Catalog of the Weird Parallels

[Ottriman]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Jinn-6

Every human being is granted a modified version of psychometry. Consuming a product brings with it the accumulated suffering involved in its production. Factory farmed meat brings claustrophobic panic, while a sweatshop t-shirt aches with desperation and degradation.

Right, that place would probably be awful to live in.

I imagine there would be very strong anti animal and worker abuse laws in this timeline becasue everyone else would literally feel the abuse. But even still some abuses would no doubt happen and the be spread all over by products.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Ottriman

Right, that place would probably be awful to live in.

I imagine there would be very strong anti animal and worker abuse laws in this timeline becasue everyone else would literally feel the abuse. But even still some abuses would no doubt happen and the be spread all over by products.

Actually I don't believe this place would have a sophisticated enough economy to support governments that could have such laws. The accumulated suffering of everyone involved in production of chain of anything complex - even when none of them are suffering anything more than the normal day to day issues everybody had whether they are producing anything or not - would make it next to impossible to use anything complex enough more than one or two people were involved in making it. The division of labor necessary for industrialization, or even much in the way of trade, would be impossible. And given that you feel the full accumulation, anything that takes longer to make than it does to use - which is basically everything - has the same problem, it *concentrates* the daily suffering of the workers.

Incidentally if you do have a society sophisticated enough to have laws, anybody sick or injured or depressed is effectively uselessly unemployable. That's not going to do nice things to long term or mental health care.

[Ottriman]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Actually I don't believe this place would have a sophisticated enough economy to support governments that could have such laws. The accumulated suffering of everyone involved in production of chain of anything complex - even when none of them are suffering anything more than the normal day to day issues everybody had whether they are producing anything or not - would make it next to impossible to use anything complex enough more than one or two people were involved in making it. The division of labor necessary for industrialization, or even much in the way of trade, would be impossible. And given that you feel the full accumulation, anything that takes longer to make than it does to use - which is basically everything - has the same problem, it *concentrates* the daily suffering of the workers.

Incidentally if you do have a society sophisticated enough to have laws, anybody sick or injured or depressed is effectively uselessly unemployable. That's not going to do nice things to long term or mental health care.

In that case this just becomes even worse, yikes!

0/10 would not wanna visit or live there.

[PTTG]

Good point. I re-wrote that a couple of times to focus on the essentials. I think the concept can be "tuned" so that it's more a matter of the accumulative deviation from the norm, or what the wisher considered acceptable, that consumers feel.

[Flyndaran]

That would still drastically change the western world where most people don't consciously acknowledge the necessary suffering that goes into industrial scale farms.

[maximara]

Delos-1

Named after the fictional park this reality is a puzzle for Infinity.

At first glance the world looked like it had suffered one of the worse reality quakes ever as it appeared that there was a wild mixture of time frames.

For example a good hunk of Europe has medieval knights who live in TL7 cities and board TL6 trains for the latest Crusade while in the American West cowboys of the 19th century live and work in the remnants of TL7 cities.

Eventually Infinity figured out the truth. Mankind had accidentally wiped itself out with a disease decades and the androids of a adult Delos-like Disneyland expended outside their park and set up turning huge hunks of the planet into quasi-copies of their "worlds" to fulfill their directives.

==The directives==
1. Within reason a robot must not harm a human being
2. A robot must remain in character unless it violates rule #1
3. A robot must make sure a human has an enjoyable experience unless it violates rules 1 or 2

==The "Worlds"==
While the regions have no formal names some wit in Infinity thought to go whole hog and his names have stuck.

Futureworld - the most advanced of the "worlds" (TL8) this is mainly notable for its regular trip to the actual planet Mars. Covers everything East of the Appalachians

Medieval world - currently a weird mixture of TL4 and deteriorating TL6-7 that covers Europe until you get to Germany.

Reichworld - of course somebody wanted to fight Navis and guess where they went? They control Europe up to the board of Russia.

Czarworld - an idealized version of Peter the Great's Russia.

1001world - a localized version of Burton.

Victorianworld - England and a sizeable part of Africa in an idealized Victorian era.

Lost world - Dinosaurs, South America

[Flyndaran]

If they look human, then how can the robots identify humans? If it's due to some local aspect of humanity that cross timers lack, then things could get dicey.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

If they look human, then how can the robots identify humans? If it's due to some local aspect of humanity that cross timers lack, then things could get dicey.

Humans don't (usually) have the little radio transmitter that lets robots do a great many things, such as personality backups, communicating with the gamemaster mainframes, idle chitchat with other robots while they perform, and so on.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

If they look human, then how can the robots identify humans? If it's due to some local aspect of humanity that cross timers lack, then things could get dicey.

If they were amusement-park robots, I would imagine that they have wifi links to their private intranet. They find a person not giving off a signal, they must be human. Other possibilities include magnetic resonance, infrared, and chemical sensors.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

Humans don't (usually) have the little radio transmitter that lets robots do a great many things, such as personality backups, communicating with the gamemaster mainframes, idle chitchat with other robots while they perform, and so on.

IFF signals would be necessary so they'd be able to identify patrons and human stuff and refrain from doing them the violence that just entertaining when it's robot-on-robot.