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Old 04-14-2012, 06:08 AM   #21
Waldemar Ingdahl
 
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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Originally Posted by antares View Post

I am wondering how realistic the positive scenario that is presented in this rpg really is. I hope I do not repeat a discussion that has been conducted over and over again. I am really curious about your thoughts.

Final question: How would you rewrite the THS timeline ten years after you initially designed the RPG?
Great discussion. Let me share some of the experiences me and Anders had when writing Cities on the Edge. First of all we encountered a difficult issue. Might sound banal, but ninty years is a very long stretch of time! Especially when you look at science, culture and society more in depth you start to notice the massive changes. For instance, just take a look on the developments of biotechnology just the last 40 years; from the high expectations of the early 70's, to the terrified exaggerations of the early 80's, over the blasé ”won't amout to much” in the middle of the 90's shook up by Dolly the sheep to the frantic years near the millenium to today's return to ”won't amount to much”.

Straight lines are often assumed in the development of the future, with planning built on examining just one factor (”what if we could clone people?”, for instance). Cities have seldom been built for the people who would ultimately live there, but for the people the developers wished would live there. The actual result is given by that dynamic. When we were writing Cities on the Edge, we assumed that there is no straight line to the future. Attentive readers will notice our descriptions and hints at developments, ideas and technologies that fell out of the way during the setting's development. A historian looking backwards from the year 2100 would probably point out other decades than the 2010's as more instrumental to forming the present.

Are we realistic about urban life in the year 2100? Is our description of it probable? Perhaps some elements will be familiar. Anders has written about some of his thoughts on how he would approach writing Cities on the Edge today. More important is, as some comments in the thread have noted, if we are giving some realistic and probable comments about the present's preoccuptions and hopes for urban life. Even more important if those comments provide the material for exciting and interesting RPG adventures.
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Old 04-15-2012, 09:45 PM   #22
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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Originally Posted by antares View Post
Hi guys,
recently I got to know THS and I am really fascinated. Looks like all transhumanists have been working together in order to develop a realistic depiction of the future.

I am wondering how realistic the positive scenario that is presented in this rpg really is. I hope I do not repeat a discussion that has been conducted over and over again. I am really curious about your thoughts.
It's very unrealistic, on multiple levels.

That's not a slam against it, all SFnal projections into the future over a period of a century or so are going to be unrealistic. SF is not about the future, it's about the present, and almost invariably reflects the debates and concerns of the present. You can actually learn something about the past by taking a look at their ideas, both speculative and fictiional, about the future.

As the saying goes, "Nothing ages faster than yesterday's tomorrow."

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In principle I regard most assumptions of THS as being rather realistic. However I have the following concerns that I do not see covered in the books. Most concerns touch on economic/financial issues.

- Europe is being shown as a very well-off power bloc. However THS also acknowledges the fact that Europe was and is rather conservative on emerging technologies (think about GMOs). So is the assumption of a strong Europe really realistic?
In principle, it could be. Remember, this is supposed to be 90-100 years in the future. For comparison, project backwards 100 years, to 1912. Britain was still master of the seas, France, Denmark, Germany, etc were global world powers, America was a rising major power but still militarily fairly minor, Japan had just dealt a major defeat to Tsarist Russia and was a rising naval power, the world was more 'internationalized' than it would be again for half a century or more, the Ottoman Empire, though dying of old age, was still in existence and ruled, at least in theory, a substantial area of the Old World.

The EU of THS, as presented, is of course radically improbable. It's too much like an idealized version of today's EU. But that's true of all the politics of THS, for that matter. The major powers of THS Earth are the USA, China, and the EU, with outfits like the Caliphate and the nanosocialists as second-tier powers.

Within the USA, for ex, the Democrats are 'green' and the GOP is technocratic, the cultural debate is between 'greens' and industrialists and geoengineers (i.e. terraforming), it looks a lot like today's politics, actually.

In short, the Earth of THS it looks a lot like the present, politically. Too much so to be fully credible, in fact. Again, contrast 2012 to 1922, to get an idea of how much can change.

If THS had been written in 1980, the USSR would have been one of those major powers in 2100, too.

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- Somewhere I read that big corporations still hire a lot of "cheap" labor from developing countries. Something that is has also been driving globalization over the last years. Again, is it realistic that high-cost countries fare so well?
Depends on the politics. The global economy was in some ways more integrated and capital could flow more freely in 1912 than iwas the case in, for ex, 1942. Globalization is inevitable only on the longest time scales, it can be stalled, slowed, or put into reverse by political and social changes, and such things can go on for decades.

