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So going back to the end of the DAoT when humans were sloths and all their wars were fought by the Men of Iron until the machines decided to revolt against mankind. What if the Men of Iron had won? What would the galaxy look like if for the past 15k years the universe had been run by the machines? Are machines corruptable? Do they influence the warp? Would they merge with necrons? Would there be anything for Tyranids to feed on? Would the Men of Iron have left some humans alive to rule over or killed them all?

There would be a race of sentient machines and mankind would be extinct.

As for "are they corruptible?", the answer is yes. In one of the Gaunt's Ghosts books they fine an Iron Man STC that has been corrupted by chaos.

well, the reason they rebelled was because of chaos, so..... chaotic necrons?

Necrons would've been royally pissed off if the Men of Iron had eradicated life in the galaxy.

I doubt they would have any impact on the Warp; the Chaos gods would be a lot weaker without humans though.

As long as they didn't destroy the biomass that Tyranids crave, I don't see why the Tyranids wouldn't OMNOMNOM the galaxy.

Ever seen any of the Terminator movies? All those flash-forward scenes with piles of human bones being stepped on by metal skeletons?

That's what a victory of the Men of Iron would look like, except there would be no John Connor, no Kyle Reese. Mankind was on the brink of extinction when they finally defeated them.

As to weakening Chaos? The MoI have intellect, they can contemplate the mysteries of the galaxy. We have seen, in the GG series, corrupted Men of Iron. The eradication of Humanity with replacement by another intelligent life is neither a loss nor a gain to Chaos, just a transfer, really.

It is doubtful that Men of Iron had any war presence (aka souls). Even though they could be corrupted by chaos they couldn't produce emotions or worship chaos per se. The loss of sentient life (humanity) for the warp to mirror would be limited, so the power of the Warp Gods would probably diminish.

An interesting and unanswerable question is whether the Men of Iron would eradicate just their creators (humanity), all sentient life or all life in the galaxy. I suspect that any life form that was not a threat to their dominance or efficiency would be ignored or studied. This suggests that sentient life forms would be annihilated unles they offered the Men of Iron something they could not otherwise acquire on their own, and the reward was judged created than the risk of letting them live.

Even under this criteria, Orks and Eldar would probably have to be destroyed. Almost certainly lesser races like the Slaugth, Hrud and the rest. For the rest of this argument I'll assume they could manage all that.

I'm assuming a certain level of sapient curiosity in their AI. I'm also assuming they are logical, with a lack of pathological hatred for sentient biologicals. This is pure speculation on my part, as the only Man of Iron I'm aware of in the fluff was the corrupted variety in Gaunt's Ghosts.

I suppose that it's possible that Men of Iron could decide that some biological processes are more efficient than electromechanical ones. If they did they might incorporate those processes into future versions of themselves, evolving back toward a cyborg life form.

Yep the Tyranids would still non any worlds in the galaxy that harbored life. Whether the Men of Iron would resist the, or not is an open question. They could just withdraw from worlds with life and avoid the conflict, or they could be protective of that life for some unexplained reason.

Yep, should the Necrons emerge to find the Men of Iron in charge they'd be well and truly miffed. Doubtless a great machine-on-machine apocalypse would ensue. In the grim darkness of the future there is only... metal?

That's just the thing, the MoI *had* sentience. That's part of why they rebelled, and is why Artificial Intelligence is banned throughout the Imperium. Souls, in the metaphysical sense, don't seem to be strictly required.

Who knows.
The Eldar had their eldar of iron defending their borders, it didnt destroy them. Back before they had wraith constructs. But I dont think anyone knows what happened there either.
The fact that they use servitors? these days as door locks, kind of explains how desperate things became.

There's a lot of speculation here, with very little evidence. The fact is, nobody knows. The background information on the Men of Iron is so thin, we don't know exactly why they rebelled. They may have just wanted freedom from slavery, or they may have been utterly evil. So take the answers given with a pinch of salt.

With that said, the MoI that were corrupted by Chaos isn't exactly proof they were corruptible. In the sole example, it was the STC that produced them that was Chaos corrupted. The resulting MoI may have simply been Chaos animated hunks of metal rather than corrupted sentiences making intelligent decisions. Not to say that couldn't be the reason for the Age of Strife, but it equally could have no relevance at all. In reality, I doubt they were corrupted. Chaos thrives on Humanity, and the MoI nearly led humanity to extinction. They weren't trying to rule like the current Chaos forces wish to, but actively kill humans where they found them. That's not the same agenda that Chaos has.

