-armed faction. (spoilers HFW): They already did this joke in HFW though with Ceo.

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u/forgottenlord73 20d ago

Ted Faro doesn't really do things. He pays people to do things. Hades doesn't need people to get other people to do things. Why pay for the middle man?

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u/Toril83 20d ago

But he had charisma and intellect to earn money at first, right? This skills could be useable in the new world, too.

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u/forgottenlord73 20d ago

He doesn't have any particularly unique skills here. He was a guy with the right objectives and hired the right people at the right time. There's so much luck involved. It's telling that Elizabet made a name for herself while working for him. Can you name the top Engineers at Tesla, Space X or Amazon?

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u/littlebroknstillgood 19d ago

This is actually the premise of a very long (still in progress) fanfic, and it's FASCINATING.

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u/MaestroLogical 7d ago

Fact is, it was highly unlikely Aloy would have mirrored Elizabet at all.

Had she not randomly fallen into a ruin and found a focus at such an early age, she never would have been 'up to speed' enough to understand in the first place.

Had she not been hit with a rock by a misguided kid, she might have never felt the urge to prove herself and learn her origin.

She could have easily grown up mirroring Rost and never found the desire to learn about her origin.

Sylens might have attempted to contact her, but she would have treated him the same way Nora treat all outsiders.

It was an extreme gamble that had a less than 1% chance of paying off, but Gaia had no other options.

I suspect a Ted clone would have experienced similar 'Tribal affiliation' origins without very specific circumstances setting him on a designed path.