How Would Ultra-Tech Without Computers Work?

[VonKatzen]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That was essentially Computer Programming without a computer, done very slowly, and with Administration in place of Computer Operation.

That fits the theme of empire fiction very well, with hundreds or thousands of people onboard starships and planets built miles deep with pure city (like Trantor or Coruscant) as this is absolutely necessary to make managing the imperial information and resources possible - essentially, bureaucracy instead of databases. Though oddly enough Asimov's Empire series has plenty of computers (even super-computers), they just don't use them like we would.

[Bengt]

The "current" Imperium in 40k have some (non sentient) robots, but they mainly use people with control implants for typical robot tasks.

A lot of the tech in 40k were developed using computers and AI though, the ban on sentient machines came after the obligatory robot uprising. :)

[warellis]

Originally Posted by Bengt

The "current" Imperium in 40k have some (non sentient) robots, but they mainly use people with control implants for typical robot tasks.

A lot of the tech in 40k were developed using computers and AI though, the ban on sentient machines came after the obligatory robot uprising. :)

Are you talking about servitors? Yeah they generally use a mix of them and cogitators for automation tasks.

[Ashtagon]

Originally Posted by warellis

Are you talking about servitors? Yeah they generally use a mix of them and cogitators for automation tasks.

For GURPS purposes, isn't a WH40K cogitator simply a bio-tech computer? That is, the Imperium's ban on AI is more like a ban on high-Complexity purely-non-biological computers?

[Bengt]

Originally Posted by Ashtagon

For GURPS purposes, isn't a WH40K cogitator simply a bio-tech computer? That is, the Imperium's ban on AI is more like a ban on high-Complexity purely-non-biological computers?

It's a regular computer, it's just sentient AI that is forbidden. They think it's run by a spirit though, because 40k.

[gruundehn]

I doubt that, without computers, much advancement in science or technology will get done and any that does get done will be done slowly or by accident.

Computers process a lot of data and do it very quickly and without duplication. Humans will do in an hour what a computer, probably, would do in a year or more. And if you have a lot of humans working on a problem, a lot of effort gets wasted because of duplication, that is people working on the same aspect of the problem without realizing it. This duplication may lead to faster work as someone will be working on a detail that half a dozen others are working on, and go off on a tangent that solves the problem. The others just waste their effort by repeating the work of the first person, detail by detail.

So, you have a thousand people working to solve the problem of "Does it help if the temperature of the refining process is increased by five degrees Centigrade?" Two years later, you have an answer and then spend another two years making sure that the answer is correct. This is a lot of time and resources spent on a specific problem. I think that the problems and research tackled would be those most easily solved by masses of humans working on the issue. Thus, a lot of research would be ignored unless someone is willing to spend the millions to research something.

Also, the people have to come from somewhere. Until technology changed the equation, 90%+ of the population lived on subsistence farms. There was no free labor pool to use for a lot of human-powered research.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by gruundehn

Also, the people have to come from somewhere. Until technology changed the equation, 90%+ of the population lived on subsistence farms. There was no free labor pool to use for a lot of human-powered research.

I think that the technology that changed that particular equation mostly developed before there were computers. The British Isles were up to 50% non-farmers by the middle of the nineteenth century, and the United States and other countries got there not many decades later. We've only had generally available computers (as opposed to industrial scale computers) for a bit over a generation, and the Internet for a decade or so less.

[tanksoldier]

Though oddly enough Asimov's Empire series has plenty of computers (even super-computers), they just don't use them like we would.

It also depends on what you mean by “computer”.

An abacus is a computer. Giant electro- mechanical mainframes fed by punch cards are also computers.

A servitor skull could be a computer.

[David Johnston2]

The default definition of "computer" is a reprogrammable device for storing and processing information in binary form. So for example if you remove organic brains and put them in charge of the functioning of your facilities you have avoided using a computer. You also have avoided using a computer if you have to physically reconfigure your device somehow to alter its output if only by flipping switches and turning dials. If you don't have computers then what you have instead are advanced devices where everything is hardwired and inflexible. Or...life forms. See Biotech.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

The default definition of "computer" is a reprogrammable device for storing and processing information in binary form. So for example if you remove organic brains and put them in charge of the functioning of your facilities you have avoided using a computer. You also have avoided using a computer if you have to physically reconfigure your device somehow to alter its output if only by flipping switches and turning dials. If you don't have computers then what you have instead are advanced devices where everything is hardwired and inflexible. Or...life forms. See Biotech.

I think that's too narrow a definition. The first generation of digital computers included some that were reprogrammed by flipping switches or even plugging in cables; but they were actually designed to work that way, and you didn't have to go in with a soldering iron and rewire them. And saying that you are "physically reconfiguring" the computer by flipping switches isn't distinctive; after all, when I load a program into my desktop from its hard drive, I'm changing the settings of switches inside it too—just not by laying hands on it. It isn't as if a computer could store a program in a nonphysical medium.