Masked Virituals

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I've always thought that VR was a great tech for slavers.

This less of a thing in THS because it's really cheap to make things that do what a person would and affordable to make thinks that *MAKE* the person do what you want if you have them captive. VR/slink is a better fit for lawful restraint, and in fact you can have the prisoners agree to do intellectual labor, participate in training and education, etc in return for certain slink amenities.

This maintains the moral hazard of for-profit prisons but it largely eliminates the inhumane conditions and removes justification for the restricted access necessary to conceal the really bad corruption.

[Flyndaran]

This could almost work as a prequel to The Matrix. It could cover the first ones to ditch the false reality to awaken in the real world.
With some major liberties taken to keep the party together and in a new setting that wouldn't just involve them dying in pods.

For cryogenically "uploaded" brains, perhaps someone decided that they needed to be carefully brought up to speed with a VR that changes rapidly but not instantly to the present.
Personally, I think that quite a few normal people would suffer severe trauma by "suddenly" moving decades or a century into the future.
The twist being that it really all was for their own good.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'm thinking about WHY someone would run a bunch of ghosts/AI in a virtual reality without telling them about the outside world.



There are some weird political, religious, and cultural experiments they could be running. They're really breaking the law by doing this, and its very expensive, but science!


The could be trying to incubate a commune for ideological purposes. Perhaps the makers of the VR think that a certain environment is optimal for happiness, or that it just makes people suited for certain types of work, and they'll eventually pull the subjects out of it.



I've always thought that VR was a great tech for slavers. You have complete power over your subjects. Their bodies are either virtual and can't leave, or they're all wired up and you control their senses, so they can't move outside of your little world. You've still got to provide them with motivation to work and keep the hardware running, but those are surmountable problems.


Of course, you have to make them do work that doesn't require physical movement, and that will usually mean knowing quite a bit about the outside world, because you're doing engineering, services, and/or art (such as the drudgery of 3d-animation).

The story The Tunnel under the World got there first. Mind you, it isn't a virtual reality, or at least it's the TL7+2 version of such. In the story a ruthless businessman has enslaved the dead minds of a community of people. The copied minds are in microscale robots in a simulation of their lives used to research advertising techniques.

Read the story. It is a masterpiece of horror on several levels.

[Derrick_rp]

Originally Posted by Anthony

It seems likely that having a virtual intelligence living in a virtual world that is not aware of that is possible in THS. However, I can't see a way of 'fighting back'.

The only reason to conduct such a simulation is that the experiment you’re running requires subjects with free will, otherwise you would just use LAIs or NAIs. Therefore, such a simulation would only have value to the creator if the free-willed infomorphs trapped inside continue to participate. If you wanted to fight back, you could either refuse to do anything, or act so irrational that you cause the simulation to product garbage results.

Both of these would likely result in the program getting shut down, but in the right game, that can be a win. It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.

[Phil Masters]

The traditional SF way of handling this, as seen in The Matrix and a Doctor Who episode, is of course to give the inhabitants of the virtual world some kind of back-channel access to the real world. This usually seems to involve hacking virtual computers in the virtual world -- apparently finding some kind of flaw in the sandbox security -- but it might be more interesting in game terms to, say, be able to mess with the psychology of other actors in the virtuality who were designed to provide a communications channel between the real and virtual worlds.

Related, I guess, is the idea I've seen in stories by the likes of the sainted Greg Egan, in which people in the real world project into avatars in the virtual for reasons of their own, possibly including dealing with -- gasp -- ethical concerns about the consequences of playing God. These avatar-controllers are then susceptible to social manipulation. Telling them that you can help them with their scientific problems, but that you'll need direct control of experimental equipment, is a valid move...