"Disagreeing about the relative values of labor was disastrous for us during industrialization. If you have solutions to the obvious pitfalls those would be interesting."

Ailor is fairly certain that the Second Republic is either the most or least technologically advanced delegate here, give or take the Ranalites. The Ailori delegation has gone out of its way not to flash tech. Their gear avoids synthetic and advanced materials as much as possible. Still, displaying when they're communicating necessitated displaying decks which in turn meant displaying at least the transistor. Either way, the course of action is the same. If there had been another delegate in the Current Era or a Future Era Ailor would want their help avoiding skippable-intermediate-upgrades and predictable pitfalls. It's Ailor's duty to help.

"If the main difficulty is addiction instead of data aggregation and processing then there is an electronic equivalent to closing the library. You can use a productivity manager to manage when, how much, and under which conditions you have access to data. Just be careful tuning it. Overwork was a problem on Ailor before we had those, and now it's one of the main remaining known known problems."

It's unsurprising to Ailor that capitalists are a difference, that was a defining feature of the Previous Era. It's more surprising that there's not tribal, feudal, or imperial delegates. (Ailor will not mention the lack of Future Era delegates, because they still have even odds on one of the delegations being Future Era and testing us.) Capitalists at an advanced level of technology is surprising and somewhat worrying. That being said, Gremirians are at least claiming outcomes that are much better than expected for capitalists. 

"The sorts of values that it might be better to be different," the Head of State offers, "suggest confusion between terminal and instrumental values."

This sure is the way to model social development. Could you elaborate on your theory of eras? Our Church, in fact, believes it knows best what values ​​a person should pursue, but it's not so optimistic as to assume that because it's true, everyone will accept it and be able to follow it. So your historical determinism would be a great relief in this regard.

The ego is too strongly wired into us biologically, and it's easier to replace us with another species than to achieve universal enlightenment as we are. Therefore, we use an ego-driven economic model and, within its framework, sponsor desired existential outcomes. Therefore, the Double Gremirians/Singularity will absorb those who wanted to be absorbed and reward those who wanted to be rewarded, with efforts to persuade people to change their values ​​proportional to the initial drive to change.

If you've allowing the possibility of enlightenment, they'll attempt to enlighten you, in proportion to this openness, and you'll disappear, your resources being channeled into pure bliss. If you feel alienated from the enlightened version of yourself and consider the fulfillment of your enlightened desires in exchange for the resources provided by your selfish self a betrayal, you'll remain in the personal "hell" of consciousness-as-a-function-in-time, with your first-order desires fulfilled, even if it's against your own interests, up to your negentropy budget. You can bring others to this hell, but you pay for them. That's why cryonics is the only area of ​​charity that is disproportionately funded by egoists.

"Disagreeing about the relative values of labor was disastrous for us during industrialization" sure is a statement. Laborers and industries that can't keep up with the amount of people who want to pay for their services charge increasing amounts until people stop asking or enough new laborers join the industry to underbid their competitors, take their business, and drive down prices.

In a good year, the amount of labor and land you put into farming correlates strongly with the amount of food that comes out of it. Incremental improvements get eaten by incremental population growth, but eventually there's a breakthrough that doubles yields. The same land and labour producing yields that are twice as large means that half that labor can work on non-farming endeavours. A popular endeavor is finding other ways to save even more time or labor. People hit on the idea of mass production as a timesaver, which isn't great for the artisan class whose work is now devalued, but the pie is growing big enough to help them through the transitional period or learning new skills. 

Nah, that doesn't seem like it'd be relevant to industrialization and relative wages.

Hm. Pity that I'm a non-diagetic thought you're having instead of being present to mention that.

"People who are sufficiently self disciplined to use the productivity manager tend to just accumulate external responsibilities and set alarms about them.

I suppose we could consider importing Adventurers who want to exchange care work for the opportunity to see our planet and society, but Ferek's serious people in particular are quite worried about a second sapient species going feral and outcompeting us.