One of the myths of our own age is that economics can (not should, just that it ever can) operate independently of social constraints and conditions. This is nonsense, as even a cursory examination of history will show. What social, religious, and political changes will reshape the economy over the next 90 years? Nobody can say, but we can bet that some will.

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- Public debt and the non-sustainability of the warfare state (US) and the welfare-state (EU) - i.e. the current problems are not treated. Of course I can see that in the long run nanoprocessing will enable a generous welfare state. Still, there is still global competition on taxes.
The underlying issue here is not economic, that's the symptom. The underlying issue is demographic, and it will have impacts on all sorts of things as well as the pension systems and welfare states. But demograpics in turn change change and do change over time. Darwinian evolution, if nothing else, means that the demographics of population decline will reverse at some point.

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- With respect to technology. How does space travel work? I do not see an economical way to get into orbit. How has this problem been solved?
The space settings of THS are totally unrealistic, precisely because they assume too conventional a tech base for access and too much developmnent built on that assumed base.

We might possibly be all over the Solar System in 2100...but not based on the rocketry and techniques extrapolated from where we are now. OTOH, odds are the irrational aversion to nuclear propulsion systems will be all but forgotten by then, too.
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Old 04-15-2012, 10:03 PM   #23
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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The underlying issue here is not economic, that's the symptom. The underlying issue is demographic, and it will have impacts on all sorts of things as well as the pension systems and welfare states. But demograpics in turn change change and do change over time. Darwinian evolution, if nothing else, means that the demographics of population decline will reverse at some point.
But not necessarily by Europeans breeding more. Europeans could become extinct, or a remnant population, with a more reproductively successful ethnic group moving into Europe.

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Old 04-16-2012, 01:22 AM   #24
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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I forget, do cyborgs feature much in THS? One way of getting human brains into space if via full-body cyborgs. Which themselves might come about as a treatment for old age. I've toyed with the idea of space being full of geriatric cyborgs...
if you mean cyberdolls with the uploaded personas of the rich/ specialist volunteers/ executed (and edited) criminals. Becoming a cyborg* will fix the body problems but the brain will still fail.
*I love the full body replacements in Cyberpunk (not so much Robocop)
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Old 04-16-2012, 01:27 AM   #25
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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if you mean cyberdolls with the uploaded personas of the rich/ specialist volunteers/ executed (and edited) criminals. Becoming a cyborg* will fix the body problems but the brain will still fail.
*I love the full body replacements in Cyberpunk (not so much Robocop)
Since the only other option would be death and leaving a digital copy, I think brain in a box sounds at least marginally better.
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Old 04-16-2012, 11:04 AM   #26
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

I don't have quite so rosy an outlook on people downloading their consciousness into a machine. It's because I don't know anyone who has had a computer that lasted more than ten years of use. Either they got rid of it because it became terribly obsolete, or its circuits just stopped working.

So if you became a living machine you would be constantly replacing yourself so as not to break one become part of an "obsolete" lower class.
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Old 04-16-2012, 11:39 AM   #27
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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I don't have quite so rosy an outlook on people downloading their consciousness into a machine. It's because I don't know anyone who has had a computer that lasted more than ten years of use. Either they got rid of it because it became terribly obsolete, or its circuits just stopped working.

So if you became a living machine you would be constantly replacing yourself so as not to break one become part of an "obsolete" lower class.
If THS computers are improving that fast, it's still better than staying a biosophonts. Biosophonts just can't upgrade their processing power at that rate.

Also, backups are cheap.
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Old 04-16-2012, 04:35 PM   #28
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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If THS computers are improving that fast, it's still better than staying a biosophonts. Biosophonts just can't upgrade their processing power at that rate.

Also, backups are cheap.
Processing power doesn't mean much if the program remains the same.
As to back ups that brings up the controversial topic of identity from another thread.
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Old 04-16-2012, 06:27 PM   #29
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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Processing power doesn't mean much if the program remains the same.
As to back ups that brings up the controversial topic of identity from another thread.
Which would probably be a good place to return it to.

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Old 04-17-2012, 01:00 AM   #30
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Default Re: Probability of THS scenario - in light of the last 10 years

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Processing power doesn't mean much if the program remains the same.
However, ghost software doesn't "remain the same". It can learn. Learning means change.

Whether the model can eliminate all possibilities for decline while preserving the capacity to learn may be an interesting technical point, but it's surely not inconceivable. Changes beyond the scope of normal human brain plasticity are another subject again, but anything that's possible with a real brain and a brainbug should be entirely feasible.
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