[nobodyandproud]

I'm going to disagree here, slightly. If anything I think Manna is something closer to AGI; and its capabilities certainly imply that it's Turing Complete.

Which means the owners will constantly be playing whack-a-mole with edge cases and emergent properties that they couldn't anticipate from a prior fix.

This is what would destabilize the dystopia; though that doesn't imply more freedom. It could just mean replacing one set of oligarchs with another; skynet; or just anarchy if Manna started becoming very buggy.

On the otherhand, I don't think Vertebrane is Turing complete though I haven't given this a deep amount of thought; though I can't see how a bad actor couldn't coopt Vertebrane into a Manna.

[ben_w]

Almost everything* is accidentally Turing complete — I know the guy who proved that Magic the Gathering is Turing complete, even helped play-test and then bought a copy of his board game.

So yes, the fictional AI in that story would, in reality, have all kinds of edge cases and emergent properties.

But Vertebrane would also have to be Turing complete, just to be able to function.

* I jest, but not by much

[nobodyandproud]

I don’t mean the AI. I mean a Manna-driven society is itself turing complete.

I’m struggling to see it with Vertebrane.

[ben_w]

How can a society ever not be Turing complete when even an isolated human already is?

[nobodyandproud]

It’s a matter of what emerges.

I can network multiple general purpose computers together to build a finite state machine/regex engine.

The rules of this “society” and its defined interactions aren’t Turing complete (it’s a FSM), even if the general purpose constituents are.