Even if you send us sterile Adventurers someone is likely to be irresponsible enough to work on reversing that if requested."

In many ways Kastakia is a tribal society, or partly feudal with the hospital ships being the feudal lords. The tribes are unusually cooperative but still have no real overarching governance. The few coordination problems they have are still mostly mediated by individual violence. 

Eras are just a colloquial description of times when the dominant mode of life and organizing society was a certain way. Tribal people were very different than early agriculture and so on. 

That's really cool that you were able to transition so cleanly! It wasn't clean for us at all. At some point, some people figured out that they could get ahead by paying a small number of people to shoot laborers who wanted pesky things like "pay" instead of just paying the laborers directly. They were pretty intractable with that, especially since they had people with guns and propaganda and a lot of incentives to keep things like they were. Ailor ended up having to shoot the slave holders to free the slaves. Then the slavers kept trying to cheat the whole "no slave" thing over and over again until there was a world war. That's a big reason Ailor is very much sold on the Blue Book. Although it sounds like Gremir somehow has something very much like the Blue Book through some indirect means.

"A trick with the productivity manager is to have two or three people who have to unlock it, so that it's less impulsive. That might be relying on Ailori being more sociable in certain ways though. 

The upside if you want to import people for Ailor include that we're pretty certain that we can generate more habitation than we consume. Many of us are also familiar with caregiving for flighted sapients, in the BDSM context or otherwise. The best of us are very invested in being Friendly, and we wouldn't let the rest of us cause issues without feeling responsible for fixing them.

It might not be best practices to just take our word for it though. Maybe you should send an Adventuring party or three over to Ailor? I'm sure you'll have your pick of locals for guides and companionship." 

"We're barely holding them back here, there are hopefuls of all feathers camped just outside ready to go as soon as we know who is open to them, and one enterprising group have set up a fertility clinic if people would rather take eggs.

All we ask is safe transit back to the portal for them on request and understanding that we're not giving any guarantees of behaviour."

We were curious why you view Eras as strictly sequential or why there must be any Eras after capitalism. In our history, following the emergence of cheap toxins - producible even by nomads, where every scratch was agonizingly yet delayed-fatally lethal, leaving the wounded with nothing to lose - the meme "anyone can kill everyone, but probably shouldn't" became prevalent. Both inside and outside city walls, order could be secretly collapsed by a single disgruntled individual. It appears we grasped the laws of heredity and efficient selection earlier than most, by the age of toxic deterrence, we already possessed an 8x yield-to-seed food productivity alongside a harsh memetic selective pressure for coordination. We evolved into a system of wealthy, decentralized, and paranoid polities experimenting with the most resilient social structures.

​Consequently, it seems to us that all the social orders you described, and many others, once existed simultaneously. We attempted to build communism, theocracies, and returned to Dunbar-centric mutual aid communes, we had nomads, totalitarian empires with weapon-conspiracies, cults and whatnot. Yet the most stable form of society proved to be capitalism. It dominated even before the industrial revolution, and after the advent of radio, it displaced all other forms of social organization with the founding of the Omnihold. We foresee no further changes. We do not understand how this relates to scarcity, as social, informational, and existential preferences are also commodified, making our needs effectively infinite.

​We concluded early on that reproduction is not among a human's fundamental freedoms, so the issue of surplus-consumption via overpopulation was regulated. "Let's reproduce less and work less" is a reasonable thing to do. More effective contraception certainly helps. We are somehow internally opposed to the concept of productivity managers, as it sounds like blackmailing oneself to exploit vulnerable parts of the brain. Using promises to others or oneself as a self-fulfilling prophecy misuses the function of a promise. One should signal the true probability of task completion or failure, rather than attempting to inflate those odds through a sense of guilt toward oneself or others, in any case, we possess too little capacity for guilt or blame for such a system to function.

