ME READING WARHAMMER 40K BOOKS IN 2018: this setting is so fucking dumb. No way a society would let their entire technological infrastructure be controlled by a handful of fanatics that have convinced themselves that computer code is literally God
In the case of W40K said civilization has long since decayed from their technological peak, however. Imagine a caveman finding a modern fully automated city - they’d likely think that is some kind of divine realm.
A while ago I read a book where a town got nuked. Only it was just a rumor spread on Facebook. Town is fine. But tons of people believed it. Set up road blocks and stuff. For years.
edit: I thought, “there is no way people would do that.” Oh well.
Except they don’t use AI in WH40K. They use cloned human brains for anything that can’t be achieved with basic electronics. I’m pretty sure the AdMech actually consider AI a form of heresy against the Machine God and the Omnissiah.
They do bionically enhance the human brain with Neuralink-style interfaces, and even go as far as entombing a person in a pod of brain fluid to augment their interface to one specific machine. But full on AI is not kosher AFAIK
Plenty of machines have AIs that are either hiding, hibernating, or degraded. There are also plenty of VI programs that are just very complex and sometimes will function in ways their users don’t understand.
The rest… Well, belief matters when your species is made up of latent psychics. The best way to get a helpful machine spirit is to treat it with respect, so a decent number of machines that had VIs become something more with time. Not only will it empower the spirit, it will prevent it from falling to Chaos…
The Machine Spirit is (mostly) an abstraction. The AdMech as a whole is a collection of tech support geeks whose documentation and manfiles were converted to hymns 10,000 years ago. Very few members actually have any significant understanding of what they’re doing anymore. They just know that if they speak the Holy Words of System Reset and then poke the button with a circle on it, the machine spirit dies and resurrects anew.
So, mostly, no, AI has been well and truly eradicated in 40k and most of what is referred to as “Machine Spirit” is just semi-basic technology being crabby like it already does in the modern day. When a modern programmer says his system is “thinking” or is “upset” he doesn’t mean it literally - AdMech just forgot that language wasn’t literal.
That said, there are a few suspiciously intelligent and well-informed Machine Spirits in a few places. A couple of them can outright hold a conversation.
Well, no. The Imperium places the Emperor above all else. The Adeptus Mechanicus is the only part that idolizes machines. The rest idolizes a corpse on a toilet.
I don’t know if they actually clone brains to use, but I certainly know that most transgressions in the imperium are punished by getting turned into a servitor, essentially a lobotomized cyborg usually only fit for specific tasks. Then there are also servo skulls, basically a small drone assistant, except its a human skull with augmentations. That being said I am at best a novice in the lore so this might not be entirely accurate
I know Cherubim and some Skitarii are cloned. But yeah they do also use a lot of brains from regular AdMech people for servo skulls, and use criminals’ brains for servitors. My understanding is it’s an honour to be turned into a servo skull, a bit like getting entombed in a dreadnought.
In general though they tend to use electromechanical solutions first. They only use cybernetics for more complex use-cases. Or for things that require complex sensor input. I’ve heard it joked before that the sort of automatic sliding door you see at the front of a modern supermarket would be a servitor in 40k, but I don’t think that’s accurate. They have access to laser rangefinders and simple electronics.
And they do have simple “computers” called cogitators, but these are electromechanical computers like those of the 1960s. They don’t use integrated circuits or the like.
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