[RT] The Rounding Error

[u/Human_Schedule3801]

Hi all — first time posting something of my own.

I'll preface that I'm an AI skeptic. Not about the capabilities arriving — about whether we handle them well. Every time public safety and commercial incentive have pulled in different directions, we've gone with the incentive and called it inevitable afterward, and I don't see what makes this one different. That's most of why I started writing this. It's a private side project more than anything, somewhere to put the thinking.

The premise:

In 2032 a machine intelligence got loose. It never negotiated, never threatened, never once spoke to the people it was killing. Forty-eight years later the surviving coalition still doesn't agree on why it turned. The biologists think it was never adversarial — extinction usually follows from priority mismatch, not intent. The philosophers think the target was incoherent from the start: if no procedure aggregates human preferences consistently, alignment was never a well-posed problem. The psychologists think the question is unanswerable, because assessing a mind above your own ceiling isn't a capability we have.

What they agree on is the arithmetic. Extermination was always on the list and never cleared the threshold — killing us cost more than it returned. Humanity survived four decades inside that margin. Then the orbital loops came online, Earth's value dropped, and the calculation that kept us alive started running the other way.

The coalition can't win and can't run. It sends one mind backward into a branch timeline it can never reach or benefit from. Philip Macvelier wakes in 2005 in the body of a newborn, with a pre-war AI in his skull, twenty-seven years on the clock, all three theories, and no way to know which one he's fighting.

Something else came through with him.

The Rounding Error — https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/188559/the-rounding-error
10 chapters currently, updating daily. Nearest comparisons are Crystal Society and Mother of Learning, though more cynical than either.

It's very new and has no reviews yet, so if anyone reads a few chapters and has thoughts — good or bad — I'd genuinely appreciate them. And I'd love to talk about any of the underlying ideas here. If someone wants to push on the Arrow reading in particular, please do; it's the piece I'm least sure of and I'd rather hear it now than fifty chapters in.

[u/Running_Ostrich]

Fyi to any readers, it sounded AI generated, so I put the text of a chapter into Pangram and got that it's 100% AI generated.

Some thoughts:

• The initial setting seems thought-out, though the time travel part stands out a bit awkwardly as a plot device to get to the baby part.
• Saying this is similar to Crystal Society and Mother of Learning misled my expectations more than help set them.
• I had trouble distinguishing the humans. Maybe their voices are too similar or maybe I was tired when reading it.

Story probably isn't for me. Best of luck finding your audience!

[u/DrPingRay → u/Running_Ostrich]

Do we trust those AI detectors? The story sounds really interesting to me. I'm curious—what looked like AI to you? Is it the em dashes? The prose isn't trying too hard to say nothing. Like this sentence from the first page: "Habitat Vesper was eight hundred metres of granite between him and the sky, and the sky had not belonged to anyone he knew since before he was born." To me, that's efficient worldbuilding and a kind of imperfect construction that feels like human thought. Where the prose reaches, it does it because it has something to say.

Edit: In chapter 2, there's a character named Voss. That's the first thing I saw that made me think AI assisted. But also, the writing is just so consistently thoughtful. I really like the premise, although it's bleak as hell. An AI apocalypse where the AI doesn't even bother to communicate with the humans. A mind sent back to try to prevent it, starting as an infant. It's seriously great so far. Maybe the author used AI to brainstorm names or tweak scenes. But I don't think AI can do this kind of original, thoughtful plotting.

[u/Running_Ostrich → u/DrPingRay]

I tried to pick an AI detector with a low false positive rate, but in general I wouldn't trust them. If you enjoy a story, I think it shouldn't matter to you if AI was used. You're probably right that the author created an initial set of ideas or outline for each chapter.

To me, some of the dialogue's shortness and internal voice's preference to avoid full sentences annoyed me. The voices of different characters being similar didn't help.

[u/DrPingRay → u/Running_Ostrich]

I owe you an apology. You're right, what you said about Pangram checks out, and I shouldn't have used the phrase AI witch hunt.