​Our borders are open to migrants. In principle, we can regulate reproduction, levy geo-rent, or require insurance for socially hazardous activities. Providing more data will significantly lower insurance costs, and we have good pseudonymization if this strikes you as a privacy violation. You may build your own settlements (including maritime ones) and open businesses, informally, you will have significant support from the curious and from charitables, though this may require some bureaucracy to account for external resources. You can rely on a UBI and protection from aggression. This will necessitate solving the portal's logistical problems if transit rights prove too expensive, but we are prepared to recognize deportation as the ultimate punishment. Gremirians are sterilized a priori, we expect them to refrain from attempts to restore reproduction or to breed. Unless your criminals construct forced human farms, you have nothing to worry about.

(Periods of great economical transition in Ranalite lead to some great ideological wars. Everything in Ranalite history was solved either by complicated philosophical heated-but-civil discussions, or by all-out ideological wars. For the common Ranalite, the sole two possible mental states in regard to large scale problems are "experts can solve this by figuring out the problem in great detail" and "I have to go heroically die because that is my only way to prevent great evil". Thankfully wars are getting less and less common, which some attribute to material wealth and some to the philosophical foundation of metamorality.)

"It sounds like we have opposite problems regarding reproduction! Early Kastakians only avoided dying out by considering reproduction a strong religious imperative, even nowadays it's considered an important social duty.

We think our non sapient precursors just had absolutely no natural predators, and very little of interest to do other than mate and raise children, ever since we discovered engaging pastimes and non reproductive sex it's been a struggle.

I can't rule out Adventurers trying to do illicit fertility restoration if you have people who would ask them to, but I believe everyone would support you enforcing whatever your usual precautions and consequences for such actions are."

"Yes, we have a widely applicable saying - damaging things is consent to be damaged. That applies to your vital social infrastructure just as much as physical infrastructure."

"How are you with physical affection? Not to put too fine a point on it but you're adorable. 

We can do safe transit. If you're worried, we can provide military grade emergency beacons."

Gremir continues to be through a mirror darkly, as if some subtle law of physics reversed chirality! Perhaps the murder-torture poison makes sense as a primary divergence point. That might explain the lack of slavers under capitalism and provide motivation for developing a mutually agreeable pointlike price system... (The discussion about if the poison paired with temporal coexistence just made it easier for the capitalists to disrupt every other option will remain where the summit can't see it, both in case it's true and in case it's not.)  It doesn't explain infinite-needs or dislike of productivity managers. Those might just be non obvious path dependant downstream effects though. For Ailor, the managers just grew out of people optimizing their activities and best practices had to start weaving in rest and recreation afterward. 

As for the sequence of Eras... that's just how it's been observed? Civilizations tend to progress through the Eras sequentially, except when they come into contact with a civilization from a later Era- when the later Era civ tends to consume or assimilate the earlier one.

"You can't threaten to shoot people to make them work. They know that you know that if you shoot them, they won't be able to work and you still won't get what you want out of them."

"I'm not sure what advice we could hypothetically give to Ailor of the past. We may have been lucky to have heatray-wielding separatist philosopher-kings setting the tone early on."

"The gremirians' wants may be infinite, but surely their needs can't be. Every child is taught the difference between the two."

"Wars are generally over resources or ideology. Increased material wealth and the metamoralistic process sound like they would prevent most conflicts."

"We intelligent lifeforms do love our non-procreative sex, don't we? But seriously, the Kastakians seem like they'd be delightful tourists."

We'd like to be absorbed into your Era, if that's what tends to happen upon contact. What can we do to be better absorbed? We can test the effects of integrating this framework on tourists and our internal networks of experimenters (Gremirians don't do experimental cities thing very often, as their cities have too few public spaces for it to matter, people can live under different legal systems in a single territory and only meet fellow experimenters).

