09-28-2020, 04:42 PM | #21 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: Justifying bioroids
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Bioroids are easy to justify if there is some sharp limit on digital AI (if you want something smarter than an ant, you need a biobrain, which might as well be in a shell that can survive on its own...). Or if nobody invented computers at all. Just because they are ubiquitous in futures imagined since the 1950s doesn't means they are inevitable components of a future tech path - they came enough out of left field nobody really predicted them (at least as anything different than "brains") even though we with the benefit of hindsight can see the precursors lying around well before that. For all we know it's perfectly possible most civilizations never invent them. Maybe everyone discovers some precursor to bioroids we haven't invented yet ourselves early in their industrial period which so outclasses those early precursors even they never appear. Mechanical brains? Ridiculous! Surely everybody has done the high school experiment where you reproduce Dr. Frankenstein famous reanimation of racoon corpses with a slice of human brain language center, that provided the first "thinking" engines and proto-robots...
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09-28-2020, 04:55 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Jun 2013
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Re: Justifying bioroids
For bioroids to be feasible on a large scale, you basically need some jobs that aren’t appropriate for robots (possibly due to AI limitations) but that you have a shortage of willing and capable humans for (or that have been made illegal or similar, with bioroids able to do them thanks to a “not-actually-human” loophole). The bioroids don’t have to be slaves, or even second-class citizens, although having them function as such for the first several years of their lives isn’t unlikely (the indentured servitude suggested earlier), and once freed (or having their citizen status upgraded), many may opt to simply continue doing the same job (probably at a higher wage and/or an “elevated” capacity, such as a supervisor).
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09-28-2020, 05:05 PM | #23 | |||
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Justifying bioroids
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09-28-2020, 05:16 PM | #24 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: Justifying bioroids
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Last edited by David Johnston2; 09-28-2020 at 06:03 PM. |
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09-28-2020, 05:46 PM | #25 |
Join Date: Sep 2014
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Re: Justifying bioroids
Lots of good ideas in this thread. What I’m thinking now is something like this:
Population growth follows the lower predictions as countries transition demographically but climate change follows the worst projections. The global economy of course needs to go on producing the things it always does but there is also a massive need for climate mitigation. Whole cities are being moved inland, ecosystems are being rebuilt using technologies spun off from the new Martian terraforming project. AI is a dead end for insert-reason-here and robotics are valuable tools but often still require teleoperation. There’s enough work to keep everyone employed for centuries, but we don’t have centuries and we don’t have enough people. Whether this is literally true is irrelevant, it’s enough that people feel that way. Bioroids are mass produced by an international project, adapted for the various biomes and trained in the mitigation efforts needed. They aren’t slaves; even from the beginning it’s clear they are people and have rights. But they’re generally seen as the saviors of the planet which makes them proud and they have good-paying steady jobs from “birth,” so for the most part they do what they were built to do. Bioroid jobs are really hard, but if a bioroid sticks with it they can “retire” at 20, with a full pension that is held until they reach some age at which bioroids start being considered elderly. In the meantime they are free to be part of the workforce like any other, and in many fields their adaptations are quite an asset… |
09-28-2020, 10:54 PM | #26 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Justifying bioroids
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In such a situation, for general computing, that messy biological stuff is the only way to go.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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09-28-2020, 10:57 PM | #27 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: Justifying bioroids
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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09-29-2020, 12:30 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: Feb 2016
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Re: Justifying bioroids
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In my own opinion, bioroids would actually potentially less problematic than parahumans because they are not distinct species that can reproduce without technology (or humanity/human upgrades in the case of crossbreeding bioroids). Parahumans represent separate species, with a much further separation than humans and our archaic cousins, that would be potentially cause the biological extinction of standard humanity. They would likely be as much of a threat to the future of standard humanity as AIs, though they would usually be prettier. |
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09-29-2020, 03:21 AM | #29 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Sweden, Stockholm
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Re: Justifying bioroids
On the Wetware vs Hardware question...
A computer processor is just ludicrously good at math compared to a human brain, but that is in large part because brains were not optimized for doing math. If there was significant evolutionary pressure on being able to solve [2491^(7/3) = X] then brains would do it easily. Something that naturally evolved will tend towards something of a "good enough" point, with most pressure being on traits which improve survival and reproduction. A Bioroid can be created with a purpose; just like an Hardware AI; and that means it can be highly optimized for said purpose. If you simplify things the difference between a Sapient Hardware AI and a Sapient Biroid AI largely comes down to what they are built of. Meat or Metal. But heck, if you introduce metal nanomachines which can perform similar to cells - then you've basically removed the difference between them and the only real difference is in the details of how they are made. F.ex. A "biological" ship made up of cells which are functionally nano-machines would for most intents and purposes be superior to your regular Star Trek ship. The cells could grow "skin" no different from regular ship hulls, they could form/build plasma weapons just like those on standard starships. And in addition to that it could heal damage or possibly even create new ships. Of course said "biological" ship would probably be described as a ultra-tech nanomachine-ship, unless it looked "meaty". Point is: From a technological perspective you don't have to justify Bioroids. They can be absolutely anything you want. You could just as well ask yourself: what can an AI do that a Bioroid (or Cyborg) cannot?
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09-29-2020, 03:41 AM | #30 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Justifying bioroids
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Until the advent of effective and readily-available contraceptives and truthful sex education, people on the whole did not very effectually plan their families, and populations generally grew as fast as they could. Explanations of the Demographic Transition in terms of family-size choice are widely repeated, but want for evidence of widespread effectual family planning before contraception was available.
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