harel55

The idea of Autonomy being a collective, or of Bavadin splintering their mind like Shallan, has always rubbed me the wrong way. I feel like we're still a long way from understanding Autonomy's intent (and how it's able to reconcile it with violating the autonomy of other shards by meddling with their worlds), but this still struck me as unfitting. This theory interests me quite a bit, because now that I think of it, there's no reason Ambition (or at least splinters thereof) shouldn't have gained sentience by now. The only reason the Dor hasn't is because it's trapped in the pressure cooker known as the Cognitive Realm, keeping it as what Sanderson describes as a "hot plasma", which doesn't sound conducive to forming consciousness. Ambition, however, was left alone after it's vessel was killed, so far as we know. It totally should be developing consciousness, like Sanderson has told us uncontrolled Investiture does. As for why it would form a collective, rather than separate consciousnesses like the spren of Honor or the seons of Devotion, perhaps it's because being in the depths of space meant there was no human thought giving them shape in the way that the Rosharans shaped the spren. Instead, the bits of Ambition each formed a consciousness, but still considered themselves to be Ambition, instead of embodying some concept. Thus, we would end up with multiple minds who all consider themselves to be extensions of the same entity. I'm still not sure exactly how I feel about this theory, but I'm intrigued.

There's already no Doppler shift on the photon level (confirmed in world and by Sanderson, who won't say why). I don't see why there would be any Doppler shift on signals based on light. I could see the scattering at the borders of a time bubble resulting in some noise or distortion of signals (similar to the faint rippling seen by characters in time bubbles), but you have to realize that any effects that would screw with computers (beyond the fact that the apparent processing speed of neighboring machines has drastically changed) would also be noticable by humans looking out of the bubble, which are known not to be present.

This fails to account for the fact that time bubbles affect whole objects (as determined by their cognitive/spiritual aspect). You could screw up the timing between two separate computers, but a single computer would either be entirely sped up or slowed down. As for data transfer between computers, my knowledge on data transfer protocol is shaky, but I don't think there would be any effect since time bubbles don't change the spacing between voltage pulses/photons. A carefully placed bubble might be able to add a phase shift to two signals that need to be synced (by effectively reducing the path length for one of them), but again aluminum shielding would hopefully become cheap and common by the time that computers become widespread.