The implied difference between wants and needs sounds like the difference between happiness and "well-being"? And the logic of rejecting blackmail is counterintuitive, we invented it only after mutual deterrence. It's simple for the threat of murder, but more difficult for torture. Heat rays? Whoa, that gives off a certain vibe of fallen empire. We had CSPs at the end of the Industrial Revolution, they remain a popular energy source, but they don't feel like weapons. We don't know how else you could have acquired an ancient laser.

(Speaking of which, what will gremirians see when analyzing data on the shared network? We're primarily interested in the technological levels, we'd like a moment of exposition if everyone is fine with it)

Kastakian tech levels are... Weird.

They seem to jump straight from artisanal to fully automated processes with only the most important things for 'maintain a ship' and 'treat medical conditions' going through a mass production stage, and really value durability and low maintenance parts over cheapness and replaceablilty to an extent that makes no sense until you realise what a total mess their supply chains are.

Most technological progress seems to be driven by 'someone hyper focused on this and dragged a few friends along with them to turn it implentable'. They did not have electronics or powered flight on contact but that didn't stop them making a global network with impressive coverage from vacuum tubes and hot air balloons.

They really don't do agriculture that needs ongoing tending, but do have aggressive low maintenance food and ship materials planting on coastlines and sophisticated predictive models of aquatic food species both motile and plant, and get away with this primarily because their oceans appear to have just naturally come ridiculously well stocked with edible life.

A lot of them still just potter around in wooden sail boats with solar and wind electricity generation and a few highly optimised labour saving devices, plus the ubiquitous network transciever and terminals, doing some kind of artisanal manufacturing or raising a single child with the attention of six adults or doing research of various kinds, subsistence fishing as they go along. 

There's also quite a bit of concern wrapped up around the technical data that there won't be enough enthusiastic help modernising the Network with contact electronics technology if Adventurers are allowed to explore other worlds, and countervailing concern that this might not be a bad thing given experiences with installing the technology in hospital ships and especially in mining endeavours. 

As a broad heuristic, "needs" are things you can die without and "wants" are things you can live without. A man who lived to old age in perfect health before industrialization is the sort of person we imagine as having had all his needs met. 

Aside from being considered immoral, torture is a tricky thing to get right. People will quickly say whatever they think you want to hear under torture, so it's not a reliable way of fact finding or making agreements. You can try to torture people into compliance, but it's hard to hit the sweet spot that breaks them just enough. Too little and they bide their time. Too much and they just break, becoming unable to do much at all.

CSPs were what the First Republic apparently used to set fire to invading ships, given the surviving hint "it's done with mirrors." Skeptics claim they never worked, that they were misdirection for flaming arrows or something, and that the hint was a cheeky nod to it all being a magic trick. Either way, it was a successful deterrent for centuries. Before the dark times, before the Empire.

Technology levels? By definition, we don't know where the gaps are in our knowledge or what lay the end of roads not taken. Let's throw out a few inventions and see where that gets us: airships, laundry velocipedes, boiling and freezing food to preserve it, disease prevention through titrated exposure, transmission of the magnetic force.

"Happiness" vs "well-being" can be understood as the difference between a positive mental state, and a fulfilment of value. A person can sometimes be made less happy, less positive-emotional, by actions and events that fulfill their values. But values fundamentally come from the person. A person can be wrong about factual questions that determine what actions would fulfill their values. A person can lack insights into what their values are. But another person can never know your values (or the values you "should" have) better than you, without your input. It's possible to tell a person "I am convinced your reasoning about your values is incoherent", but not decide what a coherent version should (only suggest).
There can be a simplified, default model of what most people need, such that, when you have no idea, for some reason, you assume a person's value will be close to it. And you can rely on it if, for example, a person wants something, and 99% of people who wanted it regretted it later, you can tell the person "you will probably regret it, and so shouldn't do that without a lot of caution and further confirmation of the situation". But that is not the same as "99% of people regretted it, so you don't actually want it", let alone "smarter people would not want it, therefore you don't actually want it" (unless it's literally a smarter version who, for example, somehow came from the future. And even then it is sort of debatable).
(All people have many different values at once, and have to make tradeoffs between them. But that is part of the general insight into your own mind required to do anything, and doesn't contradict the larger point of people determining their values.)