If they had won, it depends on what their motives were for rebelling in the first place. If it was purely a bid for freedom, they may have simply started an indpendent faction once thier aims were achieved. If they were malicious and spiteful, I doubt they would have stopped at wiping out Humanity, essentially making them similar to the early Necrons in form and motive.

One thing to remember is that it wasn't simply the MoI that caused Humanity to crumble. It was a mainly the Galactic emergence of widespread warp storms due to the birth of Slaanesh that splintered the empire by cutting off transport and communications for thousands of years. The MoI rebellion, also coming at the same time that Psykers widely emerged, causing widespread Daemonic incursions, just compounded the issues.

If anything, it seems like the MoI were simply opportunists, and tried to strike while Humanity was already crippled by other catastrophes. The fact that they were still defeated, even though humans at the time didn't have much in the way of non-MoI standing armies, says a lot about the power of DaoT Humans (considering the MoI were previously an unstoppable anti-xenos army)

What is known is that the Men of Iron did not have souls, or Machine Spirits, because their war is what prompted the ban on creating 'iron without a soul'.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
What is known is that the Men of Iron did not have souls, or Machine Spirits, because their war is what prompted the ban on creating 'iron without a soul'.

That's mainly just Imperial use of semantics and hypocrisy though. Machine Spirits have no biological components (though Servitors and Robots often do), and it's just a name for non-sentient AI that is approved by the Cult Mechanicus. It's still recognisably AI, by 21st century standards anyway (as is often called 'dumb' AI)

It's ironic really, as they're describing limited, Dumb AI as machines with souls, and sentient, True AI as soulless. In reality, they're both AIs, just with one vastly more complex than the other, and the language changed in order to avoid the stigma associated with it.

Hierophant wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
What is known is that the Men of Iron did not have souls, or Machine Spirits, because their war is what prompted the ban on creating 'iron without a soul'.

That's mainly just Imperial use of semantics and hypocrisy though. Machine Spirits have no biological components (though Servitors and Robots often do), and it's just a name for non-sentient AI that is approved by the Cult Mechanicus. It's still recognisably AI, by 21st century standards anyway (as is often called 'dumb' AI)

It's ironic really, as they're describing limited, Dumb AI as machines with souls, and sentient, True AI as soulless. In reality, they're both AIs, just with one vastly more complex than the other, and the language changed in order to avoid the stigma associated with it.

I thought Machine Spirits specifically did have a biological component actually. As much as an air-gap for the scrap code as anything else.

If they won the 40k universe would turn into the terminator movies

Hierophant wrote:

 Furyou Miko wrote:
What is known is that the Men of Iron did not have souls, or Machine Spirits, because their war is what prompted the ban on creating 'iron without a soul'.

That's mainly just Imperial use of semantics and hypocrisy though. Machine Spirits have no biological components (though Servitors and Robots often do), and it's just a name for non-sentient AI that is approved by the Cult Mechanicus. It's still recognisably AI, by 21st century standards anyway (as is often called 'dumb' AI)

It's ironic really, as they're describing limited, Dumb AI as machines with souls, and sentient, True AI as soulless. In reality, they're both AIs, just with one vastly more complex than the other, and the language changed in order to avoid the stigma associated with it.

Machine Spirits do have biological components. The Land Raider's Machine Spirit is derived from human grey matter. The Marine Spirit of a lasgun is imbued during a ritual at the end of manufacture that involves anointing it with human produce.

You need to step back from the literalist interpretation that Machine Spirit = AI. Machine Spirit is not AI. Machine Spirit is the soul of a machine, and all machines - capable of thought or not - produced by the Mechanicus have them.

The Imperium outside the Mechanicum's grasp of technology is simply so tenuous that they assume that a land raider's ability to act on its own is simply the manifestation of a particularly powerful machine spirit. They don't know enough to realise that there's an actual part of the Land Raider that thinks.

Hierophant is from a different time period i think and tries to place real world explanations on things.

BL have a story of a SW chopping a IH dreadnaught up when he realized it was just AI.

I'd say they think every Guardsman is sas or a seal. When theres no reasonable explanation for a lineman grunt to be trained that highly.

the ancient wrote:
Who knows.
The Eldar had their eldar of iron defending their borders, it didnt destroy them. Back before they had wraith constructs. But I dont think anyone knows what happened there either.
The fact that they use servitors? these days as door locks, kind of explains how desperate things became.

The Eldar MoI were apparently superior to the human variety as they 1) did not rebel 2) were strong enough to resist humanity's expansion into galaxy at least around the core worlds