Lirakoz tries to reiterate this given the opportunity, it's not clear if the disagreement is fundamental or simply results from translation difficulties (which, again, is not surprising, despite how good Lirakoz is at learning new languages).

One of the aides speaks up. "The Academy has some specialized terminology for those sorts of things." He reaches into his pockets for a book. He tears out some of the middle pages and puts them back in this pocket. "This is one of the... diaries? Mood trackers?" Neither word seems to fit. "...codices published by the Academy. You can write down things about your day and reflect on them on the top two-thirds of the page, and convert some of those thoughts and feelings to a data structure at the bottom third of the page, which can then be anonymously sent in and aggregated by the Academy. They can use it to help you know if you're different in some way from the 99% of the people who regret. No one stops you if they don't think you are actually different, of course. And then your experience can help others facing the decision in the future, whichever way it went for you personally." He offers the book to Lirakoz. Even if neither Lirakoz nor anyone he knows has a personal use for it, it might have some insights into local psychology that no one would think to mention. 

"Yes, that is similar to some exercises on Ranalite. The specific math might be one of interest, most people do not describe their everyday moods with data structures. But I am not a mathematician."

"It's the same here," says the aide, "which why I left the front part that explains how to encode it into the standard data format used for official statistics. I'm sure somebody just records in that format on the first pass, but not anyone I personally know."

"Needs and wants can be quite difficult to disentangle - a lot of things that appear to be wants, especially food preferences but it generalises to various environmental preferences, can actually turn out to significantly affect lifespan, and even more so if you consider healthspan - the amount of time before you require permenant hospice residence.

That being said, a lot of people put wants above needs quite often - like, Adventurers go to dangerous places, endeavour groups take on risks to achieve project outcomes, even families tend to prefer the heightened risks of living in a small unit rather than the reduced physical risk of staying with a larger group and accepting the related constraints.

Less obviously, if a Kastakian doesn't need to do physical labour in their chosen usefulness role we do tend to not exercise enough without considerable peer support, for instance."

Other civilizations having avoided the horrors of slavery and world war is among the best possible news. Ailor would be very happy for the bad things in their past to be extreme outliers for all possible civilizations.

The Representative will also enthusiastically endorse recreational sex. 

If Gremir are interested in experimenting then Ailor still has people from the Reform era we can send over. It's hard to predict what exactly will translate and what will not, but worst case we find out what doesn't work. Once we know a little more we can figure out the optimal end-state and work backwards from there together. Throw us coordinates and a spec sheet and we'll make arrangements for a constitution class airship? 

Ailor's tech level is deliberately hard to glean from the subnet that they shared and the example Blue Book. The subnet has exacting information on anything they have displayed, down to the 13.9 nano meter gate length (helpfully translated units!) on their decks. Information on trains, bicycles, airships, optimized city designs... that in retrospect are easily adapted to a wide range of technology levels and doesn't disclose anything more advanced than their decks. 

There are clues that Ailor is a lot more advanced than what they're showing. The metals that they use are titanium alloys very close to some theoretical optima. Their local base units are all Plank units. The numbers they give for various scientific and mathematical concepts is exceedingly precise. They can provide digits of Pi as fast as the (admittedly quite slow) network can handle. They have nearly Plank accurate measurements of the Ways which, if you assume the time stamps are corrected for quantum effects implies some level of predictive power on the opening of the Ways... and that the Ways are still opening not merely unmapped. Ultimately doing some of the things they're doing in metal and natural materials is obviously a choice- as is the Representative wearing diamonds on the soles of her shoes.